Behind the Scenes of Vintage Loves Film

Matthew Broughton, a senior designer who has been with Random House UK since 2001, was kind enough to get in touch about the Vintage Loves Film series, spotlighted here and here. For all images, click for nice, big versions.

"The ‘Vintage Loves Film’ series is a one-off Summer Promotion to highlight ten Vintage bestsellers whose films also became box-office successes. For the consumer who may have seen the film but not read the book, we would be offering a fresh way of viewing these literary classics. This presented the design team with a difficult problem – how to tie the concept of film and book together. We particularly wanted to avoid a film tie-in approach, or work with film stills – the visual conceit would lie in how we described the transition of typed word to spoken word.

 "It occurred that quotes would be the way forward for a number of reasons:

"1 – Most film fanatics can quote lines from their favourite films. For instance, we may not have seen, or know the story to the film Casablanca, but we remember the lines – ‘Here's looking at you, kid,’ ‘Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine’ , and even the misquote – ‘Play it again, Sam...’

"2 – We use quotes from critics to help sell books, so why not use a quote from the book to sell itself?

 "We made a point of selecting quotes that were relevant to both film and book whilst making sure we remained faithful to the wording of the novel. The author name and title were relegated to the spine so that the quotes would be read as the description of the book, and not as typographic window dressing. Our insistence to work only with quotes and forego the usual trade conventions was initially met with some concerns, but the positive reactions from authors and estates alike confirmed that it was a bold, but correct approach.

"Each designer took on two titles apiece, with the idea of choosing a type solution that would reflect the period or feel of the film (see below) and to complete the film connection we numbered the series with a motif inspired by the ten-to-one celluloid countdown on old black and white movies.

"The simple cover concept needed to be complemented by the production values, so we printed in two colour (black and PMS485) on a pearlescent stock (Curious Metallic Virtual Pearl) with the bookblock edges dipped in black."

Thank you, Mr Broughton!

Technical Difficulties

Due to a certain bastard telecom company, I'm having extreme net connection difficulties at the moment, so I apologise for the lack of updates. Flesh willing, broadband weak, all that sort of thing. Even uploading these two pictures took five six seven tries. To tide you over, a couple more Highsmiths. I hope to be back properly soon.

Highsmiths II

Sorry that this and the previous post are low on text--I'm a bit busy at the moment with annoying, non-book-related shenanigans. However, here are a bunch of mostly excellent Patricia Highsmith covers from the past and from foreign countries, which is what L. P. Hartley would have us believe is what the past is, in any case. Included are a couple of editions of The Price of Salt, Highsmith's first novel, published as by Claire Morgan, and now usually called Carol.

  

(Click for a bigger version)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I especially like this owl/mouth from the Spanish edition of The Cry of the Owl.

Highsmiths

In this post I complained about what happens when a publisher changes a series look, ruining the look of any complete set of books by an author you might have on your shelves (because this is all I have to moan about in life). A related problem is when a writers' works are split between multiple publishers. An interesting approach to this has been demonstrated by Vintage and Bloomsbury, in regard to the great Patricia Highsmith.

Highsmith's five Ripley novels* are, for the most part, brilliant exercises in black, claustrophobic drama that manage to have you barracking for a psychopathic aesthete as he murders his way to a better life, and murders his way out of trouble. In the UK and Commonwealth, the first four are published by Vintage, while the fifth and final book is from Bloomsbury. This means that a nicely matching set ought to be impossible.

However, when Bloomsbury rereleased their Highsmith books at the turn of the millennium, designer Nathan Burton seems to have gone out of his way to create a design that, though not infringing on the copyright of, or exactly mimicking, the Vintage designs (by Julian Humphries), matches them as well as you could hope.

 

And then the Bloomsbury Highsmiths got a redesign--again by Nathan Burton, using his appealing illustrations and a rough hand-drawn type for the author name.

 

 

 

This ought to throw things out with the Vintage covers--except that Vintage has reciprocated by redesigning their own Highsmiths along similar lines.

 

 

 

 

I'm not sure if there's been any deliberate communication between the two publishers on these designs, but it's a good thing.

Speaking of Ripley, Norton in the US has recently released this gorgeous boxed set of the books. The box and books are designed by Chin-Yee Li--the photos of the individual books are taken from the excellent Book Covers Anonymous blog.

 

 

 

 

 

And then there are the beautiful new Norton paperbacks of the Ripley books, designed by Rodrigo Corral, Christopher Brand and Jason Ramirez.

 

 

 

 

So it's a good time to be buying Ripley.

Highsmith, by the way, is the only serious writer I can think of who had the dubious honour of getting a nude photo of herself put on the cover of her biography (and not by her choice, given that she was dead several years before it was published): the spine of the UK edition of Andrew Wilson's Beautiful Shadow features this unexpected image.

 

* A question: does anyone have an explanation for this odd aspect of the Ripley books? Each book is set at about the time it was published, so the first book is very obviously taking place in the 1950s, while Space Invaders machines and other such aspects of more modern life appear in the last couple of books. And yet, by internal chronology, only a few years have passed. Highsmith is too smart and careful a writer to have not done this on purpose, and yet it's quite discombobulating.