A Bilious Attack

Every bloody bookshop I've ever gone into or used online has been bombarding me with emails letting me know that J. K. Rowling's "first novel for adults" is now available. Whoop-dee-fucking-doo; I don't care. The plot sounds like that of a minor money-losing British movie starring Judi Dench, the prose looks boring, and the cover is dull--but then, I suspect they could have jacketed it in poo-flecked human skin and it would still sell by the truckload.

Designer: don't know, don't care

I only wish they'd done a children's version of the cover, to match the "adult" covers for the Harry Potter books that self-deluding grown-ups bought so they could pretend they weren't reading children's books.

Sorry for the bile, but I used to work in a bookshop and I'd happily never hear about this writer and her books again.

The other incessant emails I'm getting are from Amazon: buy one post-apocalypse novel from them and they never stop sending you plugs for self-published/small-press zombie novels. I was particularly struck by the odd pathos of the plug on the front of this one.

One Good Cover, Many Bad Covers

When I was a cash-strapped uni newspaper editor, I got a lot of free books and CDs and movie tickets (ah, those happy days). At one stage I went to a promo event run by one of the cinema distributors. Before whatever film it was that we were reviewing began, one of the publicists stood up and gave a long slideshow and spiel about their other upcoming movies, and why all the boys and girls in head office were excited about them.

One of the movies they talked about was Jerry Maguire, a film I'm happy to say I've never watched. The promo poster for this was just a big picture of Tom Cruise's head, with his name and the film title in big red letters. The publicist said that, frankly, all they needed to promote the picture was that face and name--they didn't even need the film title, and nothing on the poster to indicate what the film was about. The very idea of a film with Tom Cruise in it was enough to excite her, and to get the masses buying tickets.

I found this both amusing and depressing, and not just because I regard Tom Cruise as a creepy undersized cultist with a punchable face and limited talents. It was more the shameless acknowledgement of how little thought often goes into promoting "big" products of an allegedly cultural nature (yes, I know, it was Jerry bloody Maguire, but bear with me here), and the (no doubt true) expectation of brainless reflexive consumption from the audience.

This came back to me when I was attempting to put together another of those bilious, scathing posts where I go through some country's top-10 bestselling books and sneer at their cover designs (see here and here). But Australia and the UK were no good for this, since their top-10s are still basically the Stephanie Meyer back-catalogue. So I turned to the US.

The problem with this is that there's not really much you can actually say. Here's a representative sample of current US bestseller covers.






These books haven't really been designed, in any meaningful sense. They've just been crapped out. They're the book equivalent of a poster of Tom Cruise's big head. "You know that book you read that was like all the other ones? Well, here's another one just like that." The publishers must wish, though, that these writers had one- and not three-syllable surnames, so that they could bump up the font size even more. (Conversely, could the name of the hack who actually wrote the two Patterson books be any smaller?)

The look of these books is boring and ugly, but in a sense they're criticism-proof. They're not meant to be objects to look at or like, or even think about consciously. They're just a minimal assemblage of triggers to get that mindless purchasing reflex kicking.

There was one bright spot on the US bestseller list, though: this wonderfully spare cover by Henry Sene Yee for Dave Cullen's Columbine.



See Yee's blog post, linked to above, for the background and other covers he mocked up along the way. It's a cover that requires the viewer's brain to be on and making connections, and which gains its chilly atmosphere because of what the viewer knows, and what the designer knows you know. It's an intelligent cover, and a bright spark in a night of bargain-basement crap.

Phaidon New Testaments & MORE!!!

In 2000, art press Phaidon produced a series of four beautiful books, the 'New Testament' series. The basic idea is a simple one, but I don't think it's one that any other publisher had come up with. The idea is that most Western artists have tackled some aspect of Jesus's life story, some literally, some quite tangentially. The four books each took a significant moment in time of the New Testamant, and showed how artists have interpreted it over 1500-2000 years.



The four books are Annunciation...



.. Last Supper...



.. Crucifixion...



.. and Descent.



All four are beautiful compact hardbacks with metallic covers and no title on the front. The interiors have just enough text to guide you through the common motifs the artists made use of and to give you a little historical context; for the most part, the art speaks for itself.






Foolishly I bought only two of the four books at the time: Annunciation is now available only as a cheaper, less elegant paperback. If you're looking for a crash course in Western art fitted to an Easter theme, here's the place to start.

* * *

In other news, I just read an article in the Guardian Review about a new UK survey of people's non-reading habits. You should read the whole thing (it's the second item on that page, after a bit of strangely unfunny humourous waffle from Will Self), but I've bolded a couple of bits that most struck me in the extract below:

"These are not families with literacy difficulties: they just do not read," the survey noted. "Parents would support reading at school, but wouldn't force their children to do it at home," Wilson-Fletcher said. Reading was seen as isolating, while communal activities such as DVDs or Wii games were valued more. The research revealed that if participants did enter a bookshop, they found it "acutely anxiety-inducing" and "overwhelming". Bookshops and libraries must become more user-friendly, the research concluded, while publishers must explore new ways of presenting books (jackets could be better, was one suggestion, with quick content clues on the front cover). And books should also be sold in less elitist environments, such as "newsagents, station platforms, vending machines, supermarket queues, on the counter in cafés and hairdressers". The "book of the film" could be sold at cinemas, while more recent books should be provided for Nintendo DS, which "associates book reading with a more familiar leisure experience".

In other words, if this survey has its way, in the future, all books will look like this:

Another Extended Sneer, with Violent Suggestions

A while ago I did a lot of pointing and gagging about the covers of the top 10 best-selling books in Australia. I have been intending to repeat that process for a while, but every bloody week the top ten books are just various versions of those bloody Twilight books, and I already sneered at them in the original post.

So, in desperation, I turned to the UK. Amazon's current top ten includes NO Stephanie Meyer, which is some small miracle. So what do we get instead?

10. At My Mother's Knee and Other Low Joints by Paul O'Grady

Late, great science-fiction writer and editor Theodore Sturgeon formulated the proposition now generally known as Sturgeon's Law: "ninety percent of everything is crap". This was in response to those critics who deride science-fiction by pointing at the worst samples of the genre and ignoring the good stuff ('Star Trek is bollocks, Star Trek is science-fiction, therefore science-fiction is bollocks.'). His point was that though it's true that most science-fiction is rubbish, most of everything is rubbish. Ninety percent of music is crap. Ninety percent of literary novels are crap. Ninety percent of films are crap.

My corollary to Sturgeon's Law would add "...but ninety-nine percent of TV is crap." The endless need for vast amounts of content and the absolute lowest-common-denominator audience produces such a torrent of bilge that it makes my forehead bleed.

I am one-half of one of the 2,000 households in Australia that has a TV ratings meter, so I'm doing my best to show that not EVERYBODY wants to watch a constant barrage of rank sewage. I mainly achieve this by watching nothing on the main commercial networks. What this means is that I primarily watch the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, the national government-funded public broadcaster. What this means is that I tend to see a fair amount of 3-year-old British stuff containing terribly dated references to minor British celebrities the world would be no worse for the lacking of.

What this means, and I really am going somewhere with all of this, is that I have a vague awareness of this Paul O'Grady person as an irritating TV drag queen turned irritating TV host. And the cover of his book proves that 99.9% of celebrity memoir covers are crap. And the less said about that "joke" of a title, the better.

9. Top Gear 2009 Annual by uncredited BBC flacks

'Top Gear' is one of those high-rating shows I don't watch. If I want to see wankers with small brains and even smaller penises driving expensive cars badly and illegally, I can just look at the fuckwits who speed along my street.

This thing looks like a comic crossed with a $1 scrapbook, which is fine given that it's a throwaway no-brain gift for children. However...

8. For Crying Out Loud by Jeremy Clarkson

..that does not explain the popularity among adults of this thing, by 'Top Gear' host and animate-pond-scum-in-human-form Jeremy Clarkson. And it's the umpeenth volume of his "thoughts" to be published, and while I give Penguin a lot of praise for some of their work, I don't know that they can forgiven for foisting this congealed pus onto the bookshelves and toilet tanks of the world. Clarkson strikes me as sort of the Platonic ideal of the overbearing know-all father-in-law.

