New Nabokovs

A recent post previewed two of Penguin UK's newly redesigned Vladimir Nabokovs.

I've managed to get hold of a few more from the series. Some of these work really well, and some I'm less certain about--I need to see them in the real world. I'm still unsure of the designer(s), too. (UPDATE: All-seeing Alan Trotter tells me it's Pentagram.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

They have a very mid-century, European look, which is appropriate enough. I especially like The Eye and Despair, while Laughter in the Dark doesn't seem remotely sinister enough, even with the hint of blood.

MORE UPDATES: Joseph of the amazing Book Design Review pointed out these amazing American Nabokov reissues which are imminent, while Kev Mears has this startling edition of Despair lurking in his shelves.

Penguin Ramblings

Soon I hope to be able to publish an interview with the executive designer at Penguin Australia. As a vaguely related prelude, here are some recent and upcoming bits of Penguin cover grooviness.

First of all, here are the two covers that were missing from this round-up of Richard Green's cover designs for some 2010 reprints of classic sensation novels.




Bulwer-Lytton's Paul Clifford, by the way, was the novel that famously began with 'It was a dark and stormy night...' (Well, it does so once you get past Bulwer-Lytton's two prefaces and a chunk of poetry quoted from Crabbe. Technically it starts with 'This novel so far differs from the other fictions by the same author that it seeks to draw its interest rather from practical than ideal sources...", but that wouldn't have been emulated by Snoopy and inspired an infamous competition for bad writing.)

Secondly, Penguin appear to be slowly revamping the look of their Nabokov back-list, presumably to capitalise on the first publication of the incomplete and much-discussed The Original of Laura.



The Enchanter was another posthumous unearthing, and something of a dry-run for Lolita.

I'm not sure which of these will be the final cover for Mary.




Finally, Penguin South Africa have started releasing the Penguin African Writers series, with Penguin UK to follow suit in early 2010.








These books are by writers from, respectively, Nigeria, Kenya, Côte d'Ivoire, Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Guyana, so it's a good mix.

As Reneé Naudé explains, "Every book in the Penguin African Writers series is distinctly African and the illustrations should reflect a theme central to Africa. We are looking for creative representations of ‘African’, contemporary and/or traditional." These first covers certainly reflect that. The publishers have started a competition to design covers for further books in the series.

I also should point out that if you learn how to pronounce Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o properly, it's incredibly fun to say.

A Cunning Ploy

Say you're a publisher who wants to publish a famous book. Unfortunately, the rights to that book are owned by another publisher, and because it's famous and a money-spinner, there's no chance in hell that they'll let those rights go. What do you do?

If you're Orion, the publishing company that contains Gollancz and Weidenfeld & Nicolson, among other imprints, you have a cunning alternative: snap up the hardcover rights.

For the most part, once a book has gone into paperback, the hardcover rights are virtually worthless. Everyone who was going to buy it at the higher price has already done so. A publisher who nabs the rights and releases the book as a hardcover is going to be competing with a cheaper product, and thus putting themselves at a disadvantage.

Not if you're Gollancz. Their tactic is to release hardcovers of science-fiction classics for the same price as the paperbacks from the other publishers. They manage this by not having a dustjacket (a significant part of a hardcover's production costs), and printing the cover directly onto the book's boards.

Here's their version of the ecological-mystical science-fiction classic Dune...



..which looks very sturdily appealing next to Hodder's identically-priced and lurid airport-blockbuster equivalent.



And here's the Gollancz version of Philip K Dick's The Man in the High Castle, one of science-fiction's masterpieces, set in a defeated US divided between the Axis powers.



This competes with the two available attractive but less robust Penguin paperbacks.



(That second Penguin cover doesn't show up well in two-dimensions--it has a sort of Braille-like cover 'image' of the seven continents, now Nazi- and Imperial Japan-dominated, in raised bumps down the right-hand side.)

They're also planning a similar edition of Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle, which I'll talk about when a cover design appears.

Having done this for science-fiction, Orion are now turning to "literary fiction" to do the same thing to celebrate Weidenfeld & Nicolson's 60th anniversary. They're grabbing the hardbackrights to books like Lolita...



