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.

Glamourous Twins

I haven't done one of these for a little while: it's another case of duplicated cover imagery. In this case it's a 1949 fashion photo ('Fashion extremes') by Nina Leen.



This photo adorns the covers of Elizabeth Wilson's first atmospheric crime novel set in post-War London...



..and the most recent reprint of Dominick Dunne's The Two Mrs Grenvilles.



(This last book, by the way, is available as a free download here.)

Nina Leen (1914 (or maybe 1909)-1995) was a Russian-German-Swiss-Italian who became one of the first female photographers for LIFE magazine. Her most famous image is probably 'The Irascibles'.



This 1950 photo features (from left, rear:) Willem de Kooning, Adolph Gottleib, Ad Reinhardt, Hedda Sterne;(next row) Richard Pousette-Dart, William Baziotes, Jimmy Ernst (w. bow tie), Jackson Pollock (in striped jacket), James Brooks, Clyfford Still (leaning on knee), Robert Motherwell, Bradley Walker Tomlin; (in foreground) Theodoros Stamos (on bench), Barnett Newman (on stool) and Mark Rothko (with glasses). These, and 14 other "Abstract Expressionists" had made a big public protest about the Metropolitan Museum of Art's perceived bias against "true" avant-garde art.

Leen also produced a number of books, include two studies of bats. One of them has this simple but witty cover.

A Cunning Ploy

Say you're a publisher who wants to publish a famous book. Unfortunately, the rights to that book are owned by another publisher, and because it's famous and a money-spinner, there's no chance in hell that they'll let those rights go. What do you do?

If you're Orion, the publishing company that contains Gollancz and Weidenfeld & Nicolson, among other imprints, you have a cunning alternative: snap up the hardcover rights.

For the most part, once a book has gone into paperback, the hardcover rights are virtually worthless. Everyone who was going to buy it at the higher price has already done so. A publisher who nabs the rights and releases the book as a hardcover is going to be competing with a cheaper product, and thus putting themselves at a disadvantage.

Not if you're Gollancz. Their tactic is to release hardcovers of science-fiction classics for the same price as the paperbacks from the other publishers. They manage this by not having a dustjacket (a significant part of a hardcover's production costs), and printing the cover directly onto the book's boards.

Here's their version of the ecological-mystical science-fiction classic Dune...



..which looks very sturdily appealing next to Hodder's identically-priced and lurid airport-blockbuster equivalent.



And here's the Gollancz version of Philip K Dick's The Man in the High Castle, one of science-fiction's masterpieces, set in a defeated US divided between the Axis powers.



This competes with the two available attractive but less robust Penguin paperbacks.



(That second Penguin cover doesn't show up well in two-dimensions--it has a sort of Braille-like cover 'image' of the seven continents, now Nazi- and Imperial Japan-dominated, in raised bumps down the right-hand side.)

They're also planning a similar edition of Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle, which I'll talk about when a cover design appears.

Having done this for science-fiction, Orion are now turning to "literary fiction" to do the same thing to celebrate Weidenfeld & Nicolson's 60th anniversary. They're grabbing the hardbackrights to books like Lolita...



..as well as One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, as well as books to which they already have the rights, like A Suitable Boy, and the wildly over-rated The Reader, and repackaging them as a matching set of un-jacketed hardbacks.



(Sorry for the low-quality images--these have been taken from a PDF catalogue, and there are no better versions available yet).

However, this time they're selling the books for about twice the rate of the paperbacks, so I'm not sure how well it will go. Furthermore, I'm not sure that they haven't gone past subtle into the realm of pleasant-but-dull. I'd need to see them in the flesh to see how effective this series design really ends up being.

UPDATE: John Self of Asylum suggests that the W&N Classics will have shapes cut out of the front boards, with the patterns (just) visible above being the endpapers showing through the holes. Now that would definitely make these a more enticing set of books.

UPDATE 2: The ultra-wise Tulkinghorn points out that the Gollancz Dune hardback cover is that originally painted by John Schoenherr for the Analog magazine serialisation of Herbert's work.

Treasures

Thanks to a post at the amazing BibliOdyssey, I came across the recently-launched World Digital Library. Though still a work in progress, it's an amazing collection of books, manuscripts, maps, photographs, paintings and other oddments from all over the world. All can be viewed online or downloaded as images or PDFs.

It has a couple of sections of particular interest to bookish types: the literature collection and the books collection (some overlap there). There are some beautiful things to be found there, including all 54 volumes of a 17th-Century woodblock-printed edition of The Tale of Genji (plus six volumes of supporting information). Here, for example, are the cover an an internal page from volume 16.




Then there's Soga's Robes, which hasn't much of a cover, but does have innards like this:



Or perhaps you'd prefer the Chinese Annals of Creation?



Or a 19th-Century Russian manual explaining to Russian peasants how to go about resettling in Siberia?



There's a heap of other stuff, including William Blake, a 15th-Century Aesop's Fables and Edmund Dulac illustrating Hans Christian Andersen.

I'll leave you, though, with the beautiful covers for the 20 volumes of Takizawa Bakin's Nansō Satomi Hakkenden.

90° Difference

I just stumbled across an interesting, if 2-year-old, interview with John Gall, art director at Vintage US (among other roles). In it, he discusses the 50th anniversary edition of Lolita which was published by Vintage US.



He reveals the original design, which both he and the publisher were eventually too nervous to run with. You can probably see why.



This reminds me of a Lolita cover with a different problem. The current Penguin Classics UK edition is fine on the front, but as Lucy Fishwife pointed out to me, on the spine the author is written 'Vladimir Nabkov'.



You'll have to believe me on that one: I didn't have a camera to hand when I came across it in the real world. It's a mite embarrassing, though.

Poe Facelift

Late last year I previewed the cover of an imminent Edgar Allan Poe collection from penguin.



See that post for the background to the cover, but in brief it's a collage by Richard Hamilton, altered by Harland Miller, with text cut-ups provided by Stefanie Posavec. And I really like it.

Now, though, that Poe book seems to have been given a facelift, and it will look like this:



The art is now one of Harland Miller's oil paintings derived from old Penguin covers.
Another, much funnier, example is this:



I do like Miller's Penguin paintings, but this particular use as a cover doesn't seem to be that inspired, especially compared with what they already had. I'd be interested to know what inspired the change.

Miller, by the way, is also a talented writer. His Slow Down Arthur, Stick to Thirty is an amusing novel, and he also wrote First I Was Afraid, I Was Petrified, a novella about suffering obsessive-compulsive disorder, illustrated with found photographs of stove knobs set to 'off'.



More of Miller's Penguin paintings can be found in his collection International Lonely Guy.