Burton Atwoods

Nathan Burton is something of a favourite round these parts (see his work on Patricia Highsmith, Pat Barker and Edith Wharton, for example), so it was great to see his Margaret Atwood redesigns for Virago finally appearing in Australian bookshops recently. Atwood is an odd case. I like some of her work immensely, but her science-fiction (which she goes out of her way to pretend isn't science-fiction) is usually awful: it has the self-satisfied unoriginality of somebody who hasn't read anything in the genre from the last 50 years, and so thinks that their daft cliches are new and exciting.

Anyway, I'll get off my hobby horse: here are the covers.

 

(NOTE: This post originally criticised an element of Oryx and Crake that was, in fact, entirely a product of my faulty memory, and not something Atwood had actually written: my apologies!)

This is How to Do It

You're a publisher printing a series of classic books to raise money for AIDS relief (through the (RED) organisation). You want them to be eye-catching and beautiful. You make them look like these--absolutely stunning. (Click for huge versions.)

 

  

  

  

  

  

 

I asked Jim Stoddart, Art Director at Penguin Press, about who did each cover and how they came about. This is what he had to say: "We’re starting with a series of 8 titles in this collaboration with the Aids awareness fund (RED), with the prospect of putting more titles into this series in the near future. Each cover switches the usual black of Penguin Classics for the (RED) red and instead of using an image we’re using a quote from the text of the book, and I’m aiming to commission a unique typographer for each cover."

The designers responsible are as follows:

Anna Karenina designed by Fuel
Dracula designed by Non-Format
Great Expectations designed by Stefanie Posavec (Penguin Press Art Dpt)
The House of Mirth designed by Nathan Burton
Notes From Underground designed by Gray318 (Jon Gray)
The Secret Agent designed by Coralie Bickford-Smith (Penguin Press Art Dpt) (interviewed here)
Therese Raquin designed by Jim Stoddart (Penguin Press Art Dpt)
The Turn of the Screw designed by Studio Frith

I promised myself I would not buy books I already owned even if the new covers were amazing. But then again, this is for charity...

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.

English Journeys

Once or twice a year Penguin put out a set of 20 small books culled from their classics backlist. Sometimes it's a set of Great Ideas, or else Great Loves or Great Journeys. In April next year they're doing the same thing with English Journeys. Most of the books do not yet have covers, and none of the books is yet listed in the Penguin catalogue, but here are the few covers I've managed to scrounge.





Plus a couple of unfinalised ones...



I'm not sure of the designer/illustrator behind these yet. On past form I'd guess at David Pearson, but time will tell.

CORRECTION: Coralie Bickford-Smith has kindly pointed out that these are, in fact, the work of Nathan Burton. Nice one!

Nathan Burton does Pat Barker

Nathan Burton's appealing cover for Pat Barker's most recent WWI novel, Life Class, is shown here.

It's not a bad book, either, though not her best. The occasional anachronism would pull me up: the word 'robot' is used during the First World War by one of the characters, for example, even though Karel Čapek did not coin it with that meaning until his play Rossumovi univerzální roboti was published in 1920.

Getting back to the subject of covers, though, Penguin has decided to republish Barker's earlier WWI trilogy with new covers by Nathan Burton. For extra grooviness, the three covers fit together to form one image. (Click for a much bigger version.)



Nice stuff. My only criticism, and it's that of a design pedant, is that it would be nice if Pat Barker's name wasn't distressed identically on all four covers. For example: