Roxanna Bikadoroff & Angela Carter

Roxanna Bikadoroff is a Canadian illustrator who has done a lot of work on book covers over the years: some of these are shown at her website. Among the highlights of her work are she did the covers for Penguin US's reissues of Angela Carter's work a few years ago (and then for Virago's reissues more recently). They have a wonderfully sinister, gruesomely sexy cartoonish quality, exactly right for Carter's sensuous, rich and fantastic prose--especially her various takes on old fairy stories, in all their bloody glory. Click for bigger versions, as always.




There's something reminiscent of Ronald Searle about her work. I also like that the typography is all done by her, by hand, rather than using some 'irregular' digital typeface.

Another nice touch are the little Penguin logos on the covers. Most corporations are tediously insistent on 'brand identity' and the like, never letting any little changes be made to their dull, set-in-concrete corporate look. On the Penguin Carters here, though, each has been rendered in a form appropriate to the book--a clown, a heart, an executioner, a mouse(?), a torn image and a marionette are shown here.

Blue

Sometimes you (by which I mean "I") buy a book even though you know nothing about the author or the writing. The cover is what grabs you. This book, a collection of poems by Brooks Haxton, leapt out at me from the shelf because of it's incredibly vivid blue cover.


It was a wise purchase, as the poems are wonderful. I especially like the title poem ('Nakedness, Death and the Number Zero'), which explores the "invention" of zero, and Archimedes' great bath-time discovery:

..Eureka! Naked into the sunlit streets of Syracuse,
he skipped forth, modestly cupping his genital
in one hand, shouting: Eureka! I have found!--it,
displacement volumetrics, being to Archimedes
understood. But onlookers could only cluck:
How sad, in middle age, to find one's genital,
and lose one's mind...

We're here to talk about covers, though, so let's look at this one. The image is a photograph, a cyanotone (hence the amazing blueness), entitled 'Blue Nude with a Braid', and it's by a photographer I'd never heard of called Paul Haviland. Some research turned up a very little about him: he was American, lived from 1880 to 1950, was mentored by Alfred Stieglitz, has never had a book of his work collected or published, and most of his work now belongs to the Musée d'Orsay in France. His middle name was, unfortunately, Burty.

Here are the three of his other photos I could find: click on them for a larger view.




That last image, a night cityscape of New York, is one I'm sure I've seen on another book cover, but I'm damned if I can find it now.

I did turn up a group shot which seems to include him: he's at the extreme left.

Anyway, it's these little bursts of research and discovery into new-to-me artists that is part of the pleasure of an interest in book covers. The number of painters and photographers I first encountered through the covers of Penguin Classics, for example, is rather high, and I know I'm not alone there.

Murnau, Shepard & Nosferatu

Jim Shepard is an American writer who doesn't seem to get anywhere near as much attention as he should in the US, and who seems basically unknown outside of it. Each of his novels is quite unlike the others, sharing only great writing and fine insight into the way people think and feel across various times and places.

Reading his "best-of" collection of short stories, Love and Hydrogen, was almost bewildering. The variety of settings, styles, voices and ideas made the experience akin to reading one of those best-young-American-writers collections, except that:
1. all of the stories were excellent, and
2. all of the stories were by the one writer.

One of his earlier stories, not in that collection, was developed by Shepard into a whole novel, Nosferatu. It's about the life of Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, the German movie director who brought the movie of that name to the screen. It's amazing, weaving what was evidently a vast amount of research seamlessly into the tale. Murnau's own half-hidden homosexuality and a central act of infidelity are presented as the parasitic vampire attached to his own life, though that heavy-handed explanation does discredit to Shepard's feather-light touch.

The cover of the US hardback first edition (design by Barbara deWilde, published by Knopf) is a fine example of restraint. It uses what I presume is a boyhood picture of Murnau and some well-placed gothic type, and both avoids the obvious and yet cunningly suggests the vampiric theme implicit in the story.


My only criticism is that, in the 'flesh', a close-up look at the cover reveals the dreaded compression artifacts.

The most recent edition, on the other hand, is both obvious and dull.


If they had to use an image from the film, surely something less straightforward could have been just as effective. This simply makes the novel look like one of those throwaway novelisation-of-the-movie books that used to be everywhere before VHS came along.

To finish with, here's Murnau at work during the making of the film.

A Quick John Christopher Follow-Up

For anyone here who doesn't also read The Age of Uncertainty (and you really should--it's over there on the links bar, see?), the goodly proprieter has recently posted a series of excellent and thoughtful posts on the three John Christopher novels I discussed here earlier. The specific posts are here, here and here.

He also has a nifty Penguin cover for The Death of Grass which I'd never come across. I hope I can be forgiven for pinching it to show here:

More Changed Covers

Here's another look at covers that change between their first announcement by the publishers and their actual appearance on the shelves. In each case here I like all of the before and after covers, although I slightly prefer the unused originals.

This is the paperback of Alan Pauls' The Past, from Vintage. The final version is a slight modification of the original hardback cover, rather than something new.


Here are a couple of books from the great NYRB Classics which I have to have. Stefan Zweig is one of my favourite authors, and so a previously unavailable posthumous novel from him sounds great. If you want to know more about him, I wrote more about Zweig over at Bookslut.





Over at the NYRB Review Books blog, there's an entertaining article about why they had to change another of their forthcoming book covers. Their edition of J. A. Baker's The Peregrine originally featured entirely the wrong bird.

Seth versus Dorothy Parker

As a brief corrective to the last post's whinge, here's a Graphic Classics cover that is, I think, absolutely perfect. It's by the Canadian comics writer and artist Seth (real name Gregory Gallant--what's with these guys and their first-name-only pseudonyms?), and it's for The Portable Dorothy Parker.



And here are the front and back flaps.



As always, click for all the wonderful detail.

So what makes this a success, in contrast with the Jason/Kerouac cover? Without compromising his style, Seth has designed something entirely appropriate to the writer and the era he is covering. It incorporates examples of her work and style, and manages a number of clever, witty flourishes. It has been done with obvious affection for Parker, but with a clear-eyed vision of her flaws as well. It is, quite frankly, one of the best examples of cover design I've seen.

Great Artist, Great Cover, But...

Before getting on to the cover I'm here to post about, a bit of background:

Jason (real name John Arne Sæterøy) is a Norwegian comic writer and artist who has a small but dedicated following in the indie/art comics world. He has published a number of idiosyncratic and enjoyable graphic novels, which are available in English from Fantagraphics. What's most obvious about his work is that he tends to draw everybody as either a bird or a dog-like creature.

Here is the cover for his The Left Bank Gang, a story about Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce and Gertrude Stein as cartoonists and bank-robbers in 1920s Paris.


Here are a couple of pages from the book: the first is Fitzgerald and Hemingway discussing their private lives and their cartooning; the second has Hemingway visiting the Shakespeare & Co. bookshop. Click on the image for more detail.


And here are the covers of a couple of his other graphic novels. The first is a detective thriller, and the second a science-fiction time travel story.


Now, on to the actual cover I'm here to talk about. It's part of the wonderful Graphic Classics range, where comic artists design covers for various Penguin Classics. Another example is Charles Burns' cover for The Jungle, discussed earlier.



I'm no Kerouac fan. His writing seems both embarassingly earnest and quite clumsy, as well as incredibly self-important and navel-gazing. The front and back flaps Jason has designed for this edition capture that amusingly well, I think.



So, it's a good cover I admire by by a really good artist. Despite this, I can't help feeling it's something of a failure. Jason's decision to render the book's characters as more of his anthropomorphic creatures is (I believe) the wrong one. It will only make sense to his fans, and be bewildering to everybody else. After all, it's not as though he can't draw people: here's his Hemingway.

So in the end, I think this is a cover that's more about the artist than it is about the book. I can't help feeling that means it doesn't really do its job well.

