A Cheap Laugh at the Innocent Past

Ferreting through a second-hand bookshop recently, I came across an example of a book whose title has suffered at the hands of time and the changing meaning of words.

I especially enjoyed the bookseller's plot summary: "A Cape Cod man comes back home to live off his brother after his bank job evaporates. Sister-in-law isn't happy, but Carey Judson perseveres and eventually turns to his love of carving wild birds." Anyone after hot homoerotic action is probably going to be disappointed by that.

It also sent me, in an idle moment, looking for other books which have suffered in the same way. This was only ever going to be a cheap laugh, but sometime you can't afford anything better.

 

 

That last book was doing so well until it decided to add a subtitle.  Another book that still seems relatively innocent is this one...

..until you open it and see that the subtitle is 'A Boy's Queer Search'.

I've just started contributing to the Hyde Park Review of Books, which is relaunching imminently. I'm going to use the fact that I've just written a longer piece for them as an excuse for the lack of any depth or insight in this post. When my first article goes up over there, I'll link to it here, and include some DVD-style extra material on this blog. In the meantime, here's a classy re-envisioning of a science-fiction classic.

Deepaks Everywhere

The wise and perceptive KevinfromCanada drew my attention to another recent theme emerging on a number of literary novel covers: the floating candle/coracle or deepak. He noted its use on three new novels: Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi by Geoff Dyer, Dreams of Rivers and Seas, by Tim Parks, and The Disappeared, by Kim Echlin.






All three of these novels feature Westerners getting lost (emotionally or spiritually) to various degrees in Asia, and to them I'd add a fourth novel, this time a new edition of an older book, Say a Little Mantra for Me, by Yvonne Burgess: a bitterly funny little novel about a woman seeking New Age enlightenment as her all-female family falls apart in 1970s South Africa.



I'm not sure why all use the same sort of image, other than it being an effective shorthand for exotic Indian/Asian spirituality, and the fact that the bright lights and colours of the deepaks against dark, watery backgrounds make for eye-catching imagery.

The Tim Parks cover makes use of a photo by Steve McCurry, one of the best-known photojournalists in the world. His most famous picture is much reproduced on postcards and calendars.



The UK edition of Geoff Dyer's book (the first of the two shown above) is credited to a Marc Quinn. I have no idea if this is the same person as the sculptor responsible for various fairly hideous statues of a half-dressed Kate Moss thrusting her crotch at the people willing to pay vast sums for the works, but it would make the world a more interesting place if it was (especially as the Dyer book features an inpired piss-take of the art shown at the Venice Biennale).



This (the deepak covers, not Kate Moss's crotch) is an unusual case of the same sort of idea apparently occurring to several different book designers independently (the books all have different publishers, in different parts of the world), with the unfortunate result of multiple books' dramatic covers losing some of their effect through familiarity.

UPDATE: Ingrid Paulson, who maintains a fine blog here, designed the Echlin cover. She has let me know that "..it's strange, because initially I looked at Steve McCurry's photographs for inspiration, among others. However, we did a few rounds and nothing was catching with the editors, so the art director suggested this very image used on the cover. There is an important scene in the book that involves a candle ceremony, so it isn't just a facile visual interpretation. But I hear you on how seeing that image everywhere has weakened the impact."

Containing a Link it's Probably Unwise to Click

There are some books that, to steal a phrase from David Cairns of Shadowplay, just seem like a big, heaping bowl o' wrong. That mainstream publishers avoid them, and they come out via vanity POD press Lulu, is no surprise.

The book I'm talking about is this one. Gird your loins before clicking.

Not good, was it? This book presumably contains recipes for ACTUAL big, heaping bowls o' wrong. It's reassuring to see that the author explains "I'm not some sort of whacky freak", a Freudian typo if ever there was one.

Hilariously, Lulu's keyword search tool is wildly inept. Clicking the search term 'cooking with semen' gives you books like Family Cooking Made Easy, Summer Party Cooking Recipes, and Recipes From South Of The Border: 246 Tasty Mexican Recipes, along with 1508 other books, all of whose author's would (I think it's safe to say) be surprised to find themselves in such company. It also leads you to a family history for a Galician man whose first name is Semen. Laughing at this is not mature.