If She Could Just Meet the Man by the Fence...

Another case of an image proliferating across all the book covers in the world, much like the man by the fence. This time it's a photo by Lorraine Molina of a woman holding a birdcage (though sometimes her birdcage has been Photoshopped away). Thanks to the sharp-eyed emailer who drew my attention to several of these instances, inspired by my talking about John Crowley.

 

And this is the original photo...

Leaves? Genes? Stock!

Another sharp-eyed reader, Kevin Arthur of the fascinating Question Technology, has spotted another stock image breeding in the wild.

"Here is a trio that I just happened upon that use the same image of leaves," he says. "The last one is not a total match (it takes four of the five leaves and re-uses them -- I'm pretty sure they're the same leaves, though). The Walden edition I have a copy of and I think its design is excellent. The other two designs I don't much care for."





The original photo is by one Robert Holmgren, whose website has some lovely work on it. Here's a screen-captured sample (click for a big version).

Poker? Library? Stock!

Sharp-eyed reader JMW has let me know of another duplicate use of stock on book covers: it's a photo gracing both Poker Face and The Ladies' Lending Library.




As he says in the comments to this post: "What's interesting is that, on the Lederer cover, the woman is holding an ace of spades in her hand, showing it to the camera. In the Keefer photo, she's not. My first notion was that the ace was placed in for the Lederer cover, since it seems like an odd thing for a woman on the beach to be holding. But on the Keefer cover, the way she's holding her hand seems strange for someone not gripping anything. Huh." Also, she's had a bow added to or removed from her hair, and had her swimming costume altered to show either more or less thigh.

Also weirdly, the Poker Face jacket credits the photo to Donna Day, while the Library credits it to Lyn Szynkowski.

A bit of hunting around (no, I don't have anything better to do, actually), finds us the original: Donna Day is the photographer, and the original model is holding a camera. So now we can all get some rest.

Pale Twins

After that last multinational mini-marathon of cover madness, have a calming cover cloning.

Stock Madness A-Go-Go

I have a fondness for books set during the London Blitz, and this seems to be something shared widely if the number of crime novels set during same is anything to go by. I've read and enjoyed Barbara Nadel's two such books, After the Mourning and Last Rights, about a shell-shocked undertaker trying not to go to pieces every time the sirens start. I also have been trying to get a look at Andrew Taylor's Bleeding Heart Square, set in the 1930s and involving Oswald Mosley Brownshirt shenanigans. When I finally did see it, I noticed another of those stock photo replications I'm always yammering on about.

However, that's not all! A bit of snooping around online brought me to crime writing blog The Rap Sheet, which pointed out two more books with the same cover image.



Four books with one cover is pretty good, but it still doesn't beat the FIVE books with one cover image that I talked about in my second-ever post.



Can anyone beat five?

Delerious Siege

Another duplicated cover image, on both Harvill's hardcover of Laura Estrepo's Delerium (2007) and Atlantic's hardcover of Steven Galloway's The Cellist of Sarajevo (2008).



What's interesting here, besides the horizontal flip of the image, is the carefully added bulletholes on the Sarajevan wall.

Trouble with Stock Images

As I'm currently reading and very much enjoying Alice Mattison's story collection, Men Giving Money, Women Yelling, and having loved her novel The Book Borrower, I thought I'd see what else she has written. In doing so, I discovered another case of ubiquitous stock imagery.



It's a photo by Felix Man, used on both Mattison's In Case We're Seperated and on the nearly reputation-wrecking posthumous collection of Philip Larkin's "secret" prose.

I Obviously Have Nowt Better to Do

I've just failed to start two lawnmowers and I almost electrocuted myself with a dying automatic garage door opener (thank God for safety switches), so why not blog instead?

It's another one of these posts, this time with the Australian version of Geraldine Brooks' March, and Nerys Jones' Godiva.



That they use the same cover photo is more apparent when you superimpose one on the other.



On a completely different note, here's a cover I really do like and know nothing about. It's from the NYRB Classics reissue of The Family Mashber, an incomplete Yiddish masterpiece from an author killed in Stalin's gulags. When I can get hold of a copy I want to find out what this cover image is from.



UPDATE: The excellent Sara Kramer of NYRB has explained in the comments that the Mashber cover image is by Christian Boltanski, a French photographer and installation artist. A brief biography is here, and a good starting guide to his works online is here.

