Spoiler: Everybody Dies

It's been a while since we last looked at a good, old-fashioned apocalypse. Nevil Shute's famous On the Beach (published 1957) is more worthy of that name than most since, as is well-known, and my apologies if you didn't know it, everybody dies at the end. It is a book which is quietly, stiff-upper-lip-ly, affectingly, utterly without hope.

This is the first edition:



The book starts off in the year following a third world war that has gone nuclear. Massive amounts of fallout have wiped out all life in the Northern Hemisphere, and the deadly clouds are now drifting irrevocably southwards, killing everything. Southern Australia is now chock-full of refugees, including the remnants of the British military, and the crew of a single surviving US Navy submarine.

Then a Morse code signal from the continental United States is received, and the American sub is sent to investigate. What happens next I will not spoil, in case you haven't read it yet. Much of the story also concentrates on the relationships between a number of central characters, including the submarine's American captain and his alcoholic Australian girlfriend, and an Australian sailor, his wife and young baby, all of whom are faced with inevitable extinction.

It's an odd thing to say, but to someone brought up on a diet of British and American ends-of-the-world, it's pleasing for an Australian reader to see the planet's last lights going out in Melbourne. Shute was English by birth, but became an Australian after World War II, and set many of his later works in this country. None had more impact than On the Beach, though, with some even attributing the passing of the Partial Test Ban Treaty in 1963 to the American public's horrified response to the book.

Until recently, it was available from the erratic House of Stratus.



In October, though, it and a startling 22 other Shute books are being brought back into print by Vintage Classics UK. These editions have attractive, sedate covers: you wouldn't even know that was a mushroom cloud at first glance. I like the way it picks up the colours of that first edition, too, with the green sky and red dress.



For a mainstream publisher to resurrect 23 books by a mostly neglected writer at once is quite a vote of confidence: Vintage don't even keep most of Somerset Maugham, Elizabeth Bowen or William Faulkner in print. I would be surprised if all the projected titles actually appear in October.

On the Beach was successfully filmed, adding to its impact, though Ava Gardner's famously scathing remark that Melbourne was "the perfect place to make a film about the end of the world" seems to have been invented by a journalist. The film produced a the usual tie-in edition...



..as well as pointing the way for publisher Pan's changing-but-unchanging cover designs over the following decades.



It was only when Pan started to churn out muscular, blokey adventure stories in the 1980s that they decided to ditch the girly romantic element of the cover and just focus on the hardware.



As a book that's been through a huge number of editions, it has a huge number of other covers to match...








Shute strayed into science-fiction on a couple of other occasions, depending on your definitions. No Highway predicted the "metal fatigue" which would lead to a number of aircraft crashes, while What Happened to the Corbetts is one of those novels written in the lead-up to World War II that project forward into the war itself (see also Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies).

Beyond Miffy

Dutch illustrator and graphic designer Dick Bruna (born 1927) is best known for his hugely popular rabbit creation, Miffy.



Significantly less well-known outside Holland are his many bold, occasionally comic, and always eye-catching book cover designs for crime novels. 9For everything here, click for bigger, better versions.)

These include a number of Georges Simenons (some of which he also translated into Dutch)...








..Ian Fleming's James Bond books...



..as well as books by Havank (pen-name for Dutch journalist and novelist Hans van der Kallen, who, despite living most of his life outside the Netherlands, died of a heart attack in a hotel room only a few metres from his birthplace)...






..and the comic Tanner novels of Lawrence Block, about an adventurer who, unable to sleep due to a Korean War injury, devotes all his extra time to learning strange new skills.




Bruna has also done covers for a number of other authors.









Almost all of these covers were for Dutch publishing house Zwarte Beertjes (Black Bears), which was started by his father and then taken over by his brother (Bruna was offered the job, but wanted to keep working in design and illustration).

A huge and expensive catalogue of his Zwarte Beertjes work has been produced. Here are the front and back covers (click for huge, detailed versions).




Much more Bruniana (including most of the above) can be found in this excellent Flickr collection, and this other excellent Flickr collection. An interview with the man himself is online here.

Barnaby Under Water

The duplicates are coming thick and fast now. This time it's another photo by Barnaby Hall, who has been featured here before, and who was even good enough to fill me in on the background to some of his work.

This time it's a photo on both a forthcoming Alma Books novel about Emily Dickinson by Paola Kaufmann, and an Oxford University Press guide to the known science of dreaming by J. Allan Hobson.




PLUS, see this post for new photos of a groovy fold-out dustjacket, supplied by John Self.

Darwinia

The 150th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species in 1859 has led to a few publishers putting out commemorative editions of this great work.

Vintage UK has this appealing version:



Penguin Classics, meanwhile, has put out a newly edited clothbound hardback with an illustration by Damien Hirst mounted on the cover. I usually can't stand Hirst, and in fact this illustration shows the limitations of his ability to actually draw, yet the overall effect is quite pleasing (click for a bigger version to get the full texture of the thing).



If I could find my huge old colour-illustrated edition I'd post that too, but it's in a box somewhere, and I lack the strength for archaeology at the moment. Instead, here's another nature-leaning new edition of an old classic, John Stewart Collis's The Worm Forgives the Plough, his collected observations and memoirs of life on the land during World War II. It has a nicely retro feel to it.



The Vintage Darwin, by the way, also reminds me of this gorgeous hardback from the Library of America. It's American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau.



That undersized jacket slips off to reveal these beautiful boards (photo pinched from here).

Pomegranates Everywhere

Here's another duplicated cover image: the photo is 'Pomegranates' by Takashi Shima (about whom I cannot find anything more online, other than the fact that they share a name with an actor in a Godzilla sequel), and it first showed up on Medieval Cuisine of the Islamic World by Lilia Zaouali.



This is a book which I gave my foodie wife, and which caused her mother to cry in alarm, "You're not going to become a Muslim, are you?"

It's also shortly to be the cover of this Hesperus classic, Vladimir Odoevsky's Two Princesses.



What's that you say? Get a life? I don't know what you're talking about.

UPDATE: It's on a third cover...

Near Enough

I quote that fount of uncontested truth, Wikipedia, when I say "the Kalahari Bushmen, San, Sho, Basarwa, Kung, or Khwe are indigenous people of southern Africa that spans most areas of South Africa, Zimbabwe, Lesotho, Mozambique, Swaziland, Botswana, Namibia, and Angola."

You'll notice that list of countries does not include the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which used to be the Belgian Congo, the setting for Joseph Conrad's famous Heart of Darkness.

So it's odd that two different publishers (Hesperus and Oneworld) should decide to use Kalahari Bushmen on their Heart of Darkness covers.




These are the original photos, both of men in traditional head-dresses, and both by Art Wolfe, whose website is chock-full of amazing photographs.




And here they are with the covers, just for the hell of it.




It's a bit of a shame that two publishers who do a lot to bring much great world literature into English seem to have plumped for an any-old-African-will-do approach for their covers.