A Bite on the Bum of Consistency

In the past I've been aggrieved about autobiographies with pictures of the authors on them, and even more so about novels with pictures of the authors on them. But it can be done well: witness next year's Muriel Spark reissues from New Directions in the US. These beautifully fucked-up photos of Spark are nicely matched with the plots/themes of the books.

I'd like to see what they would do in this line with her The Girls of Slender Means, a wonderful novel set in a girls' lodging house in Blitz-haunted London, where an unexploded bomb on the property heightens all of the sexual tension to bizarre levels.

It's also a shame they haven't used any photos from Spark's later years, when she wore the world's most massive pair of glasses, but there's more backlist to be redesigned...

I have a number of Spark's books in old omnibus editions that also used her photos:

I also have most of these novels as individual books too--I usually try not to double up like that, but all of her books are so admirably short that they hardly take up any space at all. Or at least that's the argument I might try on my wife as I contemplate adding the new ND editions to my collection.

Lispector Quartered

New Directions is about to release new translations of four of the great Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector's books (I read and loved her Hour of the Star and some short stories, and so have already ordered all of these). The covers, designed by Paul Sahre, combine to form a portrait of her.

This is the original portrait. It's quite a captivating photo, and I can well see why Sahre was inspired to use it.

And pleasingly, it seems the back also form a single image:

Picture stolen from Three Percent, whose Chad Post went off on an enraged rant a while back over the presence of a quote from dull old Franzen on one of the covers.

Here are the individual covers:

Mosaics

I'll be back properly next week, but in the meantime, via the blog of the excellent Peter Mendelsund (who I interviewed here), see these lovely mosaical covers for Stephen Jay Gould (by Sam Potts for Harvard University Press)...

That gap in the design will be filled by future volumes

and for some of the work of Clarice Lispector (I've only read The Hour of the Star, which was excellent, so here's an opportunity to read more) using a striking photo of her when young (covers by Paul Sahre for New Directions).

Here's the original photo:

Spineless

Last night I read a book I've been wanting to get my hands on for a number of years. It's B. S. Johnson's The Unfortunates, the famous "book in a box". First published in 1969, it went out of print (like most of Johnson's other works), was then resurrected briefly by Picador in 1999 (to go OP again), and has now got a third lease of life thanks to New Directions in America.

The Unfortunates is a simple story told beautifully. A man (Johnson himself) goes to Nottingham in his role as a sports journalist to cover a soccer match. With time to kill before the match, he roams the city, remembering a friend who died from cancer, and the women with whom he was involved during the time he knew that friend.

To capture the non-linear nature of the narrator's thought processes, Johnson wrote the book as 27 chapters, with only the first and last to be read as normal. The other 25 chapters should be shuffled and read in random order. To assist this, each of the chapters is seperate, and contained in a box, rather than the whole book being bound normally.

New Directions, following the Picador printing, have done a beautiful job. The minimalist, illustration-free cover doesn't distract you from the joys within the book-shaped box. The interior of the box itself contains details of the book's history, the match report from the novel, and several quotes from Johnson's heroes Samuel Johnson and Laurence Sterne.

Here's the "book" as it first appears (click for much bigger versions of all of these images):



What you see when you open it:



The unbound pages and the box interior:



A close-up of the box interior:



The various unbound chapters on the loose:




A page with some small images from the original Secker & Warburg edition of 1969 is here.