Space Powers

I've drooled before of the Library of America's boxed sets. They put together really nice-looking collections, and it would be nice to see them rerelease some of their back catalogue in this form (as they have done with their noir/crime collections, for example).

The latest LoA releases are their two volumes of important American science-fiction from the 1950s: this is the really good stuff that transcended its (usual) pulp magazine origins and helped build the genre in its modern form.

The two books and the box are all decorated with art by Richard Powers, whose strange, surrealism-influenced images ended of on the covers of more than 1000 SF books. Despite never being much of an SF fan, his evocatively strange paintings are central to its mid-century development. (see more of his work here, if the link is up.)

And here are the original paintings used:

The books included are:

Frederik Pohl & C. M. Kornbluth: The Space Merchants
Theodore Sturgeon: More Than Human
Leigh Brackett: The Long Tomorrow
Richard Matheson: The Shrinking Man
Robert Heinlein: Double Star
Alfred Bester: The Stars My Destination (pleasingly, published with all of the typographical jiggery-pokery that is often left out of modern reprints)
James Blish: A Case of Conscience
Algis Budrys: Who?
Fritz Leiber: The Big Time

A couple of these were originally published with Powers covers:

Compare these with the rather more straightforward, literal-representation-of-scenes-from-the-book covers the others received.

Cover by Bob Engle

Cover by Ed Emshwiller

Lynd Ward II

Later this year, the Library of America is producing a very handsome two-volume set of six 'woodcut novels' by the great Lynd Ward. I wrote more extensively about Ward here, so go there to see why he's worth pursuing. All I can say here is that, even though I own all of these books already, I'm sorely tempted by the loveliness of this set.

Before now, the Ward flame has been kept burning by Dover Publications, who have reprinted many of his woodcut novels, as well as his illustrated version of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, in editions that are both cheap and attractive (except for the sometimes over-loud typography on the front covers). If you want to see what the fuss is about, any of those volumes are well worth your time.

Best Books of the Year Part 3 [Not About Covers]

(Continuing from here and here...)

* * *

Tove Jansson: The True Deceiver
NYRB, 2009 (also Sort Of Books, 2009)

I’m gratified by the way my favourite writer as a child has also ended up becoming one of my favourite writers as an adult, for a different set of books. Tove Jansson, for it is she, wrote the wonderful Moomin books. In her later years she turned to novels and short stories for adults, and they are great. Back in the mid-1990s, when I first had a credit card and internet access, one of the first books I tracked down was Jansson’s The Summer Book, then long out-of-print in English, but now available from both NYRB in the US, and Sort Of Books in the UK. If you haven’t read it, I demand that you do. It’s a perfect evocation of childhood and old age, and the strange relationship between the two.

The True Deceiver (first published in Swedish in 1982, and now translated by Thomas Teal) is another small masterpiece. In less than 200 pages, Jansson tells the story of two odd women in a remote Swedish village. Katri is something of an outsider, yellow-eyed, brutally honest, no observer of social niceties, and always accompanied by an enormous, nameless dog. Anna, much older, lives alone in ‘the rabbit house’, where she paints illustrations for a wildly successful series of children’s books. Katri sets about moving into Anna’s life and home, motivated by both selfishness and altruism, trying to scrape together enough money to buy a special gift for her “simple” brother, Mats.

It is a brilliant, beautiful book. And for another side of Tove Jansson, 2009 also saw the publication of the fourth (and probably final) volume of her collected Moomin newspaper comic strips. Light-hearted, anarchic, humane and satirical, they’re also highly recommended: see more here.






Muriel Spark: A Far Cry from Kensington
Virago, 2008

A 20th-anniversary republication, this is probably the best of Muriel Spark’s later novels. Given the incredibly high standards Spark set in her fiction, that’s saying something. Like Tove Jansson, Spark worked almost exclusively at short novel or novella length, with no wasted words and beautifully clear, tight prose. Kensington is the story of Agnes Hawkins, a war widow in the 1950s, living in a boarding house (a frequent Spark setting), and working at a publisher’s. A mixture of bad temper and pride see her sabotaging her career, and becoming involved in a long-running feud with a hack journalist and womaniser called Bartlett. Black humour, death and diabolism ensue. (Weirdly, both this book, the Tove Jansson and two other bloody good books I read this year all have introductions by Ali Smith, who I don't even like much, and yet she obviously has excellent taste.)

I go on about Spark and some of her other great books here.


Miriam Toews: The Flying Troutmans
Faber & Faber, 2009

The set-up for Toews’ third novel is simple: Hattie, a woman fleeing a bad relationship in Paris returns to Canada to see her suicidal, institutionalised sister. The sister has two children, and desperate, to offer them hope, Hattie takes them on a road trip to find their estranged father.

That simple description gives no idea of how deeply funny and moving—as well as frequently alarming—this book is. It’s told mostly through the dialogue between the three characters in the car as they cross the border and roam the US, and it’s mostly in the dialogue that the humour of this book is found.

