Big Box of Beckett

Having recently seen Beckett performed live for the first time, I wanted to read some more of his work. Looking around for a good collection of his plays, I came across something even better: a glorious big box of his novels, plays, stories, poems and criticism. Me being me, I could not resist. Plus, it does the one image, many spines thing, with that magnificently craggy face, like Abraham lincoln after a big night on the tiles. (Click for bigger images)

 

The individual volumes are nicely designed, too--though, weirdly, the back covers are more impressive than the fronts. I suppose the unflashy fronts fit Beckett's whole minimal staging ethos.

Here's what's in the box, by the way:

The design was done by Laura Lindgren for publishers Grove Press.

UPDATE: The original hardcover version of this set does use those images on the front covers of the books, so there you go!

Shorts

The alleged unsaleability of short story collections is much remarked upon (I don't know what they mean: I buy enough of these books to keep a small national economy afloat), so I assume that the logic behind this attractive series of books from Harper Perennial US is to lure people towards new writers via a known quantity.

Each of these six 250-odd-page collections features a bunch of short stories from the author on the cover, along with a bonus story from a contemporary writer with a collection in-print with Perennial. I have mixed feelings about the idea, but the execution of the cover designs is both simple and elegant.








Anything which gets the short fiction of Crane and Cather into wider hands is OK by me (the others too, but I suspect they need less of a push).

I'm not sure who to credit for these covers, but they're really nice. I think (and hope) that they're photos of little cardboard stand-ups, rather than being computer-generated, but either way they're nifty.

UPDATE: Helpful commenter BKLYNmle tells me that these covers are the work of Adam Johnson. And they are photographs of real paper cutouts. Huzzah! The spines also fit together to make a single image...

007 Follow-Up

Last month I talked about the gorgeous new James Bond designs Penguin are putting out on May 29. Well, the useful Penguin Blog has now posted about them, so I can give you a bit more information.

They're the work of Michael Gillette, they're smallish hardbacks, and the niceness of the design applies to the backs and spines as well.

Casanova's Spines

The autobiography of Giacomo Casanova is one of the wonders of world literature. The man had an incredible life, as a seducer, student, gambler, poet, novelist, spy, political exile, political prisoner, con-man, musician, librettist, and more.

His 12-volume memoirs have been brilliantly translated into English by Willard Trask, and are published by Johns Hopkins University Press. What's particularly nice about this edition, the covers of which all look much like this...

..is that the full set on the shelf look like this.

I think we can all agree that this is very nice.

A similar effect has been achieved by the current Vintage UK edition of Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu (which has a sketch of old Marcel himself spilling across all six spines) and the US editions of Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time, which has the painting of that name across all four spines. Unfortunately I have nothing to show you of these, image-wise. My Proust is made of from 3 different editions, and my Powell is the classic-looking white version put out by Arrow in the UK.

What I can show you are two other Casanova covers. The first is for his short novel, The Duel, from Hesperus Press. It's a great little book, and rather more manageable than his thousands-of-pages-long science-fiction epic, Icosaméron ou Histoire d'Edouard, et d'Elisabeth qui passèrent quatre vingts un ans chez les Mégamicres, habitans aborigènes du Protocosme dans l'intérieur de notre globe.



The second is from the lovely-looking Penguin Great Loves series. These books are gorgeous, though some of them are merely extracts from bigger works. The Casanova is a case in point, being a few episodes lifted from the autobiography.



UPDATE: I forgot to mention that the painting in question is Venus in Repose by 17th-Century Dutch artist Dirk de Quade van Ravesteyn. More information on the choice of this painting for the spines can be found here.