Tampering

Continuing the theme from the interview last week, here's the clever and similarly themed cover for Alissa Nutting's Tampa, about a female teacher with a ravenous sexual appetitie for under-aged boys. The design is by Gray318 (more of his work in these posts).

The book itself is not a total success. The publishers on both sides of the Atlantic (Faber for the cover above) make the inevitable comparisons to Lolita. But we don't read Lolita because it's about a paedophile (or at least I hope we don't), we read it because it's a masterpiece of literary style and wit. Tampa, which I would be amazed to learn wasn't based on the case of the female paedophile teacher who was ludicrously deemed "too pretty to go to prison", doesn't have the same brilliance (though to be fair, what does?)--instead it's a claustrophic, monomaniacal book, entirely focused on the narrator's exploitation and plans for the exploitation of young male flesh. In the end, what's the point of it? To teach us that sexual predators are vile people? I already knew that.

This is How to Do It

You're a publisher printing a series of classic books to raise money for AIDS relief (through the (RED) organisation). You want them to be eye-catching and beautiful. You make them look like these--absolutely stunning. (Click for huge versions.)

 

  

  

  

  

  

 

I asked Jim Stoddart, Art Director at Penguin Press, about who did each cover and how they came about. This is what he had to say: "We’re starting with a series of 8 titles in this collaboration with the Aids awareness fund (RED), with the prospect of putting more titles into this series in the near future. Each cover switches the usual black of Penguin Classics for the (RED) red and instead of using an image we’re using a quote from the text of the book, and I’m aiming to commission a unique typographer for each cover."

The designers responsible are as follows:

Anna Karenina designed by Fuel
Dracula designed by Non-Format
Great Expectations designed by Stefanie Posavec (Penguin Press Art Dpt)
The House of Mirth designed by Nathan Burton
Notes From Underground designed by Gray318 (Jon Gray)
The Secret Agent designed by Coralie Bickford-Smith (Penguin Press Art Dpt) (interviewed here)
Therese Raquin designed by Jim Stoddart (Penguin Press Art Dpt)
The Turn of the Screw designed by Studio Frith

I promised myself I would not buy books I already owned even if the new covers were amazing. But then again, this is for charity...

The News from Central Europe

As promised, some more upcoming covers lifted from the 2010 Penguin Classics line-up. These are the 10 Central European Classics due in May. I'm guessing that they're by David Pearson, as they remind me of his Simenon covers, but in fact I have no idea. Robert Schumann tells me that they're the work of Jon Gray, better known in the designing world as gray318.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I'm very excited by this lot, as what I've read of these authors has been excellent. Gyula Krúdy of Hungary is one of the greats--his The Adventures of Sindbad and Sunflower are wonderful. Gregor von Rezzori, from what is now the Ukraine, wrote the amazing Memoirs of an Anti-Semite (this and Sunflower are both available in beautiful editions from NYRB). If you can handle 200- or 300-page paragraphs, Thomas Bernhard is your man. Karel Čapek is one of my favourite writers, and War with the Newts is probably his best book--an absurdist science-fiction masterpiece in which genetically engineered humanoid newts go from being humanity's slaves to cheerfully and politely lowering all of the continents into the oceans in order to make the world better for themselves.

As for E. M. Cioran, here's a bit of his cheerful philosophy, from 'The Trouble with Being Born': "Better to be an animal than a man, an insect than an animal, a plant than an insect, and so on. Salvation? Whatever diminishes the kingdom of consciousness and compromises its supremacy."

Here are those two NYRBs I mentioned...

Design by Katy Homans, using Witkacy's 'Jadwiga Janczewska' (a photo of Witkacy's fiancee, who would go on to commit suicide)

Design by Katy Homans, using Oskar Kokoschka's 'Murderer, Hope of Women II'

First!

Just a quickie, as I don't really have information about any of the designers, but in early way Faber are putting out a set of 10 'Faber Firsts', ie first novels by since-well-established writers to whom they have the rights. What's nice is that the covers are designed to emulate other Faber cover designs through the company's 80-year history. From the Faber website: "Faber Art Director Donna Payne has identified nine key strands of Faber's design history, and each of the novels will have a new cover designed by a contemporary designer which is influenced by one strand. They will all be two-colour."











Another book I very much want to get when it comes out at the same time is novelist and bibliophile Joseph Connolly's Faber and Faber: 80 Years of Book Design. Unfortunately, as yet, there is no available cover image.

UPDATE: The New York Trilogy cover is by the excellent gray318, says the Book Design Review.

A Follow-Up

This is just a quick follow-up to the post which first looked at Mark Sarvas' Harry, Revised. I'm in the midst of reading this now, and it's really good: the hero is surprisingly engaging, given that he's a moral coward, pole-axed by grief, a user of prostitutes, unfaithful to his wife, off in his own world and motivated mostly by selfishness. The cover featured in that post is even more well-done than I first thought, as that very Penguin edition of The Count of Monte Cristo actually features in the plot in one very funny scene.

So, given how perfect that cover design, by gray318, was, what did the Australian publishers of Harry, Revised decide to use on their edition?

A boring picture of a shirt.

Covers Containing Covers

I just stumbled across a review of a promising-sounding book called Harry, Revised by Mark Sarvas. Sometimes when this happens I forget about the book soon afterwards, while at other times I scribble down the name and author, determined to order it. Harry, Revised falls into the second category. What made the difference? The cover, by Jonathan 'gray318' Gray.



When I first saw this I knew that I knew that torn cover, and the design was a giveaway that it was one of the older Penguin Classics. Some determined hunting round turned up this:



Success! I think this works really well. The image in the painting, by the way, is a self-portrait by Jacques-Louis David.

UPDATE: Apparently The Count of Monte Cristo is relevant to the plot of Harry, Revised, so that explains that.

It reminded me of another cover which was cleverly created from a different book's cover. This was Frank Portman's hilarious King Dork, about the tribulations of high school and music fandom, which looked like this...


..because the protagonist is incessantly being told to read The Catcher in the Rye, which he hates, by every authority figure in his life.

Adventure Classics

There must have been something in the water British publishers were drinking last year, because three different houses decided it was time to reprint Victorian and Edwardian adventure stories.

Headline Review had four in their range, each with an appealingly scrappy cover. It would be interesting to know whether these were produced digitally, or whether they are photographs of little art boxes made from old illustrations and pages. We may never know, though, because Headline couldn't be arsed promoting this series on their website. (For these and all the other covers here, click for bigger images.)

UPDATE: Extremely talented designer Jonathan Gray (also known as gray318) wrote in the comments about these: "The Headline Adventure Classics were all cut out of paper. A mini stage set was made for each cover and then photographed." This is what I was hoping, as it's always nice to see things made, and not just Photoshopped.




Hodder produced theirown retro Revivals series, using nicely worn scans of early cover art, all with the yellow hues of the era's "scandalous" literature.



Finally, presumably inspired by surprise hit The Dangerous Book for Boys and its millions of annoying spin-offs and imitators, Penguin began their attractive two-colour-design Boys' Own Adventure line.


This line is about to be increased with the addition of a second series.


This weird simultaneity gives a rare opportunity to compare different approaches to the same book (such as The Lost World or Greenmantle), done at the same time.

UPDATE 2: The 12 lovely Penguin covers above were designed by Coralie Bickford-Smith. For more of her work on this blog, see here.