No a fifteen year old cannot live on his own, I said.
Pippi Longstocking wasn't even fifteen, said Thebes, and she -
Yeah, but she was a character in a book, I said.
And she was Swedish said Logan.
So there would have been a solid safety net of social programmes to keep her afloat, I said. It doesn't work here.

(Quoted text stolen from Dovegreyreader’s excellent blog, as my own copy of this book was loaned to a friend several months ago, and is yet to return (Are you reading, Trish?).)




Katherine Anne Porter: Collected Stories & Other Writings
Library of America, 2008

Porter is one of those writers I was vaguely aware of, but had read nothing by. To be honest, I’m not sure why I suddenly decided to buy this 1100-page volume, except that it was on sale and I have no self-control. Whatever the reason, I’m very glad I did—it was a revelation. I have a particular fondness for short stories and novellas, and Porter must be up there with William Trevor and Alice Munro as one of the great English-language short story writers. This book (half of which is short fiction, half of which short non-fiction) is superb. Hell—the final story, ‘The Leaning Tower’, a 75-page story of pre-WWII Berlin, is reason enough alone to get this.





Shirley Jackson: The Lottery and Other Stories
Penguin Modern Classics, 2009

Somehow, despite hugely enjoying those novels of Jackson’s which I have read, I’d never got this famous short story collection. Like the Porter book, though, this was a serious treat. First published in the 1950s, this collection demonstrates a range of mood and subject I really hadn’t expected: I knew Jackson could do creepy and mad and supernatural, but I had no idea she could do so much more. Having said that, though, the creepy and famous title story is one of the highlights.

Supernature

A recent purchase was the Library of America's two-volume American Fantastic Tales set, a 1500-page collection of short fiction by the United States' best. Everyone is in here, from Edith Wharton and Henry James to John Cheever and Paul Bowles, from Charles Brockden Brown and Edgar Allan Poe to Willa Cather and Vladimir Nabokov. It's a genuinely excellent collection of the creepy, the peculiar and the savage.

What I want to talk about, of course, is the cover design. Both volumes were designed by Chip Kidd, with rather effective photographs. Volume one, which goes from the late 1700s to the 1930s, looks like this:

The second volume, which goes from the 1940s to now, looks like this:

The photographers are Andy and Michelle Kerry (volume one) and Fredrik Broden (volume two). Both images are well chosen. The earlier stories of volume one tend to focus on threats from the outside world, appropriate for a densely forested continent with settlements perched around the edges. The cloaked figure with the lamp is at risk from things in the woods or roaming the roads between villages. In volume two, much of the danger is found in domestic settings: the backyard, the home or the workplace.

The two are available together in a slipcase, which I couldn't resist. I'd have preferred less text on the box, but then I suppose that when the whole thing is shrink-wrapped, the potential buyer can't actually look at the individual books, so you need to let the box do the selling with all of the author names and so forth.

Here's the box...

..and here's what it looks like when possessed.

American Earth and de Vicq de Cumptich

A beautiful recent purchase is the Library of America's American Earth: a cornucopia (1000 pages) of  writing about the environment, the American wilderness, and the future of the planet. Any anthology which includes both Rachel Carson and Robert Crumb is doing something right, and this thing is gorgeous.

It has a dustjacket (designed by the wondrously named Roberto de Vicq de Cumptich) which does not quite cover the boards beneath, letting you know that there is something more going on under there.

And there is.

(Click for bigger versions of both.)

The painting is 'A Lake Twilight' by landscape artist Sanford Robinson Gifford, and is exactly right for the book: the human element in the painting is right to the forefront, and yet dwarfed by the natural world around it.

Roberto de Vicq de Cumptich has designed a lot of other beautiful covers, shown to good effect at his website. I could post dozens of them, but I'll limit myself to his picture book, Bembo's Zoo.

This book is a work of design genius. An alphabet book, with an animal for each letter, is a straightforward idea. However, this book constructs each animal entirely from the letter forms in its name, using only the Bembo typeface. As an example, here are B for Bison and P for Peacock.

 

An elegant (and noisy) website promoting the book also features animations for each illustration, showing how the animals were constructed.

Darwinia

The 150th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species in 1859 has led to a few publishers putting out commemorative editions of this great work.

Vintage UK has this appealing version:



Penguin Classics, meanwhile, has put out a newly edited clothbound hardback with an illustration by Damien Hirst mounted on the cover. I usually can't stand Hirst, and in fact this illustration shows the limitations of his ability to actually draw, yet the overall effect is quite pleasing (click for a bigger version to get the full texture of the thing).



If I could find my huge old colour-illustrated edition I'd post that too, but it's in a box somewhere, and I lack the strength for archaeology at the moment. Instead, here's another nature-leaning new edition of an old classic, John Stewart Collis's The Worm Forgives the Plough, his collected observations and memoirs of life on the land during World War II. It has a nicely retro feel to it.



The Vintage Darwin, by the way, also reminds me of this gorgeous hardback from the Library of America. It's American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau.



That undersized jacket slips off to reveal these beautiful boards (photo pinched from here).