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.

Over at the blog of the otherwise admirable Australian Book Designers Association, I am doing my party piece.

Back to normal soon...

Things round here will be back to normal soon--my apologies. As a sort of offering in my defence, a new Whiskey Priest Book has just been published: Anthony Trollope's steampunk science-fiction novel, The Fixed Period, set in 1980 in a country where compulsory euthanasia at the age of 67 is the rule.

More here.

(Typed laboriously while trying to wrangle an 11-day-old baby, so please excuse any typos...)

Last week I was interviewed on the IEEE Techwise Conversations podcast, talking about Whiskey Priest Books and the practicalities how to be a not-very-rich publisher of lost classics. Another chap on the program has published nearly 1,000,000 books, and makes rather more money--but at what cost?!!

Whisky Priest Books discussed:

So if you'd like to enjoy my honeyed tones, listen here or there.

Whisky Priest in the New York Times

More new cover criticism later this week, I promise, but in the mean time, I'm interviewed at the New York Times's technology site, talking about Whisky Priest Books and being your own niche classics publisher. (Said books are available here (worldwide), here (Amazon US) and here (Amazon UK).

Writers No One Reads 2

My second Writer No One Reads entry, George Edgerton (Mary "Chav" Chavelita Dunne) is up here.

Shameless Self-Promotion

Having long been a fan of the work of Will Schofield, the vast throbbing brain behind 50 Watts (and its forerunner, A Journey Round My Skull) and one of three behind Writers No One Reads, I was thrilled to be asked to contribute the occasional contribution to the latter. My first is about would-be assassin, poet and novelist Peter Kocan.

Me, Elsewhere, Rabbiting On

Today is Halloween, a celebration that goes mostly ignored here in Australia. People tend to divide into 3 groups here:

      1. Those who ignore it

      2. Random kids who go trick-or-treating, and are mostly disappointed because those in group 1 have no treats to hand over.

      3. Those who go into splenetic rants about American cultural imperialism whenever it's mentioned.

In any case, over at The Second Pass, I'm one of a number of persons talking about great scary short stories; to my delight, I find myself in the company of John Crowley, one of my favourite writers. Hot-diggetty, as the cool kids say. The story I chose is from the John Wyndham oddity, The Outward Urge.

If I hadn't, mistakenly, been convinced someone else would choose it, I might also have gone for Guy de Maupassant's 'The Horla': go here for details, online texts thereof, and even a Peter Lorre-starring radio play version.

Or go here and here for my ludicrously extensive John Wyndham covers posts.

Whisky Priest

(Note: This post is somewhat self-serving, in that I'm going to talk about a series of books I am publishing. Rest assured that, after this one post, I will not be using this blog to talk about or sell these books--all of that will be going on over on the Whisky Priest Books blog. However, I thought I'd post this here since I'll be talking about how the covers of these books were designed.)

* * *

There are a number of books I want to read which are either completely out of print, or else only available in utterly hideous print-on-demand editions with vile typography and crappy covers. A number of these books are out of copyright, and so potentially open to anyone to make their own editions (hence the vile/crappy versions described above). Having experimented with print-on-demand technology, I thought I'd have a go at creating a couple of physical books myself. It was lots of fun, and I got hooked. The result is Whisky Priest Books: out-of-copyright books I want copies of, and which, with any luck, other people might want to read as well.

I started with Fitz-James O'Brien. An Irish-born poet and journalist who was killed fighting for the North in the American Civil War, he was also responsible for a notable series of early science-fiction and supernatural short stories. One or two of these occasionally crop up in themed anthologies, but there was no decent collection of his work available. So I made one. The title story, The Diamond Lens, is probably his best-known. In it, a man who has built a super-powerful microscope discovers an entire miniature world inside a water drop, including a beautiful (but microscopic) naked woman, with whom he falls in love. The cover pretty much suggested itself (click for bigger versions of all cover images).

