Crane & Chabon

Another gem just arrived in the post: Michael Chabon's first collection of non-fiction, Maps and Legends. It's published by McSweeney's, and they've done their usual beautiful design job on it.

The book has three part-dustjackets or "belly-bands" layered one over the other, each cut to odd shapes and with a hole in the middle to reveal the title. Here's the book with and without its jackets...



..and here are the jackets/bands together and seperately. These four photos were pinched from the excellent design:related website.



The art is by mini-comics artist and writer Jordan Crane, more of whose work can be found at his Red Ink Like Blood site.

Here are the front and back covers in close-up: click for bigger versions.




UPDATE: Having now read this, I can say that this book is just right for readers like myself. It talks intelligently about the process of writing and reading, about late-Victorian and early 20th-Century adventure and pulp fiction, about the "literary" writer/critic prejudice against science-fiction that conveniently relabels literary science-fiction as "fables" or some other apparently non-embarrassing word, about the creation of cities and the recreation of childhood, about the power of maps and myths, and about golems.

Gentlemen of the Road

Michael Chabon is one of my favourite writers (and if you haven't seen the wonderful movie version of his Wonder Boys, you must). He also recently has been on a bit of a mission to revitalise genre fiction (mystery, science-fiction, even pulp adventure).

His newest book, originally published as a newspaper serial, was provisionally entitled Jews with Swords. It's the story of two amoral yet good-hearted Jewish thieves and adventurers in the Caucasus around 950AD.

Chabon's books usually have wonderful covers on the American versions (usually by the great Chip Kidd), and dull, unimaginative covers on the Commonwealth editions. This time, though, for once it's the British edition that has the good cover.



It's just right, like an Edwardian adventures storybooks for children. I'd have peeled that annoying white sticker off, too, if bitter experience didn't tell me that it would tear off some of the cover with it. A shame, because it's the only thing that spoils the illusion.

This edition also comes with a tipped-in bookplate, possibly signed by Chabon himself. At least, it's his signature, but I'm buggered if I can work out whether it's been hand-signed or simply printed onto the bookplate. I'd love to know which it is.