Handheld

A new publisher that is focused on resurrecting forgotten literature, new translations, and collections of letters, and including two Sylvia Townsend Warner books: it's nice that they want to appeal to me so very specifically. Handheld Press is off to a very strong start.

The first of their book series, the Handheld Classics, bring back forgotten or neglected books that deserve a second chance. Having just finished Una Silberrad's 'Desire', I can say that it's the sort of wonderful novel that Virago Modern Classics used to unearth before their great culling; a New Woman novel of unusual depth and texture.

Forthcoming is the amazing 'Kingdoms of Elfin', the spectacular late-career story collection from Sylvia Townsend Warner.

All the Handheld Classics have an attractive, clean design of a strong central image and lots of white space; the work of Nadja Guggi of Messrs Dash + Dare, with Handheld's editor/manager Kate Macdonald doing the image selection.

There are also the Handheld Research editions, non-fiction books likethe other Townsend Warner book noted above...

..and, excitingly, Handheld Modern, for new books. The first title, still forthcoming, is Danish author  Eddie Thomas Petersen's 'After the Death of Ellen Keldberg'.

This dramatic cover image brings to mind a personal hobbyhorse about nudity on book covers: it's almost invariably sexualised, and almost invariably aimed at men. Books for a general audience, even though mostly read by women, get naked women on the covers to appeal to men. Books marketed at a gay male audience often get naked men on the covers, also to appeal to men. Only romance novels get naked men aimed at women. You almost never see naked, non-sexualised adults on book covers, and a vanishing proportion of those will be images of men. All this is quite odd for such a female-run and -patronised business as publishing, but it's splendid to see Handheld break the trend with this startling and eye-catching design. Read more about it from Kate Macdonald here.

The Price of Teeth is... SIN!

An intriguing book due early next year is Chris Offutt's My Father, the Pornographer, in which he writes about the experience of having a father (Andrew J. Offutt) who--supposedly in order to pay the young Chris's orthodontic bills--turned enthusiastically to churning out great heaving piles of pornographic books. I'll review the book itself when it's published (something of an introduction can be found here), but I thought I'd take this opportunity to look at the marvellous cover design by hero-of-this-blog Jamie Keenan (about whom more posts here).

Touch it for a bigger version, as one of Offutt's protagonists mighthave said

In fact, the good-girl-art images used by Keenan here are astonishingly sweet and innocent compared to the depictions of women on Offutt's actual books, almost all published under various pseudonyms by various dodgy outfits.

Lolling About in Bed

Since the last two posts have featured cases of one image, many covers, let's do a trilogy. Here's a photo by Barnaby Hall (to whom this has happened before, several times) that keeps turning up on covers. This nudely reading woman is very multilingual.

Reich's Orgasmatron

I just came across this marvellous cover for a book about noted psychoanalyst and nutter Wilhelm Reich, creator of the "orgone energy accumulator" (an insulated box for the witless to sit in and delude themselves that they are accumulating sexual energy for general health benefits) and the similarly useless "cloudbuster". The cover design is the work of Marina Drukman, and is great! (Bear in mind that Reich advocated his patients take off their clothes while he touched them during sessions.)

Click for bigger version; published by Fourth Estate

Owls, Butterflies, Nudes

While trying (and failing) to track down something both in print and in English by an apparently amazing Austro-Hungarian writer named Géza Csáth (and if he's as good as his cousin, Dezső Kosztolányi, then he's very good indeed), I did find these two French translation covers, from the Arbre Vengeur imprint. Illustrators unknown, but I like them a lot, especially the owl-woman.

So here we have another French imprint which (usually) limits the artwork on their covers to a circle.

An Ape with a Cigar IN YOUR FACE

Coming next year from Vintage Classics UK is the somewhat new concept of 3D book cover art*. They're publishing a set of five science-fiction classics, each of which will come with a pair of red/green 3D glasses in order to appreciate the covers. Here are the covers... (click on the first three for much bigger versions, especially if you already own a pair of old anaglyph glasses)

These aren't bad at all, though the Lovecraft misses the opportunity to do something which actually hurts the eyes, which would have been appropriate.

(UPDATE: And as Óscar Palmer notes in the comments, the two Vernes are the work of Jim Tierney, who also did these gorgeous Verne covers as part of his student work. Tierney is now working for Penguin in the US, a well-deserved role.)

And here's another of the Vintage Classics D. H. Lawrences with a Carla van de Puttelaar cover photo (see here for the others).

* Relatively new for non-lascivious purposes, in any case. The only other 3D books that I've seen in bookshops are along these lines...

And for more unlikely ape action, look here.

Not Safe for Work, or Sane Humans

I first encountered the work of Harry Stephen Keeler a couple of years ago, through the championing of Paul Collins of the Collins Library. To get the flavour of Keeler's mad world, visit this page. Here's a sample extract from the plot summaries there: "A man is found strangled to death in the middle of a lawn, yet there are no footprints other than his own. Police suspect the "Flying Strangler-Baby," a killer midget who disguises himself as a baby and stalks victims by helicopter. (X. Jones of Scotland Yard, 1936)"

In learning more about Keeler, I came across Ramble House, a (then, at least) one-man operation dedicated to bringing all of Keeler's works back into print. The owner, Fender Tucker, printed the books individually and then bound them in his kitchen with a hot glue gun and an iron. As Ramble House expanded to reprint the work of other forgotten, misguided writers, most of the printing and binding now seems to be done via Lulu. At first this might suggest that some of the magic is gone. But then you take a look at the cover designs of Australian artist Gavin L. O'Keefe, and you see that Ramble House is fulfiling a unique niche in publishing. Mere words cannot do these things justice (though I note that O'Keefe is as at home with photography and Photoshop as he is with more traditional artist's tools).

My brain, it is now broke.