Loss of Pubic Hair

It's always pleasant to see a mostly forgotten author you love be brought back into print for other people to rediscover. The latest example of this I have is Alfred Hayes, who the ever-wondrous NYRB is resurrecting later this year.

The downside to such a resurrection is that the nice new editions almost always look much better than the mouldy old tattered second-hand copies of the books I already own.

Oddly, there was a much different cover for My Face For the World to See originally mooted, and shown on some bookshop sites. I'm not sure if it was ditched because of pubic hair concerns, or because it didn't match the style of the In Love cover.

All three photos are by Saul Leiter.

Given the intro to My Face... is being written by David Thomson, I'm intrigued to see how he's going to work his embarrassing Nicole Kidman obsession into it.

And to conclude, here's my old Penguin edition of In Love.

Living Safely

Another changed cover here, but I'm not sure which will be the final version. Different online shops at different times have offered the following covers for Charles Yu's intriguing-sounding How to Live Safely in aScience Fictional Universe.

The first cover is by John Gall, but I don't know if he created the other one. I prefer the first--it's less obvious and more freaky--though I do like the other (the dog is what makes it work, I think).

UPDATE: A wise commenter has directed me to photos of people holding up signs with the second cover and the words 'Now with new jacket' printed on them, so I'm guessing that resolves that question!

Before & Afters Addendum with Crabs

A different kind of cover change takes place when, at the last minute, someone gets nervous about being sued and calls in the Photoshoppers. Here are the before and after versions of a pleasantly lightweight, reasonably amusing book about awful books which I'm reading at the moment.

Someone must have been afraid that Guy N. Smith, author of the famously awful Crabs novels, might call in the lawyers. For your edification, here are the best covers of the six Crabs books. Tremble!

Before & Afters

I've talked before about the way some books change appearance between announcement and publication. I suspect this happens more and more these days, as internet bookselling tends to demand some sort of image as a placeholder for people pre-ordering the books.

I thought it would be interesting to look at three new or imminent NYRB Classics, and at the covers they were originally promoted with compared with those they qwere finally given. In one case, the title even changed. For each of the three books below, the first cover is the original image and the second is the final, published (and, in the end, more appropriate) version. All NYRBs are designed by Katy Homans.

For the Cossery and Simenons, the now-unused first images are rather intriguing in their own right. However, since they weren't used, I can't find the source information.

Poe Facelift

Late last year I previewed the cover of an imminent Edgar Allan Poe collection from penguin.



See that post for the background to the cover, but in brief it's a collage by Richard Hamilton, altered by Harland Miller, with text cut-ups provided by Stefanie Posavec. And I really like it.

Now, though, that Poe book seems to have been given a facelift, and it will look like this:



The art is now one of Harland Miller's oil paintings derived from old Penguin covers.
Another, much funnier, example is this:



I do like Miller's Penguin paintings, but this particular use as a cover doesn't seem to be that inspired, especially compared with what they already had. I'd be interested to know what inspired the change.

Miller, by the way, is also a talented writer. His Slow Down Arthur, Stick to Thirty is an amusing novel, and he also wrote First I Was Afraid, I Was Petrified, a novella about suffering obsessive-compulsive disorder, illustrated with found photographs of stove knobs set to 'off'.



More of Miller's Penguin paintings can be found in his collection International Lonely Guy.

Good & Bad

First, the good: in the comments to an earlier post on the Vintage Classics editions of Le Clézio, the ineffable Will turned up a scan of an earlier edition of War. The cover is a great 1970s thing.



Second, the bad: this is what happens when you rave about great covers in yet to be published books. These two lovely Fallada covers...




..seem to have mutated into these (sorry about the poor resolution)...



..which aren't actually bad (in fact, they're quite nice), but they're not a patch on the first versions. Now, as it's nearly Christmas, maybe if we all hold hands and are very good, Father Christmas will change them back.

