The Startling, Here and Elsewhere

The absorbing blog of amazing photos, If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger, There'd Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats, has instituted a new category, for strange book covers. This is to be applauded. Here are their finds from the last 24 hours (I know I first saw the Espionaje cover at 50 Watts). There seems to be a bit of a boobtastic focus so far...

On another tack, can I just say that Erich Kästner's Going to the Dogs, recently resurrected by NYRB with a suitably seedy Christian Schad painting on the front, is one of the most purely enjoyable books I've read all year?

The painting is Schad's 'Self-Portrait with Model' (1927).

Here are a couple of other similarly unnerving Schads: 'Appendectomy in Geneva' and 'Agosta, the Pigeon-Chested Man, and Rasha, the Black Dove' (both 1929).

Click the paintings for much bigger versions.

What on Earth is Going On in the Middle East?

I'm puzzled--dozens and dozens of Middle-Eastern persons have been finding their way to this blog by doing a Google Image Search for this book cover.

From this post of full of class and diistinction

I can think of no rational explanation for why this would be happening.

Purple Yellow Blue

No credits for these as yet, but they're the eye-grabbing new covers for Picador UK's re-releases of some of the B. S. Johnson backlist. See here for their full-on edition of The Unfortunates, the famous unbound book in a box. UPDATE: They're designed by La Boca.

That Trawl cover is so much more appealing than my tacky old Panther edition, which is typically boob-tastic for that publisher and era.

Don't Lounge About Nude on the Road, Love, You'll Catch Your Death

And speaking of photos appearing on piles of books, how about this poor lass forced to lie naked on roads all over the world...

Mockery, WITH Covers (and, be warned, breasts)

There's a certain appeal for many readers in the Mars/Barsoom tales of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Burroughs was no great writer, but he was prolific and, perhaps more importantly, his Martian princess heroine Dejah Thoris spent her entire time naked (Google Image search her name for some of the excitible art this has prompted.). Burroughs also has the advantage of being out of copyright, so anyone who wants to can cash in with reprints of his books. I came across a series of these from Deodand Publishing (I should note here that unlike many publishers of the out-of-copyright, Deodand do not charge ludicrously high prices for their books). The art reminds me of that drawn by heavy metal fans in early high school--more enthusiastic than talented...

There are more effective ways to cash in, of course. Comics company Dynamite is busy adapting the books for comics, and doing their best to squeeze money from idiots by offering various hard-to-find and thus ridiculously expensive "variant covers" (a common way comics companies have to rip off those most eager to be ripped off)--see six of the eight available versions of the first issue...

..and you will notice what Dynamite is pinning their fiscal hopes on, the subtle and sophisticated "risque nude variants", like so...

There's a truly odd cynicism behind this sales ploy, in that even though the books feature the heroine constantly nude, thus actually justifying this sort of objectification (in terms of source fidelity if not in any other way), the actual comics themselves do not feature nudity on the inside pages. Since this is hardly likely to be due to taste or restraint, I can only imagine it's an attempt to be able to sell the non-nude-covered versions of the comics to kids, without creating the sort of moral panic that occasionally occurs when American parents find nipples in their kids' comic books.

Changing the subject entirely, and going back to book covers for a moment, I was surprised by this cover from Dodo Press. Can anyone suggest why Thorne Smith's second supernatural-comedy about Topper and his two friendly ghost friends should end up with Fyodor Dostoevsky on the cover?

At least it's not a risque nude variant.

"I'm looking for a book with a naked woman lying down on the cover..."

There's a certain kind of crime writer (with an associated kind of crime reader) that I sold a lot of when I worked in a bookshop. The writer produces formulaic books with non-specific titles at tremendous speed, and the readers gobble them up and forget them half an hour later. Looking through the crime shelves, said readers are unable to remember which ones they've read, and the covers, titles and blurbs do nothing to help, since they're all basically the same. I've never seen such determination to keep producing basically the same book, though, as shown by the designers at Bantam for the work of Tess Gerritsen.

This cover was also discussed in this post, as it's a lookalike.

Lots of sleepy naked chicks in Gerritsen-land.

Burton on Amis

At the end of last year, I showed the excellent Jonathan Burton's work on Douglas Adams's most famous book, with the promise of his upcoming Kingsley Amis covers for Penguin Modern Classics. Well, here they are, and I love them.

Click for a bigger of the full cover--it captures well the chilly, sometimes fantastical, and often booze-soaked world Amis conjures up in his short fiction.

Without wishing to give anything away, once you've read the book this image is pretty chilling.

These covers are even more effective when you look at the sorts of designs these books have had in the past.

 

Given that these are the covers I've been living with for some time, an upgrade is inevitable.

That first old Girl, 20 cover, by the way, is entirely representative of the one-note crappiness of Panther's 1970s Amis covers--though to be fair, it was pretty much their approach to every other author too.

 

Shock! Horror!

Above is the cover for the recent Pushkin Press edition of the alarmingly young Florian Zeller's novel Julien Parme. It uses an untitled photograph by Australian artist Bill Henson, one of his many moody, shadowy pictures of young people.



This is particularly interesting because Henson was recently the subject of a startling controversy in Australia, in which the country's media and self-appointed commentators went absolutely mental.

Australia has an odd history of censorship. It's an unusually plain-spoken country (example: when the CEO of my bank rang me recently in response to a negative letter I'd written about them to my local newspaper*, he began with, "I understand you're a bit shitted off with us."), where, for the most part, people are pretty relaxed about swearing, sex and violence on the telly and in print.

But Australia has occasional paroxysms of stupidity about "dangerous" art as well. Brett Easton Ellis's American Psycho has to be sold shrinkwrapped in plastic, with a big 'Rated R' sticker on it, to prevent impressionable youths from buying it or from flipping through the pages in bookshops. Laughably, it's completely banned in Queensland. There are no other books to which this law has been applied, other than photographs of hardcore pornography, which are technically illegal outside of Canberra.



The Henson photos were the focus of another of these sporadic eruptions last year. A Sydney gallery was going to host a show of his photos, and sent out invitations featuring one picture of a 13-year-old girl with visible nipples. All hell broke loose. The Prime Minister went on national TV to make a fool of himself, describing Henson's pictures as "absolutely revolting". The Opposition Leader rushed to agree, despite the fact that he (a millionaire ex-banker who tries to claim the common touch by saying that he's "lived in flats") even owns some Henson photographs. Police seized all the photographs and tried to put together an obscenity case.

In the end the police action fell apart, as it should have, and most people calmed the fuck down. You can see most of the exhibition online (though not the photo which triggered all the fuss), and more of Henson's work elsewhere. You can see that particular shot on the cover of a book about the kerfuffle, though it's been carefully cropped to avoid frightening the horses.



* Yes, I am officially becoming an angry old bugger.