..as well as One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, as well as books to which they already have the rights, like A Suitable Boy, and the wildly over-rated The Reader, and repackaging them as a matching set of un-jacketed hardbacks.



(Sorry for the low-quality images--these have been taken from a PDF catalogue, and there are no better versions available yet).

However, this time they're selling the books for about twice the rate of the paperbacks, so I'm not sure how well it will go. Furthermore, I'm not sure that they haven't gone past subtle into the realm of pleasant-but-dull. I'd need to see them in the flesh to see how effective this series design really ends up being.

UPDATE: John Self of Asylum suggests that the W&N Classics will have shapes cut out of the front boards, with the patterns (just) visible above being the endpapers showing through the holes. Now that would definitely make these a more enticing set of books.

UPDATE 2: The ultra-wise Tulkinghorn points out that the Gollancz Dune hardback cover is that originally painted by John Schoenherr for the Analog magazine serialisation of Herbert's work.

90° Difference

I just stumbled across an interesting, if 2-year-old, interview with John Gall, art director at Vintage US (among other roles). In it, he discusses the 50th anniversary edition of Lolita which was published by Vintage US.



He reveals the original design, which both he and the publisher were eventually too nervous to run with. You can probably see why.



This reminds me of a Lolita cover with a different problem. The current Penguin Classics UK edition is fine on the front, but as Lucy Fishwife pointed out to me, on the spine the author is written 'Vladimir Nabkov'.



You'll have to believe me on that one: I didn't have a camera to hand when I came across it in the real world. It's a mite embarrassing, though.

The Ingenious Eugênio Hirsch

Sometimes you start out writing one post, and it turns into something else entirely. This was going to be a quick look at the various covers for Philip José Farmer's Flesh (and it sort of still is--see the end). However, in finding said covers, I came across the work of an Austrian-Brazilian book designer who I just had to write about.

Born in Vienna in 1921, Hirsch and his family wisely got the hell out of Europe in 1938, moving to Argentina. Hirsch himself moved to Brazil in 1957, and was soon hired by the Civilização Brasileira publishing house. It was for them that he produced his first cover, for the local edition of Nabokov's Lolita, which caused as much of a sensation in the design world as the book's contents did in the literary world.



Hirsch produced a number of great covers for Civilização Brasileira, including eye-catchingly fleshy takes on Scott Fitzgerald and D. H. Lawrence, and a deeply sinister Graham Greene.











He also worked for several other South American publishing houses.









In the 1960s he went to the US to work for 'Playboy' magazine, producing some uniquely odd photographs...



..before working in Spain and then returning to Brazil in the 1970s. He died in 2001.

So how did I get onto this? Well, one of Hirsch's covers was for Farmer's Flesh, as noted above.



I was thinking about that book because of a wonderful feature over here: The Box of Paperbacks Book Club. The idea is simple--a man bought a big box of cheapo paperbacks from a second-hand bookshop, and decided to read and post about each one, no matter what they were or how well they were written. The range of titles is as pleasingly eccentric as you might hope: everything from the James Bond novels to Flesh to The Man From Planet X #1: The She-Beast to Avengers spin-off novels.

In rough chronological order, here are some of the many Flesh covers, various (mostly antlery) interpretations of its futuristic pagan/sex/orgy madness (I'm not sure you'd call it a good book, but it's certainly memorable).








And then there's the currently in-print version, as part of this collection published by Baen.



From hideous type treatment to Martian Mills & Boon artwork, that last cover is a mess. It is very representative of Baen's fine tradition of ludicrous, boob-tastic, and typographically woeful cover artwork.








The Cold Equations, of the first cover above, is story where a young girl stowaway must be ejected from a spaceship because the fuel aboard is only enough for the planned pilot to reach safety. It has absolutely nothing to do with women in bikinis roaming the snow with mutant sabre-toothed tigers as company.

Some links:
* More on Eugênio Hirsch, as well as the rest of his mental 'Playboy' photos, at Weird Universe
* A brief thesis on the graphic design of Civilização Brasileira (PDF format) at book designer Ana Sofia Mariz's website
* More on the awfulness of Baen covers at Judge a Book by its Cover