Spines, Legs, Horrible Films, Cigarettes

A book coming out in January, that appears to be a satire on creative writing classes, with a rather nifty cover:

Interestingly, though the book is published by Cape, part of Vintage UK, it actually calls back to the once-characteristic plain white spines of old Picador paperbacks.

First Novel is not the first book by that title. In 1999 Harvill published a book by the same name written by Mazarine Pingeot, the "secret daughter" of arch-shit and former French president François Mitterand. The book was no good, and was seemingly only published because she was the "secret daughter" of arch-shit and former French president François Mitterand, and piles of this book could be found in remainder bookshops for years afterwards.

It uses a well-known photo, 'Sense' by Tono Stano, that was later bought and fucked with by MGM to become the poster for the famously crap film 'Showgirls'.

And just so that, if I get hit by a bus later today, that's not the last image I ever post, here's a cover design from Picador a couple of years ago that I somehow missed when it came out: the clever cigarette-pack packaging of Stuart Evers's Ten Stories About Smoking.

Books on Books on Books

"Often I have slipped away from picnics and birthday parties and children’s soccer games and awards ceremonies to squeeze in a bit of reading while concealed in a copse, a garage, a thicket, or a deserted gazebo. For me, books have always been a safety valve, and in some cases— when a book materializes out of nowhere in a situation where it is least expected—a deus ex machina. Books are a way of saying: This room seems to have more than its fair share of bozos in it. Edith Wharton may be dead, but she’s still better company than these palookas."

A subdued but still eye-catching cover, designer unknown.

A fine new entry in the field of books about books with lots of books on the cover is Joe Queenan's semi-autobiography/essay collection One for the Books. I've long enjoyed his film writing--often hilarious pieces where he does things like being Mickey Rourke for a day, or floats in the icy Atlantic to see if you really can deliver all of dying-Leonardo-di-Caprio's lines from the end of Titanic without freezing to death first. While frequently funny, One for the Books also has a surprisingly elegiac quality--Queenan is a committed real paper book man, and sees that industry withering at the hands of e-readers, and he has a cold-eyed and realistic view of how many years he might have left to live, and how many books will still be waiting unread in the piles when his time is up.

"Hardcover books of yesteryear often had an off-putting, ominous quality; it is entirely possible that their harsh, imperious covers were designed to intimidate the public [...] It was as if publishers wanted to sell books exclusively to readers who would know what to do with them. This policy is now a thing of the past. When Howard Stern’s autobiography was published, in 1993, I saw a man walking down Fifth Avenue who manifestly was not sure how one went about holding a book. Its inscrutable rectangularity perplexed him. He wasn’t sure whether to stuff it under his arm or cradle it like a football. His maiden voyage on the sea of literacy had not prepared him for this daunting adventure; the book-maneuvering skills most of us acquire relatively early in life, via Richard Scarry or Judy Blume, were not available to him. There is no telling what happened when the poor man opened the book and found that it contained words."

The essays, many published previously in magazine form, do create a mosaic-form autobiography of a pretty enviable life, once Queenan was able to get away from his parents. And the man has excellent taste in books, which is always a relief.

"I have rarely been treated especially well in bookstores. I think this is because I do not look like a book lover. I look more like a cop. I certainly do not look like the kind of person who frequents serious cultural establishments. What it all comes down to is this: I do not look like I have ever read a book by Bill McKibben. Though it pains me to admit it, I look like somebody who can’t make up his mind whether to buy the new Clive Cussler or the new W. E. B. Griffin. Bookstore personnel pick up on this."

A book due out early next year that also makes use of many books on its cover is Ron Currie, Jr.'s Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles. I especially like the way all the cover text is incorporated into smaller covers and spines, and that all these covers were created by the designer, rather than using a straightforward photo of existing books. It reminds me of these designs.

Puffin Magic

I've been wanting to post about this for a while, but my camera has been uncooperative until today--this was not a book I was going to press flat in the scanner. It's Phil Baines's Puffin by Design, designed by Tom Sanderson, a companion to 2005's Penguin by Design. And it's a beauty!

A comprehensive and beautifully illustrated to 70 years of some of the most gorgeous children's books in publishing, this book is heaven to anyone interested in book design. Have a look at some of the inner spreads (click every image in this post for much bigger versions).

 
Perhaps best of all, though, is that cover, designed by Tom Sanderson. It's a photo, not a manipulated image. Sanderson was kind enough to let me use this image of its construction.

Having read this, I have a deep urge to revisit the books of my youth. Looking through the covers collected here has reminded me of numerous books I loved when I found them on school library shelves, but which had vanished into the deep storage of my memory in the intervening years--books which, more often than not, I first took down from the shelf because of the cover art.

Hesperus Brief Histories

Four books due out from Hesperus in the middle of the year (which probably means we'll see them some time in 2012, given Hesperus's recent track record*) are their Brief Histories of various forms of literature. Every cover is made up of a shelf of relevant books, but every book is both a fake and a pun (and there's a nice range of fake publishing imprints in there, too).

Among Hesperus's other allegedly forthcoming titles, I especially like this cover.

* I have about a dozen Hesperus titles on order, most of them scheduled to have come out in late 2008 or during 2009, and none of them yet to see print. They do great books, but you do have to wait a bit to read them.

Book about Book-Burning Burnished with 36 Books, and an Oft-Banned Book

A novel due out in February, set in Franco's Spain, about book-burning, boxing and friendship, with a cover made up of 36 books:

And from the same publisher, Harvill Secker, and due out two months later, yet another Orwell face-lift, this time for a hardcover edition of Animal Farm.

Designers both unknown. The designer of the Rivas book is Michael Salu.

* * *

UPDATE: Regarding Pohl's The Age of the Pussyfoot, featured in this post, I find I have this scan of the main illustration from its first magazine appearance. The art is by comics legend Wally Wood. Click for a bigger version.

Spines on a Cover, and a Query

It's a book I'm unlikely to read because of various literary and political prejudices, but the cover of Patrick Hennessey's The Junior Officers' Reading Club is appealing. (Though I think actual little plastic soldiers, rather than digitally added little real soldiers, would have looked a bit better.)



As a book from Penguin/Allen Lane, they've slipped in quite a few Penguin spines in that lot.

On another note, does anyone in Britain know whether the publisher Hesperus Press still exists? Their website is "being updated", their blog hasn't been touched since April, their various social network sites are gathering dust, and all of the books they were going to publish over the last few months, including this one discussed earlier, remain unavailable.



This, by the way, is obviously not one of those promised "more substantial posts" I was on about last time.

Retitled

Just a quick one here, about a book I'd heard of but dismissed as being the literary equivalent of those "funny" little books you see at chainstore bookshop checkout counters--

However, a rave review from the entertaining and reliable Nicholas Lezard has made me reconsider, and I'm glad I did, because I saw the new paperback edition's cover:


I really like this: the determination to carefully Photoshop-match the "original" titles with the original fonts on the old paperbacks and hardbacks shows an admirable dedication. I also just like books about books with lots of books on the front (the subject for an upcoming post, by the way).

It also pisses all over the dull-as-dust hardback cover for the same book: