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.

The Startling, Here and Elsewhere

The absorbing blog of amazing photos, If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger, There'd Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats, has instituted a new category, for strange book covers. This is to be applauded. Here are their finds from the last 24 hours (I know I first saw the Espionaje cover at 50 Watts). There seems to be a bit of a boobtastic focus so far...

On another tack, can I just say that Erich Kästner's Going to the Dogs, recently resurrected by NYRB with a suitably seedy Christian Schad painting on the front, is one of the most purely enjoyable books I've read all year?

The painting is Schad's 'Self-Portrait with Model' (1927).

Here are a couple of other similarly unnerving Schads: 'Appendectomy in Geneva' and 'Agosta, the Pigeon-Chested Man, and Rasha, the Black Dove' (both 1929).

Click the paintings for much bigger versions.

Going gooey-eyed over NYRB Lit

On a number of occasions I've drooled, both privately and publicly, over both the contents and covers of the New York Review Books series. It seems to me that, unless you're trying to create a massive, all-encompassing library of "classic" books--more, to be honest, than any one person is likely to ever read--along the lines of Penguin Classics, then the NYRB way is the way to go.

Since the 1990s it has grown into an extensive collection of frankly amazing diversity and quality: about the only times I don't buy one of their new releases is when the book is either one I already own (usually in a much uglier version), or else the topic is of narrowly American-centric focus. This means that each year still seems to provide a couple of dozen books of staggering awesomeness. I mean, I just looked at their upcoming books on Amazon, and my mind is boggled: Thomas Tryon! Erich Kastner! Natsume Soseki! Renata Adler! Kingsley Amis! Saki and Edward Gorey! Russell Hoban! Holy shit!

Anyway, to calm down and get to what I'm here for, they've just published the first in their ebook-only series, NYRB Lit. I assume the rationale here is that these books are those that are unlikely to make back the costs of physical publishing, but which are too good to languish unpublished in the US market. I've been lucky enough to read two of them, Lindsay Clarke's The Water Theatre and Zena el Khalil's Beirut, I Love You: A Memoir, both of which are marvellous in entirely different ways. The former reminded me at times, in the best possible way, of two of my favourite writers: Graham Greene and Ronan Bennett. The later is a superb and funny autobiography about growing up a dishevelled artist in Lebanon (and Lagos and New York). Zena el Khalil  also provides a wonderful alternative to the usual po-faced author photograph.

As with all ebooks, discussions of the covers is potentially difficult, in that the books don't exist as objects. NYRB have not used their usual Katy Homans-created series design. Instead they've gone with the covers-as-icons idea, using a nearly square format, with each one designed by Ian Durovic Stewart. Click for bigger versions...

I really like these. Looking at them, I was reminded what designer Ian Shimkoviak said in his guest post here in July:

[M]any people doing e-books will ask that the title type be very big and legible at a small thumbnail size. This is not a critical request in my opinion as most reader devices clearly list the name of the product next to it in a legible font. Most people will probably click on something because the image is strong and enticing rather than the type being massive. So this request I often find naive and irritating as it really sets the tone for a cover that is ugly and obnoxious looking.

These NYRB Lit covers seem to me to idealise the ebook cover possibilities. They do have large type, legible at small sizes, but it's well-integrated into the design, and very attractive. The images are well-chosen, and the overall effect, with its layering and texturing, makes you wish these were physical objects you could look at in the real world. I hope they do sell well enough to spawn paper editions.

I know this all sounds like something of a love letter. But I'm not ashamed to admit that I've frequently shared  my bed with a NYRB book, and sometimes more than one. If we must have ebooks, and it seems we must, let these be the sort of ebooks that triumph.

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.

The Dead School

Forthcoming from NYRB, The Letter Killers Club, by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky (about whose amazing Memories of the Future I wrote here):

I don't know who took the photo on the cover, but I recognise what it's a photo of: a school in Pripyat, a city abandoned when the area was contaminated by the Chernobyl nuclear reactor accident in 1986. See these other photos of the same schoolroom:







Visit those three flickr albums above for more amazing and creepy photos from the abandoned city. As you might imagine from my obsession with nuclear disaster, I can't stop thinking about these pictures.

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.