Black Cockatoos and Crying Children

Australian publisher Allen & Unwin is celebrating its 20th birthday with four "classics" from its backlist (I use inverted commas as The Slap is too new and anything by Andrew McGahan is not good enough to qualify), done up in fancy screenprinted fabric boards, without any text on the covers. The four books in question are (click for much bigger versions):

Journey to the Stone Country by Alex Miller

White Earth by Andrew McGahan

Lilian's Story by Kate Grenville

The Slap by Christon Tsiolkas

 I really dig these--the textlessness, the limited colours and the bold graphics really work. I don't know who any of the artists are as yet, but am endeavouring to find out.



UPDATE: Annette of Allen & Unwin gave me the designer details--"It was our two very talented inhouse designers, Lisa White for 'Lilian's Story' and 'The Slap' and Emily O'Neill for 'Journey to the Stone Country' and 'The White Earth'. Lisa reworked the artwork on 'Lilian's Story' from the original cover art by Hans Selhofer. We're very proud of these 20th anniversary editions and very proud of our excellent designers."

Magnums

(With thanks to the peerless John Self of Asylum, who drew these books to my attention. UPDATE: See the end of the post for more.)

Another imminent set of Penguin re-releases are the Magnum collection, a partnership between Penguin Books and the Magnum photo agency. Magnum is an unusual artistic co-operative of photographers, whose co-founders included the late and very great Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Capa.

These six books, for the most part classics of non-fiction or reportage, each use a dramatic Magnum photo on the cover, and have no text on the front (the title/author circles you can see below are removable stickers). The barcodes on the spines are a little bit ugly, but I guess you can't have everything. (Click for much bigger versions.)








I particularly like the cover for Hersey's (not Hershey, as the cover above has it) Hiroshima, a powerful little book about the nuclear bombing of that city, told by people caught up in the horror. The cover image is of the Peace Dome, a building that was the city's trade centre, and which survived relatively unscathed despite being at the very epicentre of the bomb blast. This photo, by Philip Jones Griffiths, dates from 1995. An earlier edition of Hiroshima from Penguin used a shot from soon after the attack, a scene of horrific devastation captured by Wayne Miller.



I also really, really like the cover to In Cold Blood, though I don't know who did it (UPDATE: See end of post). Interestingly, the cover for A Man on the Moon was not taken on the Moon at all. It's from a collection of photos by Rene Burri called "Space ruins": the remnants of the closed-down bits of the USA's space race installations.

By the way, if you're looking for another heart-breaking Hiroshima image, try this cover. What might at first glance be an ordinary-ish portrait of mother and child is transformed by its context into something horrible.



UPDATE: Mr Self has got his hands on the books, and has kindly filled me in more on the designs.

"The covers are matt (almost untreated?) card stock - which I was surprised by, as for some reason I expected them to be glossy. The writing on the back cover is nicely debossed. The inside covers have photographs overlaid with the usual book blurb (inside front) and a blurb about Magnum (inside back) ... I also got a press release which gives details of all the photos, so the ones you haven't identified are as follows:

In Cold Blood: Photo by Inge Morath (wife of Arthur Miller), taken during the 18 day road trip across the USA made by Morath and Henri Cartier-Bresson en route to the set of the The Misfits. It was Morath's first trip across the US.

The Fight: Photo by Abbas.

Hellfire: Image by Guy le Querrec, taken 8 Sep 1973 (inside images by him and Cartier-Bresson).

Hell's Angels: Photo by Dennis Stock."

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:

Future Classics, No Titles

Gollancz, Britain's leading publisher of science-fiction, has recently launched the 'Future Classics' series of reprints. These are books from the last decade or so that they claim will be the SF classics of the future (the sort of books that were reprinted in Gollancz's apparently discontinued SF Masterworks series until recently).

They have taken the interesting and unusual option of releasing all of the books in the series without any identifying text on the front cover. No author name, no title, no blurb quotes. This information is relegated to the spine, leaving the covers free for simple, dramatic, 2-colour works of (mostly abstract) illustration.

Some of the titles in the series are shown here:



They are...

1. Fairyland by Paul J. McCauley: the pattern of insect wings is in laser-etched spectral reflecting foil.

2. Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan: a suitable Da Vinci-anatomy cover for a novel full of biological augmentation and subversion.

3. The Separation by Chris Priest: the khaki colours, pattern and rough card cover texture match the parallel-world WWII setting of the book.

4. Blood Music by Greg Bear: the varnished blood pattern suits this story of "intelligent" nanomachine-like engineered blood molecules.

5. Evolution by Stephen Baxter: a novel which tells to story of life on Earth from the start to the finish has a machine-like illustration of an ape on the cover; in something of a first for novel cover design, the darker areas on the cover are actually furry.

6. Schild's Ladder by Greg Egan: a scattering of distant stars matches the vast distances travelled by the heroes of this story of potential universal collapse.

Not all of these books are brilliant: Richard Morgan's debut is surprisingly weak, and the Baxter is far from his best. However, the general standard of the novels is very high, and the designs are fascinating. You really need to see them in the flesh to get the full effect. Hunt them down at your local bookshop.

UPDATE: The great Dave Langford discusses these books in his excellent column in the otherwise dodgy SFX magazine, and on his website. He notes that the stars on the Egan cover glow in the dark. Huzzah!