My other starting book was as pretty much as odd as literary oddities get. Having read and thoroughly enjoyed Melville's Moby-Dick, I was reading some essays about the book. In one, by David S. Reynolds, I came across this intriguing sentence: "The largest monster in antebellum literature was the kraken depicted in Eugene Batchelder’s Romance of the Sea-Serpent, or The Ichthyosaurus, a bizarre narrative poem about a sea serpent that terrorizes the coast of Massachusetts, destroys a huge ship in mid-ocean, repasts on human remains gruesomely with sharks and whales, attends a Harvard commencement (where he has been asked to speak), [and] shocks partygoers by appearing at a Newport ball...”

The audience for an 1850 book-length Monty Python-style doggerel poem about a socially aspirant sea serpent is probably just me, and it would be honestly impossible to press this on anyone as a great (or even good) work of literature, but I'm glad to have read it. Such an overblown book seemed to need a relatively minimalist cover, so I used a detail from one of the book's original illustrations.

Book three was a collection of the Edith Wharton novellas and stories I didn't already have in my numerous collections of her shorter works. A lush John White Alexander painting ('Repose', from 1895) seemed right for this.

At this point I became pretty bored with the blue rectangular author/title box, and decided to chuck it in. This was a good idea, as it gives a lot more flexibility in cover design.

Lord Dunsany (or Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 18th Baron of Dunsany) is still in print today, known for his remarkable fantasy stories. His other work is less well known, and Tales of War was particularly interesting. Drawing on his own WWI experiences, its protagonists include numerous soldiers, Kaiser Wilhelm II (the theory is advanced that he started the war to compensate for his ludicrous moustache) and a talking gorilla.

Two other WWI novels also caught my eye: Contemptible by 'Casualty' (Arnold Gyde), a straightforward, thinly fictionalised version of his own fighting experience in France, and A. P. Herbert's The Secret Battle, which was one of the first novels to look at shell-shock and the odiousness of capital punishment for desertion and cowardice in battle.

This cover makes use of 'Battle-Scarred Sentinels', one of the many frankly astonishing photos of Australian war photographer Frank Hurley

This cover features an adapted version of a pencil sketch by  Dutch cartoonist Louis Raemaekers

Storm Jameson was once widely popular, but her work is now almost entirely (and unfairly) forgotten. My favourite of her novels is In the Second Year, first published in 1936, and describing a Britain where the Fascists had taken government. For this cover I lifted a frame from an old newsreel of a British Union of Fascists rally.

French novelist Henri Barbusse's early novel Inferno, from 1908, is a neglected classic of existentialism and voyeurism, if that's your cup of tea: a near stream-of-consciousness narrative from the point of view of a man peering through a gap in his boarding-house room wall at the goings-on in the neighbouring room. The oppressive ranting of the text and the peering eye suggested a design for this one (click for a better view--the text doesn't display well at the smaller size).

As you can see, it's hard to stop once you start down this self-publishing path. Who else do we have? How about Leonard Merrick, as championed at The Neglected Books page here and here?

This tale of a writer whose first book is hugely successful, but who then starts to bomb in a big way, needed a thoroughly fucked-up typewriter...

..while this book, much of which concerns an aspiring actress and her attempts to secure work, seemed to need this portrait from an old theatrical poster.

Or Grant Allen, a number of whose other books I've really loved, and whose Michael's Crag (about a man who, after a blow to the head, becomes convinced he's the archangel Michael) was discussed at The Dusty Bookcase?

Here you can see the whole cover, front and back. The image is one of the book's 200+ silhouette illustrations,  by Francis and Alec Carruthers Gold

Or the wonderful Stefan Zweig, whose work has been resurrected recently by the brilliant NYRB and Pushkin Press? This volume contains two of his novellas unavailable elsewhere, along with his monograph on poet Paul Verlaine.

I couldn't resist Egon Schiele for this: it's his hypnotic 'Sitzende Frau mit hochgezogenem Knie' (1917) 

Or French novelist Alphonse Daudet, whose cynically funny collection of stories about the sex war and the artistic temperament, Artists' Wives, deserves rediscovery?

