Blathering at Poor People Elsewhere

The AIGA Eye on Design blog very kindly indulged my obsession and then took it further:

Blathering at the poor people of New Zealand

Here I am at the Newsroom, yammering on about the one image, many covers phenomenon.

Covers Containing Covers

A new addition to the collection of covers that contain and alter/vandalise other covers: My Ariel, the forthcoming (from Coach House Books, next month) collection of poetic responses to Plath's Ariel, by Sina Queyras...

..which of course riffs on the original Ariel cover.

There are several other covers which have done this. Mark Sarvas's Harry, Revised makes use of an old Penguin Classics Dumas cover, while Frank Portman's King Dork savages Salinger.

 

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Then there's this Swedish editon of Aleksandar Hemon's Nowhere Man, which is the most straightforward version of this I've seen.

Queued Penguins

Perving at the upcoming Penguin Classics has revealed a bunch of things I will need to spend money on, and a few things worthy of comment here. First of all, an apparently random trio of upcoming titles have a completely new series design, for no reason I can yet determine. I like it, but don't understand what's happening.

 

  

 

There's also a welcome addition of more weird/horror fiction to the line, both American and Filipino.

 

We also have another ofBassani's Romanzo di Ferrara books, getting us closer to having the whole cycle in print in English...

 

..and using a cover image last seen on the late, lamented Harvill edition of Erwin Mortier's My Fellow Skin.

And then we have Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo, which is a welcome addition to the library of books featuring Josephine Baker on the cover.

Here are some of the other upcoming offerings worth your consideration.

Beached Statue

 Ever since Planet of the Apes, a disaster-wrecked Statue of Liberty has been used frequently in movies and on their posters to symbolise ruined America.

  

 

 

  

It's a cliche that started in literature, and actually goes back to 1887: the oldest occurrence I've read is in J. A. Mitchell's novella The Last American, which featured illustrations like these...

 

 ..and which, along with Planet of the Apes, led to numerous book, pulp magazine and comic covers featuring Liberty in various states of disrepair and repurposing.

Now that a horrific deluge of utterly unoriginal post-apocalyptic self-published fiction has been unleashed by Amazon, it seems only fitting that these books without new ideas should also feature covers to match.

It's mildly unfair to include Warday here, in that it was first published in the 1980s by a respectable firm, but Streiber abandoned his career as a writer of obvious fiction in order to become a wildly disreputable purveyor of alien-abduction bullshit and plagiarist, so fuck him.

Old Favourites Return

A couple of much-used cover images are getting another run around the block later this year. First of all comes A Fine Imitation by Amber Brock, which uses a photo by George Hoyningen-Huene...

which we have seen a few times before:

Then there's this photo by William Egglestone, being used on Deborah Shapiro's upcoming The Sun in Your Eyes...

..and which has been around the block a few times already, each time also with the white space used for the text block:

The girl on the left is still not looking any happier, despite her increasing literary fame.