Many Marilyns

Here's another of those images that is much used on book covers: the famous shot of Marilyn Monroe reading Ulysses (and suspiciously close to the end), taken by Eve Arnold.





A different photo by the same photographer of the same subject reading the same book was used on the cover for the Picador Book of Contemporary Irish Fiction, which I particularly enjoyed as it had a lot of (excellent) short stories, and relatively few extracts from novels.




Novel extracts piss me off no end; they seem so pointless (and this is one of the reasons I no longer read Granta magazine--most of their new fiction turns out to be bits from novels in progress). If you want to read the book, read the whole book, rather than a segment that was never designed to be read in isolation.

The worst offender in this regard from recent years is the Vintage Book of War Stories, which is in fact nothing of the sort. It's actually the Vintage Book of Extracts from War Novels, containing only one single solitary self-contained story, and that one only a couple of pages long.



Circling back to the topic of Marilyn Monroe and cover duplications, see this cover for what used to be just called the Faber Book of Blue Verse.



While the same image being used on another cover is not that unusual...



..it's the first time I've seen an unrelated image being used on both a book cover and a movie poster.



UPDATE: The wise ctorre points out that "You boys don't know your Marylin. Arthur Miller confirmed that she had indeed read Ulysses, and that she wanted more of Molly Bloom." So I stand corrected.

Great Ideas Round 4

As they did in August 2008, Penguin are planning another 20 of their Great Ideas books for August 2009. Only a few of the covers are available as yet, but it would seem that they're going with purple as the single colour used (the first three series used red, blue and green).







This last, textless cover is appropriate for Writings from the Zen Masters. If I'm not mistaken, that tiny purple artist's seal is a stylised Penguin.




Some of the other titles suggest a certain amount of barrel-scraping: Shakespeare's On Power, for example, appears to be bits from his plays presented out of context. On the other hand, Robert Louis Stevenson's An Apology for Idlers ("An irresistible invitation to reject the work ethic and enjoy life’s simple pleasures, such as laughing, drinking and lying in the open air.") sounds like just my cup of tea.

At the moment I'd imagine these covers to be mostly the work of David Pearson, but I'm willing to be proved wrong.

UPDATE: Phil Baines, one of the designers, has let me know who's behind these beauties. "Hi, same four designers as previously, David Pearson (art directing and designing), Phil Baines, Catherine Dixon and Alistair Hall."

Of those shown above, Orwell and Johnston are by Pearson, Locke and Kant are by Dixon; de Maistre by Baines, and the Zen book is by Hall.

Cultural Differences

Back in the mists of time, I displayed an uninspired cover made woeful by the lack of a comma.



I was reminded of that by this self-help book. It probably looked fine to the American publishers, but people in the UK will get a very different mental image from the title than the author would have intended.



Still, I suppose it's better to use it in overcoming obstacles than it is to cook with it.

...and Nobody Gets Hurt

Just yesterday I got my hands on Denis Johnson's (Tree of Smoke, etc) newest novel, Nobody Move: it's a brisk, engaging and uneasily funny thriller in the style of Elmore Leonard or Richard Stark. (And sometime I'm going to have to talk about Johnson's Fiskadero as an end-of-the-world book.)



What concerns us here is the cover design, by Susan Mitchell, and the illustrated boards by Philip Earl Pascuzzo. The dustjacket, printed in lovely metallic inks, is full of die-cut bullet holes, which give you a glimpse of Pascuzzo's pictures of the two main characters underneath. (Click for nice big versions.) The book is published by FSG, who also produced that beautiful slipcased triple-decker version of 2666.

Pascuzzo has a lot of other lovely cover work on display at his site. Here are a select few to give you a taste. (Again, click for nice big versions.)

Live Nude Authors!

An odd intermittent trend is for some female writers to appear nude on the front of their own books.







My first thought would be that this would be to get male readers to buy the books, but then some of these books are aimed almost entirely at women (except for the Pamela Anderson "novel", the target audience for which is utterly mystifying). I can't think of any books by men where the authors pose nude on the front. Can anyone out there suggest any?

Female nudity on book covers is, of course, very common (see an earlier discussion here). Male nudity, aside from photos of Michelangelo's 'David' or the covers of romance/porn novels, is almost non-existent. Yet we're frequently told that women buy most books.

While we're on the topic, certain images used on book covers discussed in earlier nudity-themed posts have cropped up again elsewhere.

Here's Ben Stockley's photo from the York Hall Russian Baths (discussed here) on four covers...






..and another photo (first discussed here) on three.





It should be noted that Ediciones Nowtilus are more scared of pubic hair than some other publishers.

More Rooks!

Recently I commented on the fact that Oneworld Classics' forthcoming new edition of Ivan Bunin's The Village would have the same cover image as a number of other great Russian works. Someone at Oneworld must have realised the same thing, as at the last minute it got a new cover:



However, never fear! My point still stands, as here are another five books, all with 'The Rooks Have Come Back' by Alexei Kondratyevich Savrasov as the cover image (plus the two in the original post, for a grand total of seven). (For added inter-connectedness of things, the Dover Dead Souls makes use of a typeface based on the work of Edward Gorey.)







At around the same time, we also looked at the proliferation of deepaks on book covers, as drawn to my attention by KevinfromCanada. One of the covers discussed was Kim Echlin's The Disappeared, which I now discover shares a cover with a travel book by Ilija Trojanow.

Bad Stock Luck

Some authors don't seem to have a lot of luck when it comes to originality in their cover designs. One such is Deborah Lawrenson (who I've never read). When her The Art of Falling was republished in 2005, it ended up with a tinted version (with added castle and bombers) of a cover image used on a Penguin Classic of an excellent H. E. Bates book the previous year.




The same thing happened to this book's original cover: the same image as appeared on it (again with bombers added) has also been spotted on the cover of Thomas Cahill's Mysteries of the Middle Ages.




Then there's her most recent book, Songs of Blue and Gold, which has the same cover as the German edition of a novel by Stephanie Gertler.