The cover uses 'Model writing postcards' (1906) by Carl Larsson

Or Grete Lanier's diary of her schoolgirlhood in early 20th-Century Vienna, originally published by Sigmund Freud?

This cover uses a detail from ‘Profilbildnis eines Mädchens’ (1897) by Koloman Moser, a number of whose paintings capture Viennese adolescence rather intriguingly

There are other titles in preparation, and I'm thoroughly enjoying working on them. I can recommend this process to anyone who wants to read an old book and doesn't want to read it on a screen. The POD publisher I use is Lulu, mainly because they have an Australian press, and so getting copies of my own books doesn't cost me an arm and a leg in postage. Their price-setting system is a little irritating--once a book crosses 300-odd pages  in size, it seems to get dramatically more expensive--but I've set every book's price as low as I can (profit on one of these books bought from Amazon averages around 70-80 cents).

So, that's the start of Whisky Priest Books. See some of them at Amazon US, Amazon UK, or all of them at the Whisky Prist Lulu shop.

Man in Fog

Before getting to the man in the fog, a bit of self-promotion. I have a piece coming up in the next issue of McSweeney's The Believer magazine (the one with the great Charles Burns covers). Due out in under a week, buy your copy for a pittance here! I also co-wrote a piece for The Huffington Post, which will theoretically turn up at some point.

Anyway, back to the man in the fog. In the first proper post here, I talked about an image that turned up on a number (five at the time) of book covers. The photo is 'Man in Fog' from 1935, by Arthur Tanner.

I now know of it appearing on nine books (more, in fact, since the Simenon below stands in for a whole series of Maigret books, all of which used the image).

Elsewhere

I'm interviewed over at Flavorwire, talking about five great covers and three types of awful cover...so you know Tutis ends up in that second batch.

Things

Pleasingly, How to Make a Chinese or Japanese Book Cover has been re-posted over at Sociological Images, with lots of discussion in the comments section. If you're interested, pop over. If you're just here for the book covers, here are two which struck me this morning, one very good and one very bad. See if you can guess which is which.

(Design by Michael Kellner)

 

(Designer unknown)

Simple but Effective (plus a meme)

Just came across this one: not much to say, other than the fact that for a book about the relationship between a novelist and a poet, in one of Bellow's well-drawn city settings, it's just about perfect. Don't know who the designer is, but they know their onions.



***

Meme time: I have been tagged by the cunning Lucy Fishwife of Life Happens Between Books, and must post Six Random Things About Me.

1. I have had as "pets" dogs, cats, magpies, bats, hairy-nosed wombats, bettongs, rabbits, guinea pigs, ducks and sugar gliders. I also once had a koala die in my arms of kidney failure, which was very sad.

2. I was engaged to be married at the age of six. It did not work out.

3. I once drunkenly stumbled up to David Malouf at a publishing party (to which I had received an inbvitation as a lowly bookseller) to tell him how much I admired his work. I was quite pissed and inarticulate. He thought I was a bouncer come to evict him from the premises. At the same party, one of my co-workers scored a snog from Alistair MacLeod.

4. My father once inadvertently made noted Australian children's-TV fixture Humphrey B. Bear swear on live TV with the aid of a Tesla coil--the first and only time said bear has spoken in over 40 years of broadcasting. The bear danced too close to the coil and was struck by a bolt of electricity, and his slightly muffled cry was "Oh, FUCK!"




5. In my first week of primary school I suffered major concussion after running into someone at full-tilt and bouncing off them to fly head-first into a brick wall, knocking myself out. How brilliant might I have been if this had never happened? We will never know. It also has made me deeply suspicious of any book or film where the protagonist gets knocked out with a blow to the head, and yet remembers everything that happened to him/her up to that moment. Head trauma doesn't work like that!

6. I am currently typing with several tissues stuffed up my right nostril to stem a blood nose. Ah, the glamour of the writing life. I also just did a Google Image search for "bloody tissue" to decorate this entry, and really wish I hadn't--'tissue', of course, having another meaning in this context.