Christopher Priest, Collapsing Societies, Inappropriate Covers & Shitty Movers

Christopher Priest is an extremely talented science-fiction writer who is probably never going to get the recognition he deserves. The wider public best knows his work through the film of The Prestige, the cover of the trade paperback of which is shown here. I have this edition, and it's lovely, printed in sepia tones on a parchment-style paper stock; the images well-match the magic/mysterious-science ideas of the story. Unfortunately my copy is also badly damaged, due to the fuckwittedness of a pair of house-movers who managed to leave the box which contained this book in the rain. They also managed to drive partway to the new house with the back doors of their truck hanging open, water-damage some of our furniture, and to stink of smoke so much they set off the smoke alarms in the new house just by standing in the corridor without cigarettes.

But back to the topic at hand: Priest has written a number of unusual and thought-provoking novels which explore a dazzling array of ideas: exotic geography, time travel, politics, virtual reality, illusions and alternative history among them. A common denominator is a chilly authorial voice, like Ballard's but without the repetitive self-limitations.

His second novel was Fugue for a Darkening Island (1972), unusual for the fact that it is a fairly straightforward story that doesn't play with the concepts of space, time or literature. It was also an end-of-the-world novel, which is where we come in.

My edition is from the long-gone and lamented Pan Science Fiction series, a wide-ranging set of novels and story collections whose covers made them instantly attractive to young science-fiction fans in the late 1970s and early 1980s.



The first blurb there shows you why it's of interest to apocalypse fans, and the Wyndham comparison is not far-off. The cover, by horror comics artist Mike Ploog, is wildly misleading, however. The bawling man clutching the nude woman may as well be wearing a loincloth and waving a sword rather than a rifle, given the style of the picture and the fantasy world background. It makes the book look like macho survivalist nonsense, rather than a (admittedly exciting) well-written examination of the betrayals and compromises someone might need to make to thrive in a terrible situation. Fugue is also reminiscent of John Christopher's The World in Winter.

Here are a couple of other editions: the first is (I think) the original hardback, and the second is from an omnibus which combines Fugue with the rather more mind-boggling (and also excellent) Inverted World.



Speaking of Inverted World, it's about to be reissued by NYRB Classics, so you have no excuse for not reading it. Here are two versions of the proposed cover design: the final choice is the second one, which is a lot better than the first.

More Changed Covers

Here's another look at covers that change between their first announcement by the publishers and their actual appearance on the shelves. In each case here I like all of the before and after covers, although I slightly prefer the unused originals.

This is the paperback of Alan Pauls' The Past, from Vintage. The final version is a slight modification of the original hardback cover, rather than something new.


Here are a couple of books from the great NYRB Classics which I have to have. Stefan Zweig is one of my favourite authors, and so a previously unavailable posthumous novel from him sounds great. If you want to know more about him, I wrote more about Zweig over at Bookslut.





Over at the NYRB Review Books blog, there's an entertaining article about why they had to change another of their forthcoming book covers. Their edition of J. A. Baker's The Peregrine originally featured entirely the wrong bird.

Cover Changes

When you're the sort of sad person who pores over publisher catalogues you sometimes spot interesting changes in cover design between the original announcement and the final book. Sometimes they're improvements; sometimes not. Either way, the original designs disappear from the web and are never seen again. This is a shame when they were good.

Two examples from Penguin are shown here. The first is the rejigging of the cover to Eileen Chang's Lust, Caution (Chang's work having been discussed earlier here and here).



Presumably the idea was to capitalise on Ang Lee's movie with a still from the film on the cover. Though the image itself is fine, and avoids the usual movie tie-in cover pitfalls (ie hideous ugliness and instant datedness), I can't help feeling that the original was more beautiful and eye-catching.

The second example is Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men.



Part of the reason for this must have been to update the book to fit the new Modern Classics look. The first image was from the classic 1949 movie. The second, very wisely, is not from the widely panned 2006 remake. The new cover is more dynamic, and probably better, though the simplicity of the original image of John Ireland has a certain appeal.

Which versions of these books would you be more likely to pick up?

UPDATE: The original Lust, Caution cover features Anna May Wong--see this post for more.