Now, I like owls as much as the next man. But the only owl/Clarkson conjunction I want to see on a book cover is of the nocturnal-bird-tearing-out-the-eyes-of-the-vile-TV-host variety.

7. Guinness World Records 2009 by various persons who must lie awake at night wondering 'How is it my life has taken me to a place where I stand around with a stopwatch and officially witness how long it takes for someone to eat 500 hard-boiled eggs?'

Shiny.

6. That's Another Story by Julie Walters

Make that '99.99% of celebrity memoir covers are crap'.

5. Jamie's Ministry of Food by Jamie Oliver

Now, I know it's not the designer's fault that this cover irresistibly reminds me of the wonderful online Christmas game 'Attack of the Sprouts'...

..but it's probably for the best that they didn't include three china ducks behind Mr Oliver.

4. Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama

One day a politician will publish a book with an interesting cover, and on that day there will be much rejoicing.

3. The Big Book of Top Gear by someone who needs to take a good, hard look at themselves

Three 'Top gear' books in the top ten. That's the second sign of the Apocalypse. This technicolour extravaganza produces the unconvincing illusion that YOU are Jeremy Clarkson, smiling like a buffoon, with what look like two gurning sex criminals in the seat behind you, all three unaware that the fatal, eye-tearing owl lurks around the next bend.

Also, that title is an anagram for 'Go, Hot Tripe Kebab Goof', something that an enterprising British person should find a way to yell at Clarkson every time he appears in public.

2. Dear Fatty by Dawn French

99.999%, then. And is that the same swimming pool as the one behind Julie Walters? Still, if this book is as duff as the title and certain reviews suggest, the cover may actually be the best thing about it.

1. The Tales of Beedle the Bard by J. K. Rowling

That cover's OK, I guess, without being anything special. Much as I suspect the book would be. I'll never know, of course: I've never read anything Harry Potter, and intend never to rectify this. I worked in a bookshop during the releases of Potters 4 to 6, and the constant questions about when the next one would be coming out, along with endless "Have you read them? YOU MUST YOU MUST THEY'RE FANTASTIC THE BEST THINGS EVER!"-type 'conversations' killed any faint interest I might have had in these books. Buyers of this "standard edition" should note, however, that they are missing out on "an exclusive reproduction of J.K. Rowling's handwritten introduction" and a bag of "replica gemstones", which come with the exclusive "collector's edition". Don't say you weren't warned.

Replica gemstones: you don't get them with your fancy-pants French literature.

Abusing the Abuse Industry

A recent visit to a chain bookshop that shall not be named saw me looking in disbelief at a display they had set up by the front entrance. It was a small wall of misery memoirs, of the abused child variety.

There are a couple of odd things about this: first of all, I've never understood the hunger people have to read about this stuff. One or two books, sure, that might make sense. But when I worked in a bookshop, the same people would buy these things by the score. They would start off with a Dave Pelzer or two, and soon they'd be waist-deep in child rape, bashings and underage prostitution.

I don't know whether these customers were former abuse victims themselves, unable to tear their minds off a topic which had become all-consuming, or whether they were getting a voyeuristic and, frankly, pornographic kick out of these books (see also the endless lovingly described serial-killer/torture-porn that has become de rigeur in certain blockbuster thrillers these days). Shit, I sound like an old man.

Secondly, and more startlingly, all of these books look exactly the bloody same!





















How does the modern child-abuse afficionado remember which ones they've read? They all use the same limited pastel palette, washed-out photos of unhappy kids, unconvincing "hand-drawn" fonts for titles, and (except in a couple of cases) little sans-serif fonts for author names.

(Please note: I am not making mock of the abused, I am simply depressed by the commodification of child misery and by the vast audience it commands.)

> Gak <

In my last post I sneered at the typography of Wildside Press's print-on-demand book covers. This is why:



Why anyone would pay 3 times the price of an Oxford World's Classic or Penguin Classic for an oddly sized, non-proofread print-on-demand version of a widely available book, nastily typeset from Project Gutenberg e-texts, is beyond me, but presumably there's some market for these things, because they keep pumping them out.

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.