An extended sneer at Australia's bestsellers [Part Two]

(Continued from the last post)


5: Underbelly by John Silvester and Andrew Rule
The true-crime account of Melbourne's ongoing gangland wars, waged by apparently moronic criminals intent on wiping each other out. This was recently a hugely successful TV series with lots of violence and lashings of nudity. Hence this cover, which puts this book into the weird genre of non-fiction accounts with fictional versions of the protagonists on the covers: see, for example, the memoirs of Iris Murdoch which feature Judi Dench and Kate Winslet, or the Truman Capote biography with Philip Seymour Hoffman on the cover. Very odd, when you think about it.


4: Change of Heart by Jodi Picoult
When I worked in a bookshop, my boss described Jodi Picoult's books as being novels for people who don't like to read. Though that's probably a bit unfair, they're not much good. Nor is this dull-as-dishwater cover. It looks like a paracetamol ad. More interesting is that Picoult recently did a short-lived stint as writer on the Wonder Woman comic, Wonder Woman being a character created by the deeply odd psychologist William Moulton Marston, "polyamorist", co-inventor of the lie-detecting polygraph machine, and bondage enthusiast (see almost any issue of the comic which he wrote).


3: Breath by Tim Winton
Holy shit--a genuine work of literature by a genuinely good writer, with an attractive cover. What's it doing on the bestseller list? Excuse me while I fall off my chair.


2: A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle
The publisher Penguin get a lot of raves on this blog for their classics line and many of their cover designs. On the other hand, they do publish some real, Z-grade raw sewage. This mimsy, Oprah-hawked self-help cod-philosophy book does its best to ride on the coat-tails of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth in the promo material, which conveniently ignores the fact that it's exactly the sort of self-obsessed, it's-all-about-me, blinkered mindset that books like this inculcate which has helped contribute to the hideous state of the world we are now dealing with. The leaf skeleton on the cover does indicate the threadbare nature of this book's contents, though I suspect that was not the designer's intention. Go and read some Emerson or some Thoreau, you Oprah-addled numbnuts!


1: 4 Ingredients by Kim McCosker and Rachael Berminngham
My wife's impressive collection of food books attests to the huge leaps that food photography and cookbook design have made in the last couple of decades. There are many, many genuinely gorgeous books in this field. But sometimes a publisher decides, "Fuck it, let's go for the boring, the obvious, the uninspired!" And the book becomes a number-one bestseller, thus showing that all the design brilliance in the world appears to mean fuck-all to the average book-buying punter.

An extended sneer at Australia's bestsellers [Part One]

Something I've been meaning to do for a while is a post which looks at the covers of the ten best-selling books. It hasn't happened yet, because the top ten are invariably, as a group, uninspiring when it comes to cover design. But then I thought to myself, "You're supposed to be caustic, aren't you? They don't need to be good for your purposes!"

So here we go: an extended sneer at the covers for Australia's current best-selling books.


10: Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert
Subtitled "One Woman's Search for Everything", this is one of those female midlife crisis books: Gilbert ditches husband, family, home, and pisses off to Europe to eat food and fuck strangers. Back in my bookselling days I remember selling a lot of copies of Mary Moody's autobiography Au Revoir, which was the same story, to a lot of frustrated middle-aged women. At least they weren't out buying turbocharged penis-substitute sports cars like their husbands. The cover designer's not done a bad job here: the type treatment is quite clever. The copies in bookshops usually seem to have the ugly Oprah-recommended sticker on them, though. A nice try, I suppose, and better than the book deserves.


9: Hold Tight by Harlan Coben
Does what it's supposed to, in that it features the 2 standard elements of every crime novel cover published in the last 10 years. One: moody photo in subdued, depressing colours that features no human faces. Two: Big author name, smaller title. Like so (all these images are from Amazon UK's current top-twenty crime novels--click for bigger versions):

It's sad, because some of these would be genuinely arresting photographs for covers if they didn't look so identikit in design.


