Mockery, WITH Covers (and, be warned, breasts)

There's a certain appeal for many readers in the Mars/Barsoom tales of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Burroughs was no great writer, but he was prolific and, perhaps more importantly, his Martian princess heroine Dejah Thoris spent her entire time naked (Google Image search her name for some of the excitible art this has prompted.). Burroughs also has the advantage of being out of copyright, so anyone who wants to can cash in with reprints of his books. I came across a series of these from Deodand Publishing (I should note here that unlike many publishers of the out-of-copyright, Deodand do not charge ludicrously high prices for their books). The art reminds me of that drawn by heavy metal fans in early high school--more enthusiastic than talented...

There are more effective ways to cash in, of course. Comics company Dynamite is busy adapting the books for comics, and doing their best to squeeze money from idiots by offering various hard-to-find and thus ridiculously expensive "variant covers" (a common way comics companies have to rip off those most eager to be ripped off)--see six of the eight available versions of the first issue...

..and you will notice what Dynamite is pinning their fiscal hopes on, the subtle and sophisticated "risque nude variants", like so...

There's a truly odd cynicism behind this sales ploy, in that even though the books feature the heroine constantly nude, thus actually justifying this sort of objectification (in terms of source fidelity if not in any other way), the actual comics themselves do not feature nudity on the inside pages. Since this is hardly likely to be due to taste or restraint, I can only imagine it's an attempt to be able to sell the non-nude-covered versions of the comics to kids, without creating the sort of moral panic that occasionally occurs when American parents find nipples in their kids' comic books.

Changing the subject entirely, and going back to book covers for a moment, I was surprised by this cover from Dodo Press. Can anyone suggest why Thorne Smith's second supernatural-comedy about Topper and his two friendly ghost friends should end up with Fyodor Dostoevsky on the cover?

At least it's not a risque nude variant.

Highsmiths

In this post I complained about what happens when a publisher changes a series look, ruining the look of any complete set of books by an author you might have on your shelves (because this is all I have to moan about in life). A related problem is when a writers' works are split between multiple publishers. An interesting approach to this has been demonstrated by Vintage and Bloomsbury, in regard to the great Patricia Highsmith.

Highsmith's five Ripley novels* are, for the most part, brilliant exercises in black, claustrophobic drama that manage to have you barracking for a psychopathic aesthete as he murders his way to a better life, and murders his way out of trouble. In the UK and Commonwealth, the first four are published by Vintage, while the fifth and final book is from Bloomsbury. This means that a nicely matching set ought to be impossible.

However, when Bloomsbury rereleased their Highsmith books at the turn of the millennium, designer Nathan Burton seems to have gone out of his way to create a design that, though not infringing on the copyright of, or exactly mimicking, the Vintage designs (by Julian Humphries), matches them as well as you could hope.

 

And then the Bloomsbury Highsmiths got a redesign--again by Nathan Burton, using his appealing illustrations and a rough hand-drawn type for the author name.

 

 

 

This ought to throw things out with the Vintage covers--except that Vintage has reciprocated by redesigning their own Highsmiths along similar lines.

 

 

 

 

I'm not sure if there's been any deliberate communication between the two publishers on these designs, but it's a good thing.

Speaking of Ripley, Norton in the US has recently released this gorgeous boxed set of the books. The box and books are designed by Chin-Yee Li--the photos of the individual books are taken from the excellent Book Covers Anonymous blog.

 

 

 

 

 

And then there are the beautiful new Norton paperbacks of the Ripley books, designed by Rodrigo Corral, Christopher Brand and Jason Ramirez.

 

 

 

 

So it's a good time to be buying Ripley.

Highsmith, by the way, is the only serious writer I can think of who had the dubious honour of getting a nude photo of herself put on the cover of her biography (and not by her choice, given that she was dead several years before it was published): the spine of the UK edition of Andrew Wilson's Beautiful Shadow features this unexpected image.

 

* A question: does anyone have an explanation for this odd aspect of the Ripley books? Each book is set at about the time it was published, so the first book is very obviously taking place in the 1950s, while Space Invaders machines and other such aspects of more modern life appear in the last couple of books. And yet, by internal chronology, only a few years have passed. Highsmith is too smart and careful a writer to have not done this on purpose, and yet it's quite discombobulating.

Live Nude Authors!

An odd intermittent trend is for some female writers to appear nude on the front of their own books.







My first thought would be that this would be to get male readers to buy the books, but then some of these books are aimed almost entirely at women (except for the Pamela Anderson "novel", the target audience for which is utterly mystifying). I can't think of any books by men where the authors pose nude on the front. Can anyone out there suggest any?

Female nudity on book covers is, of course, very common (see an earlier discussion here). Male nudity, aside from photos of Michelangelo's 'David' or the covers of romance/porn novels, is almost non-existent. Yet we're frequently told that women buy most books.

While we're on the topic, certain images used on book covers discussed in earlier nudity-themed posts have cropped up again elsewhere.

Here's Ben Stockley's photo from the York Hall Russian Baths (discussed here) on four covers...






..and another photo (first discussed here) on three.





It should be noted that Ediciones Nowtilus are more scared of pubic hair than some other publishers.