AA Gathering

In a cunning attempt to read books without having to find space for them in the house, I rejoined my old uni library. It has a large number of books on my list of things I want to read which are out of print, and so ought to save me a bit of cash. It also has a motherlode of old Penguins, which is great. Unfortunately, many of them have been insensitively rebound minus their covers, which is less so.

One of my recent borrowings was an old book by John Bowen, The Birdcage, a daring-in-its-time book from 1960 about a young media couple from London who split up, and one gets involved in tracking down an old Edwardian playwright, while the other gets involved in gay cruising. It was good, not great, but a nice enough way to spend 190 pages (and has been resurrected as a Faber Find, I see).

In tracking down the original cover, I found that it was a nifty Alan Aldridge illustration, making use of phrases lifted from the novel (click for much bigger versions of all covers).



Aldridge (and his Ink Studios) is best known now as the graphic designer behind much of the Beatles' best stuff, as well as the picture book and animated film The Butterfly Ball and the Grasshopper Feast. The film was played frequently on Australia's public broadcaster during children's viewing in the early '80s, and I remember being mesmerised by it every time it came on.



He did a lot of work for Penguin in the 1960s and 1970s. Some of the best known was for the science-fiction classics and classics-to-be which that publisher began reprinting (including Make Room! Make Room!, more recent editions of which are discussed here).










Here are some of his other Penguin covers...













..and some of his Penguin Crime covers...







Aldridge is still going strong. His website is here, and a recent exhibition of his work was a rousing success.

I'll leave you with one last cover because the title is wonderful (in a way that somehow suggests that the book itself is unreadable).

Fun with Maps

I've never Twittered--it's about as appealing as Morris dancing--and this fine post on it at The Age of Uncertainty pretty much nails my feelings (with the addition that I have not owned, and never will own, a mobile phone). But, having said that, reading said post and then wandering off through the net via some of the replies, I came across this lovely cover.

It's for Iain Sinclair's new one, Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire, and it's a dustjacket that folds out, and out, into a great big map. Now, I may be a hopeless nerd, but I think that's rather cool. I just wish I didn't find Iain Sinclair to be such a pain in the hole, because then I could justify buying it.




UPDATE: In the comments below, John Self of Asylum mentioned another book with a great fold-out dustjacket, the Picador first edition of Mick Jackson's thoroughly enjoyable The Underground Man. John was kind enough to share these images of said jacket in its various states of unfoldingment.

Unhand Me, Gray-Beard Loon

Stumbled across this one, an apparently not-available-to-buy book put together by design agency Pentagram (who've done a lot of cover work for Faber, Canongate (including the Pocket Canons discussed earlier) and others): it's a special illustrated edition of Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner, designed to be a showcase for the agency's artists. Click for bigger versions.







The book is designed by Angus Hyland. The cover is by Jimmy Turrell, and the interior art shown here is by (in order) Tom Gauld, Luke Best, Sam Weber and Adam Simpson. The actual book has work from many other artists. I want.

More here.

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.

Yellowbacks

There are advantages and disadvantages to being signed up to the Advanced Book Exchange's electronic newsletter. The disadvantages include having lovely books you can never afford waved in front of you, as well as the results of irritating polls ('Funniest Books Ever') and updates to the latest bit of Harry Potter tom-foolery. The advantages are links to interesting bits of old book trivia, like this recent posting about the old 'Yellowback' books (sometimes called 'Mustard-plasters').

The yellowbacks were the airport fiction of the Victorian and Edwardian eras: cheap, mostly of insignificant literary merit, and with colourful, lurid covers. Routledges 'Railway Library' was the main purveyor of these thrillers, romances, travelogues and comedies, though some writers of quality did slip into their list (such as Robert Louis Stevenson).

As that ABE post notes, the yellowback style was created by designer Edmund Evans, who printed woodblock illustrations in brown (with two other colour tints) onto yellow glazed paper for maximum eye-catching potential at a reduced cost. (There's a small collection of his illustrations here.)

Anyway, this is as good an excuse as any to post some of my old yellowback cover scans (I do not, unfortunately, have many of the original books). Click for somewhat bigger versions (while pondering the tragedy that you don't get many titles like The Rajah of Monkey Island these days).










The middle book in that last row is Doctor Nikola, second of the five Nikola pulp novels by Adelaide-born Guy Boothby. Adelaide doesn't have many once world-renowned Victorian pulp writers to its credit, but fortunately Boothby was actually pretty good at what he did (which was to write classy tosh).

Cloning Urchins

Over at Palimpsest, Paddyjoe points out another case of cover duplication--with a twist:





Unusually, not one of them uses the original photo unaltered (UPDATE: See below!). Here it is, via Getty Images and the Hulton Archive (hence the watermark), and it's a 1948 photograph by Bert Hardy. One boy is either replaced or removed, or else a new background has been dropped in.



It was originally published in the 'Picture Post', with this caption: "Gorbals Boys, 31st January 1948: Two young boys from the Gorbals area of Glasgow. The Gorbals tenements were built quickly and cheaply in the 1840s, providing housing for Glasgow's burgeoning population of industrial workers. Conditions were appalling; overcrowding was standard and sewage and water facilities inadequate. The tenements housed about 40,000 people with up to eight family members sharing a single room, 30 residents sharing a toilet and 40 sharing a tap. By the time this photograph was taken 850 tenements had been demolished since 1920."

There's a long but fascinating article on Bert Hardy here, including a theory that his Korean War photographs may have led to 'Picture Post''s downfall.

Thanks to John Self of Asylum for bringing the three covers to my attention.

UPDATE: I can't believe it didn't occur to me earlier that there were probably multiple shots in the series, so I went and checked, and indeed there were. Here's the other one, as used on the first two covers...