Suddenly Wells Everywhere

In 1946, having recently published the short but aptly-titled Mind at the End of Its Tether, H. G. Wells died. And thus 2017, which is 70 years later, sees him drop out of copyright in much of the world. And lo, there suddenly shall come forth a torrent of Wells.

Vintage Classics UK is one of the first to have a go, with these eye-warping 3D covers. Vintage Classics used to compete with Penguin Classics, who have the paperback rights to Wells while copyright lasts. Now Vintage is wned by the same people, Penguin Random House, so they will be going into competition with themselves, but I'm sure this makes sense to an accountant somewhere.

Oxford World's Classics are being rather more sober about things (I do like the Moreau cover, but the others are a bit bland).

Alma are adding him to their Evergreens catalogue...

..while Gollancz/Weinfeld & Nicolson, who currently only have hardback rights to Wells, are shuffling a whole lot into paperback (more on these here):

 

Collins Classics are doing their usual quickie covers...

..and the Macmillan Collector's Library are having a go too:

Vintage US is bringing out a couple...

..and finally we have Wordworth Classics, if you want ugly but cheap editions.

The five most popular choices in all this lot are, of course, five of Wells's best-known books, and for a good reason. Each of them effectively created a branch of science-fiction that would have countless imitators and followers over the next century-and-more (The War of the Worlds: alien invasion, The Time Machine: time travel, The First Men in the Moon: space exploration, The Island of Doctor Moreau: biological/genetic engineering, The Invisible Man: superpowers), but it's nice to see a few of the neglected social novels getting some attention too. In this respect, Peter Owen is standing out from the crowd: they're republishing only one Wells, and it's completely SF-free.

Dressing Books

In 2015 Jhumpa Lahiri gave the keynote speech to the Festival degli Scrittori, the Florence literary festival. Her chosen topic, and obviously one dear to my own heart, was "the clothing of books"--a writer's view on the design of book covers and the conflicts between authors and marketers. Now her talk has been turned into a book itself, a short and attractive paperback from vintage US.

(Cover design by Joan Wong (with thanks to Aldrin for this info).)

Lahiri's talk begins from her own experiences as the child of immigrants, always dressed incorrectly in clothes that are durable but out of fashion, marking her out as an Indian amongst Americans. And her own experiences with the covers for her books are not much better, leading her to want to abandon individual cover designs altogether: "most of my book jackets don't fit me, which is why I sometimes think, as a writer too, that a uniform would be the answer." She is also lucky enough to be an author published in many languages across the world, which exposes her to different cultures' attempts to encapsulate her books in different ways. Unfortunately this all too often seems to end up with the decision to slap a picture of a sari on the front (see this related post).

It's a thoughtful and enjoyable book, but also one slightly hurt by its failure to include images of any of the covers Lahiri talks about; and her own descriptions are often too vague for even a thorough Googling to determine which covers she means in any particular instance--especially one which she describes "a certain awful cover for one of my books that elicits in me an almost violent response. Each time I am asked to autograph that edition, I feel the impulse to rip the cover off the book." I want to know what cover she means!

It's not just her books that suffer from visual misrepresentation. When Lahiri's previous book came out, a portrait of her featured on the front cover of The New York Review of Books. Lahiri is a perfectly normal looking person...

..so quite why she ended up depicted like this is a surprise.

My three-year-old daughter insisted I turn the magazine face-down because "she looks like a witch!" and it was frightening her while she was trying to eat her breakfast.

Lesbian Flowers

Vintage Classics has an edition of Rita Mae Brown's Rubyfruit Jungle coming out soon--one of the first lesbian novels that was frequently funny and joyful, rather than a Radclyffe Hall-style doomfest--and while the cover image is in itself rather beautiful (a photo by Mark Vessey), as a choice of image it feels stale: blossoming flower as a stand-in for blossoming female sexuality is an old, old trope.

This is one of those occasions in which the Vintage Classics author formula of 'VINTAGE [SURNAME]' doesn't work: 'Vintage Brown' sounds like the description of a wallpaper you'd rip down as fast as possible upon buying a house last redecorated in 1978.

It does, however, reference the various, rather dull, US covers that many of the books original readers would recognise (image stolen from here):

Much better, to my mind, is this old Penguin Essentials cover from 2001:

The title and author were listed on a removable sticker used in most bookshops to cover the more prominent nipples

Of course, if it's explicitness you're after, you could always try this Italian edition...

Dead Disciples

Richard Beard is an unusual novelist, ranging all over the place in his work. His last novel, Lazarus is Dead, featured its Biblical hero, alive again, mystified and almost angry at his resurrection. An earlier novel, Damascus, was set on a single day, yet featured the years-long relationship between its two main characters from the beginning onwards--no matter what scene as being described, it took place on 1st November, 1993 (and used only people, places and names taken from a copy of that date's Times newspaper).

His newest, the excellent Acts of the Assassins, takes off from both of these earlier works: it's about Gallio, a Roman counter-insurgency investigator in the Middle East trying to track down Jesus, a cult leader, who may or may not be dead, through his followers--all of whom are being killed in nastily baroque ways.

The contents page: nobody comes out of this well...

But the novel is not set 2000 years ago, but in a modern world where the Roman Empire retains its hold over Europe and the Middle East, and Gallio makes use of mobile phones and surveillance technology in his quest. But its not a simple alternative history, either--there is some weird collapsing of history, with future and past colliding in weird ways (for example, a fresh murder scene is simultaneously a historic monument to the death that occurred there, with both the still-warm corpse and memorial plaque present).

The cover, by the in-house Vintage/Harvill Secker design team, beautifully combines the modern-world and Biblical aspects of the book, with the Twelve Disciples as both shooting gallery targets and haloed silhouettes, some of them already butchered.

Click for biggering

It's a very good book indeed: it successfully works as a proper political/intelligence thriller, but is so much more ambitious and interesting than pretty much any other book in that genre.

Barbey, Bombay, Manto, Narayan, Haapaniemi?

In March this year, Vintages US and UK are publishing a collection of Indian/Pakistani writer Saadat Hasan Manto's Bombay short stories. It will be wonderful to be able to read these in English at last. I first discovered Manto through his entertaining Stars From Another Sky, a collection of writings about Bombay's film world in the 1940s. It's gossipy, funny and throughly enjoyable even if, like me, you know none of the films or actors he writes about.

Published by Penguin India, it's sporadically available in other countries depending on your luck.

Back to Bombay Stories: the US edition uses a photo by Bruno Barbey, taken in Bombay itself in 1980.

It's a wonderful picture: what at first glance looks like an idyllic image of a man sleeping, watched by peacocks on a luxurious pedestal, snaps into focus as you realise the peacocks and window are a print on paper or fabric, and he's sleeping on a hard wooden floor.

It's a photo I forst encountered on the cover of the old Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics edition of the sadly underrated R. K. Narayan's The Guide. Much decorated and frequently rediscovered by various classics publishers, Narayan still doesn't get the respect he deserves outside of India.

The photo is also on the cover of this collection of Bruno Barbey's photographs, many of them from India. The book is published by Turkey-based Fotografevi.

The Vintage UK edition of Manto's Bombay Stories also makes use of peacocks, in a detailed and slightly hallucinatory illustration that looks very like the work of Klaus Haapaniemi (see his Leskov peacocks in this post).

While waiting for March, seek out these other Manto collections, also from Penguin India.