8: New Moon by Stephanie Meyer
There seems to be a huge boom in romantic/erotic/horror novel series these days, spawned by the daft Anita Blake series by Laurell K Hamilton, and presumably all descended from Anne Rice's Vampire Lestat potboilers. And here's another one, book two in a series. The cover's not bad for this sort of thing: at least it doesn't look like a Mills & Boon & Bloodsuckers the way a lot of these things do:



7: This Charming Man by Marian Keyes
Penguin's infuriating promo website for this book says, 'Honest. Funny. Reliable. Trust Marian.' In other words, they mean unthreatening, predictable Irish-flavoured chick lit. The cover's dull and unthreatening too. And do you think Marian knew that the original Smiths song from which she pinched her title was about a predatory homosexual picking up a boy whose bicycle has suffered a punctured tyre on a remote road?


6: Twilight by Stephanie Meyer
See number eight, above. Also, it's another one of these, only without the nudity.

Books one to five will follow soon.

Staring Pachyderms

Elephants are amazing (and amazing-looking) animals; when you look at their faces, their eyes are quite beautiful. Perhaps this is why the elephant eye is such a common book cover image, for elephants real and metaphorical.



Even when the elephant in question has, as the title suggests, vanished, the close-up-on-the-eye meme still persists.

The White Dress

Something that has cropped up a number of times on recent covers of literary fiction is the white dress. Could this be the lit-fiction equivalent of women's shoes on chick-lit covers? Presumably its main attraction for the designer is that an expanse of white on a book cover is perfect as a place to put the (inevitably red and black) text.





A fistful of mucky food is obviously an optional extra.

Book/Album Cover Cross-Over Madness

A similar category to the single image on multiple covers is the image that turns up on both book and CD album covers.

Here's an example (involving Ali Smith, who has had this done to her before):



Then there's this: not quite the same image, but presumably one from the same shoot (and an appropriate link for an Ibiza crime/sex/drugs novel):



There are others out there (any suggestions, anybody?), but I'd like to finish here with a different sort of example. It's a book that uses the cover image AND album title of a famous album:



This is from the 33 1/3 series published by Continuum--a series of books supposedly about the stories behind specific albums. Joe Pernice's Meat is Murder, however, is instead a really nifty little novella about growing up a Smiths fan in 1980s suburban America. I've reviewed it at greater length elsewhere. I just wanted another excuse to plug it, really.

UPDATE: Following on from the update to this post, I should note that the Ali Smith/Primal Scream covers use a William Eggleston photo.

Just Too Sad

I've recently been on a bit of a short story binge, working my way through the brilliant work of Alice Munro with side-excursions into the work other writers. One of these excursions led me to Cressida Connolly's The Happiest Days. Here's the cover of the (Picador US) edition I have.


It's a collection of stories about, involving or told from the viewpoint of young children. The cover image is at first glance a slightly ironic appropriation of what I assume, from the colour reproduction, is an image from an old magazine or knitting catalogue. It's quite sweet and faintly daggy.

Once you've read the book, though, especially the story 'Granville Hill', the cover takes on a very different implication. It's a story about a teenaged girl whose younger sister is dying of cancer, and who is troubled by the shifting attentions and traumas this induces in her parents. It's very, very good, and perfectly captures the awful way in which little kids seem to have an almost infinite capacity for hurt and the pain the world can inflict on them. To read that story, and then look at the cover again, seeing the two girls as the story's sisters, may well break your heart.

Mordecai Richler & Others

I just read Mordecai Richler's The Street, a collection of short stories about a Montreal Jewish neighbourhood in the 1940s. Fun, if occasionally slight: Richler said in his introduction that short stories were not his forte. For him at his best, try Barney's Version or The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (Kravitz also appears in The Street).

But we're not here to review the books, but their covers. I like them. I also like the same images on the covers of completely different books. In each case, the twice-used images are appropriate to both books. Witness:



The other book here is John Banville's brilliant The Untouchable, about a Soviet spy in Cold War London. My copy is signed: when I was getting it autographed, I recall Banville said something very witty, to which I replied. "Nrgh. I love your books. Ha ha."

The photo is by Michael Wildsmith, who has a small online portfolio here . In this image, the sole fingure could easily be a side-locked Orthodox Jew striding down a wet Canadian street, or a shady and treacherous member of the English establishment doing a runner through the fog.



The other book here is one of Derek Raymond's nihilistic and enjoyable thrillers, the first in his 'Factory' series. The photo is by Stephan H. Sheffield, about whom I can find no more information.