The Price of Teeth is... SIN!

An intriguing book due early next year is Chris Offutt's My Father, the Pornographer, in which he writes about the experience of having a father (Andrew J. Offutt) who--supposedly in order to pay the young Chris's orthodontic bills--turned enthusiastically to churning out great heaving piles of pornographic books. I'll review the book itself when it's published (something of an introduction can be found here), but I thought I'd take this opportunity to look at the marvellous cover design by hero-of-this-blog Jamie Keenan (about whom more posts here).

Touch it for a bigger version, as one of Offutt's protagonists mighthave said

In fact, the good-girl-art images used by Keenan here are astonishingly sweet and innocent compared to the depictions of women on Offutt's actual books, almost all published under various pseudonyms by various dodgy outfits.

Lo-lee-ta: An Interview with John Bertram

One of the most interesting design books out this year is Lolita: The Story of a Cover Girl, edited by John Bertram and Yuri Leving, published by Print Books. It's a fascinating  examination of the history of design approaches to this brilliant and problematic Nabokov novel, and it also contains numerous new covers designed for the book, which demonstrate just how many ways there are to visualise a book.

John Bertram was kind enough to talk to me about the how and the why of the book's creation. Click on any image for much larger versions, with artist/designer credits. (For a full list of the designers involved, and their websites, see here.)

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CAUSTIC COVER CRITIC: Your own work is very much in the field of design, but as an architect. How did you come to co-create a book about book design? 

JOHN BERTRAM: I’ve always had an interest in graphic design and at one point even worked briefly for a graphic designer. I’ve been an avid reader all of my life, and drawn as well to illustrated books, book covers and all sorts of printed ephemera. In 2009 I started Venus Febriculosa, a website devoted in part to the confluence of art and literature, the natural source of which is the book cover. Lolita was the subject of the first cover contest that I sponsored after which I was contacted by Marco Sonzogni, Lecturer at Victoria University of Wellington, who suggested the idea of working together on a book about Lolita covers. Marco became a collaborator on a several Venus Febriculosa contests (among them Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, and Tadeusz Borowski’s This Way for the Gas Ladies and Gentlemen), out of which came two other books, including This Way, that became the precursor of and the template for the Lolita book.

My conception from the very beginning was a book that merged the scholarly with graphic design. In early 2010 I was invited by Yuri Leving, Chair of the Department of Russian Studies at Dalhousie University, and author and editor of numerous books about Nabokov, to contribute an article about the contest to the Nabokov Online Journal, of which he was founding editor. Later Yuri suggested including my article in a book he was editing. At a certain point, the book that Yuri was planning and the book that I was planning merged into one.

CAUSTIC COVER CRITIC: Which was most interesting for you in creating The Story of a Cover Girl—the history of Lolita designs, or the untapped possibilities still to be explored?

JOHN BERTRAM: Although there is undoubtedly more to explore either way, I think it’s a finite exercise. I don’t think there will be a sequel to The Story of a Cover Girl, although I am sure new designers will always enjoy the challenge of Lolita.  When I first began commissioning designers, I found myself anticipating the arrival of each new cover, waiting for the perfect cover. But, of course, the premise of this book is that the perfect cover is an impossibility and that is a credit to the novel and to Nabokov.

CAUSTIC COVER CRITIC: Your book proves that Lolita lends itself to numerous effective cover designs. Do you think that many other classic novels would do the same? Could a volume of similar heft and variety be created for, say, Great Expectations or Ulysses.

JOHN BERTRAM: Well, I would say that Lolita is ideal for an exercise of this sort because it’s fairly unique in a number of ways that I’d like to quickly delineate. One: Vladimir Nabokov was a gifted and exacting writer, obsessed with the right word at all costs, and I think it’s important to honor that. There’s not a random or casual word in the entire novel. Two: Lolita is difficult to pin down. To borrow some terminology from Dieter E. Zimmer’s essay, is it a tragedy, a comedy, a social satire? Is it about a painful love affair or transgression of social mores? Three: The book comes with baggage that is usually very misleading or just plain false. The fact is, Dolores Haze is not sexually predatory, she does not have precocious sexual appetites, and she is not perverse. Although the word Lolita has come to mean all of those things, Lolita is, really, a normal twelve-year old girl. Four: There are clearly ethical considerations in treating a novel that deals with child rape. It’s important that we not ‘collude in exploitation’ to use Ellen Pifer’s phrase. Five: Humbert Humbert is the narrator, so there is the question of how much of what he is saying is the truth and this is the subject of many debates in Nabokov circles. Six: Lastly, Nabokov is on record with his own ideas about what should and should not be on Lolita’s cover and, again, these are worth paying attention to.

All of that being said, I think there are many books that could successfully be addressed in this way. Before we decided upon The Name of the Rose for our second cover contest, we entertained a variety of titles, including Ulysses and Finnegans Wake by James Joyce, The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka, Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett, The Wasteland  by T.S. Eliot, A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess and Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. The Name of the Rose contest was extremely successful. The novel has a lot of interesting components: an ambiguous title, unusual visual richness, literary depth, symbolism. It’s an international best-seller that has been translated into dozens of languages and, like Lolita, made into a film. And it is, paradoxically, both a rather breezy page-turner of a ‘murder mystery’ and at the same time a book of historical complexity and erudition that addresses some obscure points of faith, doctrinal squabbles and the state of the early 14^th century Christian church.

Of course, my dream is to edit a similar book about the Bollingen Series, an unparalleled publishing endeavor undertaken by Paul Mellon’s first wife Mary Conover Mellon.

