Bondage Manga Wodehouse & Stolen Cover Art

Yet another case of public-domain PG Wodehouse being debased by random ebook sellers, this time one Sheba Blake Publishing...

..who also sells another Wodehouse short story using artwork stolen from the cover Norton's edition, by Antony Hare. The Norton edition looks like this...

..and the Sheba Blake version like this...

In fact, a quick look at the Sheba Blake website reveals a vast array of stolen covers, many from Vintage UK and Penguin. Cunningly, those stolen from Vintage still retain the 'Vintage' branding...

Penguin Frome and Vintage Mirth

Vintage Rudge and Dombey, and that Hunted Down cover is from Peter Owen

..and I'm sure that all of these other covers could be found to have been stolen too, with a bit more Googling.

Why they Burned Down the Library of Alexandria

Another competitor for the late lamented Tutis: The Library of Alexandria, whose reassuring web presence consists of a Facebook page full of unsolicited legal advice. Unlike Tutis, who stole their wildly inappropriate cover images from anywhere, The Library of Alexandria mostly stick to paintings in the public domain. Fortunately for our purposes, they are choosing the images based on no sane basis.

Here's their unique approach to P. G. Wodehouse...

Mark Twain...

F. Scott Fitzgerald...

The hidden side of Antarctica...

And their strange takes on some other literary classics (the unconventional cropping is their own work)...

"The unpleasant, acrid smell of burnt poetry."

Will Schofield of the ever- and increasingly amazing 50 Watts pointed me towards this new work by the marvellous Tomer Hanuka, who I interviewed here.

Click for much bigger versions of this and all other Wodehouse covers below

It's part of a set of six new Wodehouse covers imminent from Norton in the US, each designed by a different artist.

Cover by Alessandro Gottardo

Cover by Antony Hare

Cover by John Hendrix

Cover by Jonathan Bartlett

Cover by Lilli Carré, about whom much more here

For a convoluted look back at the history of P. G. Wodehouse covers, see this post, and for the least appropriate Wodehouse cover ever (which also gets his name wrong), see the end of this post.

Speaking of Tomer Hanuka, he has also done two more John O'Hara covers for Vintage Classics UK (his frst two are shown here).

 

And finally, speaking of 50 Watts, you HAVE to look at the winners of the design-a-book-cover-in-a-Polish-style competition. This was inspired by the book 1000 Polish Book Covers, an amazing thing I will be posting about as soon as I get my copy.

Fish, Barrel, Gun: Tutis

For a self-styled "caustic" cover critic, Tutis is the gift that keeps on giving. They show an interesting willingness to appopriate other people/publisher's cover art for their own shoddy POD editions.

Example #1: This is the Larry Elmore cover for the first of Tracy Hickman and Margaret Weis's wildly-popular-in-the-1980s Mormon-propaganda, sub-Tolkien, Dungeons & Dragons spin-off novels:



Here are a couple of Tutis's classics:




Setting aside the complete inappropriateness of these covers (though at least they Photoshopped out the dragon), this is the unwise theft of a cover which millions of people will recognise.

Example #2: When Weis and Hickman started writing their own sub-Tolkien Mormon propoganda that wasn't affiliated with Dungeons & Dragons, the first cover looked like this:



Enter Tutis:




Example #3: Trashy fantasy novels seem to be a useful resource for Tutis. Here's the cover for one of the bestselling Terry Brooks' many, many Tolkien-"inspired" novels: again, a book cover seen by millions.



And here's Tutis's edition of The Man Eaters of Tsavo and Other East African Adventures--remember, by the way, that said man-eaters are actually lions, not made-up airborne monsters.



Example #4: This Tutis Wilkie Collins make use of a Charles Addams painting of the Addams family home.



Example #5: Why reuse other people's covers when you can reuse your own, whether or not they suit the book at all (though who knows where this image came from originally?)




With their usual care and attention, they've left off the author's surname on that second book--it's actually by P. G. Wodehouse. But what is that thing? Look into its cold, dead, pink eyes...



Aaaaaaaaaaarrrrrgh!

Wodehouse Old & New

Searching for a particular P. G. Wodehouse quote, I came across the Random Wodehouse Quote Generator, and wasted some happy time laughing. (The quote I was after was from Bertie Wooster in Right Ho, Jeeves. As he attempts to storm out of a room, he turns to have the last word: '“Tinkerty tonk,” I said, and I meant it to sting.')

Anyway, this inevitably got me onto hunting down various Wodehouse covers. For several decades in the UK, almost every Wodehouse title has been published by Penguin, but late last year Random House took over the rights and has started pumping out the books under their Arrow imprint. In the US, Vintage and Everyman print the paperbacks and hardbacks respectively.

The most recent Penguin covers and the new Arrow covers are quite similar in spirit but different in execution, so I thought it would be interesting to look at them both, and compare them with other Wodehouse covers from the past. I'm only doing this for a couple of titles, as an attempt to round up all of the various covers for a writer who produced more than 90 books would kill me.

The first is Code of the Woosters, one of the classic Jeeves and Wooster books.

Here we have the Penguin version, with a cover illustration by the excellent David Hitch, who did all of the covers for this edition of the Wodehouse books.


This is the new Arrow version, cover artist as yet unkown to me--an Arrow art director simply says that they're "a fantastic Korean artist" in an interview. (UPDATE: A helpful commenter lets me know that the artist is Swan Park.)


Then we have the Vintage US edition, with an illustration from Marc Rosenthal, illustrator, children's-book and comics artist.


And this is the Everyman hardback, with a cover by Polish artist Andrzej Klimowski, who has similarly illustrated all the books in this edition of Wodehouse.


Then we have the Penguin Twentieth-Century Classic and Modern Classic editions, both using a detail from a lovely 1927 poster by Alfred Leele, 'The Lure of the Underground'.



And here's the (unfortunately low-resolution) poster.


Some other Code of the Woosters now. An American 1950s Ace edition:


Another Penguin from 1971:


A Folio Society edition from 1999:


An indeterminate edition from 1975:


And a Vintage edition from 1990:


Now we'll look at a different Wodehouse--Uncle Fred in the Springtime, one of the excellent Castle Blandings books. Again, we'll kick off with the David Hitch Penguin and the unknown new Arrow editions.



And here is the Klimowski 2004 Everyman edition:


Here we have earlier Penguins, from 1954, 1961 and 1979 respectively (cover artists unknown for the last two).




A Candian 1939 edition from McClelland & Stewart:


A Hutchinson hardback from 1987:


A Simon & Schuster US version from 1969:


And finally a Folio Society edition from 2004, with its slipcase.


UPDATE: The deeply wise Alan Trotter points out that "the old Penguin Code of the Woosters you show was done by Ionicus, who did all the Penguin Wodehouses for years: obituaries here and here. As far as I'm concerned, having grown up with his work, Ionicus is the only proper Wodehouse illustrator, though I like Klimowski too; most of the others are too cartoonish. Can I warn anybody tempted by the Modern Classics cover that this edition was appallingly proofread, to the extent that a number of jokes were spoiled or lost."