Loss of Pubic Hair

It's always pleasant to see a mostly forgotten author you love be brought back into print for other people to rediscover. The latest example of this I have is Alfred Hayes, who the ever-wondrous NYRB is resurrecting later this year.

The downside to such a resurrection is that the nice new editions almost always look much better than the mouldy old tattered second-hand copies of the books I already own.

Oddly, there was a much different cover for My Face For the World to See originally mooted, and shown on some bookshop sites. I'm not sure if it was ditched because of pubic hair concerns, or because it didn't match the style of the In Love cover.

All three photos are by Saul Leiter.

Given the intro to My Face... is being written by David Thomson, I'm intrigued to see how he's going to work his embarrassing Nicole Kidman obsession into it.

And to conclude, here's my old Penguin edition of In Love.

Hanson on Amis

Eric Hanson's wonderful illustration and design work has graced a number of books before: see here for an earlier post on his book covers. Now he has created new cover illustrations for four of the best novels by Kingsley Amis, being published in the US later this year and in early 2013 by the reliably amazing NYRB Books. Click the images for much bigger versions of each.

(As ever, these NYRB Classics are art-directed by the great Katy Homans.)

Lucky Jim is one of my favourite books ever, and The Alteration is a superior alternative history novel; The Green Man is a very funny black comedy/horror/fantasy, while The Old Devils is another black comedy, this time about old age (though I admit I prefer the similarly themed Ending Up).

See here for Jonathan Burton's take on Amis for Penguin UK, as well as a characteristically hideous old Panther cover for The Green Man.

Pulp & Femme Fatales

Looking through the upcoming books from NYRB is always a heartening experience--they resurrect so much good stuff.  In April they're bringing a book by famed French crime novelist J. P. Manchette (1942-1995) into English--Fatale.

The evocative cover image is a photo I recognised, from the series 'Pulp' by Neil Krug, of his now-wife, Joni Harbeck. These photos, collected in a book of the same name, were taken using ancient, expired Polaroid film. That, combined with the crime/Western/hippie theme of the pictures, makes them look like long-lost, damaged stills from low-budget genre films of the 1960s and 1970s. Click for bigger versions.

The current French edition of Fatale looks like this...

..but it used to look like this...

..with an illustration by comics artist Jacques Tardi, with whom Manchette has collaborated on several crime graphic novels.

So there you go: crime novels, comics, B-movies and naked ladies--who says this isn't a cultured blog?

Before & Afters

I've talked before about the way some books change appearance between announcement and publication. I suspect this happens more and more these days, as internet bookselling tends to demand some sort of image as a placeholder for people pre-ordering the books.

I thought it would be interesting to look at three new or imminent NYRB Classics, and at the covers they were originally promoted with compared with those they qwere finally given. In one case, the title even changed. For each of the three books below, the first cover is the original image and the second is the final, published (and, in the end, more appropriate) version. All NYRBs are designed by Katy Homans.

For the Cossery and Simenons, the now-unused first images are rather intriguing in their own right. However, since they weren't used, I can't find the source information.

Twenty Thousand Streets, One Cover Image

One of my favourite books by one of my favourite writers, the Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky trilogy by the great Patrick Hamilton, has recently been rejigged in the cover department by Vintage UK. Unfortunately, it's been rejigged to look the same as a couple of other books that already exist.

 

 

 

Before the update, it featured possibly the least prepossessing barmaid in history...

This is from a Bill Brandt photo, 'Barmaid at the Crooked Billet, Tower Hill 1939'.

And before that, it looked like this...

And way back in the misty past, like this (an edition which now will set you back between $2000 and $5000, depending on condition).

This is as good a place as any to have a small whinge: Hamilton's much-praised first novel, Monday Morning, remains out of print and also completely unavailable, both second-hand and in libraries. Two different publishers have assured me over the last couple of years that they were going to reprint it in the very near future (at one point it was meant to be a Faber Find). No luck. Somebody needs to publish that book NOW, or my wrath will be terrible indeed.

UPDATE: John Self points out what I had forgotten--that NYRB also publishes Twenty Thousand Streets..., with a rather nice cover (designed by Katy Homans) using 'The Long House (red Bathroom/Blue Figure)' by Laurie Simmons.

The News from Central Europe

As promised, some more upcoming covers lifted from the 2010 Penguin Classics line-up. These are the 10 Central European Classics due in May. I'm guessing that they're by David Pearson, as they remind me of his Simenon covers, but in fact I have no idea. Robert Schumann tells me that they're the work of Jon Gray, better known in the designing world as gray318.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I'm very excited by this lot, as what I've read of these authors has been excellent. Gyula Krúdy of Hungary is one of the greats--his The Adventures of Sindbad and Sunflower are wonderful. Gregor von Rezzori, from what is now the Ukraine, wrote the amazing Memoirs of an Anti-Semite (this and Sunflower are both available in beautiful editions from NYRB). If you can handle 200- or 300-page paragraphs, Thomas Bernhard is your man. Karel Čapek is one of my favourite writers, and War with the Newts is probably his best book--an absurdist science-fiction masterpiece in which genetically engineered humanoid newts go from being humanity's slaves to cheerfully and politely lowering all of the continents into the oceans in order to make the world better for themselves.

As for E. M. Cioran, here's a bit of his cheerful philosophy, from 'The Trouble with Being Born': "Better to be an animal than a man, an insect than an animal, a plant than an insect, and so on. Salvation? Whatever diminishes the kingdom of consciousness and compromises its supremacy."

Here are those two NYRBs I mentioned...

Design by Katy Homans, using Witkacy's 'Jadwiga Janczewska' (a photo of Witkacy's fiancee, who would go on to commit suicide)

Design by Katy Homans, using Oskar Kokoschka's 'Murderer, Hope of Women II'