CAUSTIC COVER CRITIC:  Is the sexual nature of the book part of its design appeal--many of the covers you show are clever visual puns on sex, genitalia and the like. Do you think the gap between what everyone knows the book is about, and what you can actually show on a book cover, helps inspire the designers?

JOHN BERTRAM: I do think that the sexual nature of the book is clearly part of its design appeal (as well as media appeal!). Whether this is fortunate or unfortunate is hard to say, but I’m certainly aware that no other book would likely garner the interest that this one has. There are many people who feel that Nabokov’s Pale Fire is superior in every way to Lolita, but it’s difficult to imagine a scenario in which a book on Pale Fire would be the subject of so much attention. I also can’t imagine drumming up much interest for my Bollingen Series book (although I know it would be brilliant). I would love to be proven wrong about this.

CAUSTIC COVER CRITIC:  The Story of a Cover Girl is notable for being a book about visual design with no pictorial elements on the cover itself. What led to this decision?

JOHN BERTRAM: When Michael Silverberg, our incredible editor at Print, suggested that Sulki & Min design the cover I was overjoyed. They had designed a wonderful cover for Tadeusz Borowski’s This Way for the Gas Ladies and Gentlemen which was included in the book This Way, and I had no doubt that they would bring their customary intelligence and insight to this cover. They were pretty much given free reign, so whatever conceptions we had about the cover were sort of irrelevant. It was completely their idea to include the Nabokov quote on the cover. Originally, they had designed a white cover with black text, a reference to another Nabokov quote in which he is willing to settle for ‘an immaculate white jacket…with LOLITA in bold black lettering’ but I think the publishers felt that it was too austere. Enter Pantone 7488, a color that references (albeit in a brighter shade that really pops!) the original Lolita cover published by Olympia Press.

CAUSTIC COVER CRITIC: To violently change direction—if you could resurrect any neglected book and push it on everybody you met, what would it be?

JOHN BERTRAM: Well, I suppose you can’t really call The Rings of Saturn a neglected book, but I am constantly surprised at the number of people who have never read W.G. Sebald. However, the one book I have pushed on people (and this is before Jeffrey Eugenides rescued it from the ashes of obscurity) is Second Skin, the criminally underrated 1964 novel by John Hawkes. Just incredible.

CAUSTIC COVER CRITIC: Thank you, Mr Bertram!

Rummaging Around in the Atticus

Most of the most interesting new literature these days seems to be the work of small, independent presses, even at a time when you'd think it would be harder to make a small press a manageable business proposition than ever before. One of the newest, smallest presses I have come across is Atticus Books (first discussed here), who I discovered via this wonderful cover design.

Click for a much bigger version--all Atticus cover designs are by Jamie Keenan.

Anyone who publishes a book that looks like that deserves some investigation, I thought, so I bought a bunch of their titles, and of those I've so far read, none have disappointed.

Jürgen Fauth's just-published Kino, for example, is a clever and sarcastic literary thriller about an American woman investigating her family's cinematic legacy. Her grandfather was a silent film director in the between-wars Berlin, rubbing shoulders with (and slagging off the talents) of Fritz Lang and other giants of expressionist cinema, and making careerist use of Lang's unpleasant Nazi wife Thea von Harbou, before fleeing to Hollywood in the 1940s. His diaries show his cynical rise to fame and the heights of his self-described genius--this is a man, after all, who renames himself 'Kino'. Interspersed with these diary entries are his granddaughter's modern-day adventures as she abandons her husband on their honeymoon in order to unravel the mysterious appearance of one of Kino's long-lost German movies.

Though the modern-day sections aren't quite as strong as Kino's memoirs, it's a fun and vivid book, incorporating and playing with a number of cinematic cliches (fugitives on the run, mysterious secrets from the past, over-the-top gunplay, etc).

Atticus's first book, Alex Kudera's Fight for Your Long Day, is a very different creation, but definitely my favourite of the Atticus line so far. It's an ostensibly simple story: a day in the life of Cyrus Duffleman, an adjunct professor (meaning badly paid wage slave) at several US universities. It made this non-American feel distinctly better about his own country, which despite its many betrayals of its proud labour rights history has at least maintained a number of important protections for non-executives.

Insane students, overwork, fading health, bureaucratic lunacy and a political assassin all conspire to warp Duffleman's unsteady course through the 18-odd hours of his workday; it's both blackly funny and quite depressing. On the evidence of this and his earlier novella (The Betrayal of Times of Peace and Prosperity), Kudera (who has worked in Duffleman's shoes) has the attitude to university life that a battered wife has to a husband she loves too much to leave. Fortunately, his pain has produced some lovely, wise writing.

Keenan Attacks Bolaño

The UK editions of Roberto Bolaño's have been a bit overshadowed by some of the extraordinary US cover designs, especially that for 2666 (see here). But for the latest posthumously discovered work by the strangely prolific Bolaño, Picador UK have got Keenan (last seen working wonders for Atticus Books here) to design a slipcased hardcover edition. As The Third Reich's main character is a German wargamer, Keenan has used a wargames theme for the whole package, to pleasing effect. (Click for much bigger versions.)

This speaks to my dubious past as a nerdy high school role-playing- and war-gamer: all those little plastic and metal figures rampaging through games of Warhammer, Axis and Allies, Risk, etc... That I should grow up to bang on about such an un-rock'n'roll subject like book design, and write a blog about such, should have comes as no surprise.

My only criticism of this package has nothing to do with the design: it's the second reviewer's quote on the back of the box that I find hilarious. The Sunday Times said, "Readers who have snacked on a writer such as Haruki Murakami will feast on Roberto Bolaño." Such a ludicrous comparison tells you nothing except that whoever wrote that review has presumably only ever read two authors in translation. I'll let you guess which ones.