Mordecai Richler & Others

I just read Mordecai Richler's The Street, a collection of short stories about a Montreal Jewish neighbourhood in the 1940s. Fun, if occasionally slight: Richler said in his introduction that short stories were not his forte. For him at his best, try Barney's Version or The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (Kravitz also appears in The Street).

But we're not here to review the books, but their covers. I like them. I also like the same images on the covers of completely different books. In each case, the twice-used images are appropriate to both books. Witness:



The other book here is John Banville's brilliant The Untouchable, about a Soviet spy in Cold War London. My copy is signed: when I was getting it autographed, I recall Banville said something very witty, to which I replied. "Nrgh. I love your books. Ha ha."

The photo is by Michael Wildsmith, who has a small online portfolio here . In this image, the sole fingure could easily be a side-locked Orthodox Jew striding down a wet Canadian street, or a shady and treacherous member of the English establishment doing a runner through the fog.



The other book here is one of Derek Raymond's nihilistic and enjoyable thrillers, the first in his 'Factory' series. The photo is by Stephan H. Sheffield, about whom I can find no more information.

Nina Chakrabarti

I'm currently reading Submarine by Joe Dunthorne, an unease-inducing but very funny coming-of-age novel set in 1997. It's hard to tell whether the narrator is mildly mentally unhinged, or whether it's just that he's 14. A very good review can be found here if you are interested.

The cover of this book, published by Hamish Hamilton, is by Nina Chakrabarti (self-portrait shown here), and it's an absolute beauty. On her slightly out-of-date website, Chakrabarti says she "was born and spent her early life in Calcutta, India. She moved to the UK in her teens carrying her stamp collection under her arm and little else. She studied illustration at Central St. Martins, and many years later, at The Royal College of Art. Her work is often concerned with collections and the composition of objects. She works using Rotring pens, felt tips, biros, pencils, inks and the Apple Macintosh."

Her cover for Submarine emulates the sort of obsessively detailed drawing/doodling you find on a schoolkid's exercise book. Significantly, every object incorporated into this doodle is relevant to the book's plot. Click on the image to appreciate full-size version--I apologise for the slightly blurry bits, but I had to scan this in 3 bits and stitch it together to get the whole cover into one image, and I didn't want to damage the dustjacket in the process.


What makes this cover even better is that it's printed on a textured cartridge paper, and all of the doodling is slightly indented, as though by the pressure of a biro. It's this sort of attention to detail which can make a book a really satisfying art object as well as a bloody good read.

This also follows through to the book's endpapers, which Chakrabarti has decorated with a selection of the words which Submarine's precocious narrator likes to use and obsess over.


Seek out this book: it's definitely one to have in hardcover.

UPDATE: A slight downwards revision in my feelings for this book as I read on. This is not due to any fault in the writing as such, but because of a protracted, unnecessary and disgusting dog-death scene. At the risk of sounding like a crank, WRITERS SHOULD STOP KILLING DOGS IN THEIR BOOKS BECAUSE IT'S A COMPLETE FUCKING CLICHÉ! In any book (or film) that makes more than a passing reference to a dog, 99 times out of 100 it will be dead by the end: usually killed nastily. The writer either seems to feel that this will be amusing (it isn't), or that it will achieve some sort of poignant death-of-an-innocent effect (usually when said writer hasn't got the balls to kill off a human child character). Writers of the world: you're on fucking notice. Stop it!

UPDATE 2: That little rant aside, it's still a very good book.

Hard Case Crime Revisited

Here's a quick follow-up to the look at Glen Orbik's covers for Hard Case Crime.


Another artist Hard Case use a lot, and who does sterling work, is Gregory Manchess. I've read the two John Lange rediscoveries Manchess has provided the covers for.


Lange was an early pseudonym for Michael Crichton, and he should have stuck with the fast, funny pulp crime rather than the portentous climate-change-denial rubbish he seems more interested in these days.


A close look at the cover of Zero Cool revealed something interesting (besides the bikini babe). What is she reading?