Crane & Chabon

Another gem just arrived in the post: Michael Chabon's first collection of non-fiction, Maps and Legends. It's published by McSweeney's, and they've done their usual beautiful design job on it.

The book has three part-dustjackets or "belly-bands" layered one over the other, each cut to odd shapes and with a hole in the middle to reveal the title. Here's the book with and without its jackets...



..and here are the jackets/bands together and seperately. These four photos were pinched from the excellent design:related website.



The art is by mini-comics artist and writer Jordan Crane, more of whose work can be found at his Red Ink Like Blood site.

Here are the front and back covers in close-up: click for bigger versions.




UPDATE: Having now read this, I can say that this book is just right for readers like myself. It talks intelligently about the process of writing and reading, about late-Victorian and early 20th-Century adventure and pulp fiction, about the "literary" writer/critic prejudice against science-fiction that conveniently relabels literary science-fiction as "fables" or some other apparently non-embarrassing word, about the creation of cities and the recreation of childhood, about the power of maps and myths, and about golems.

Engulfed in Flames

A writer who divides many people who have read him is David Sedaris. His "97% true" books of personal stories are frequently hilarious, but some people I know who've read him find him a bit mean-spirited (though to be fair, he is his own main target). Those who have never read him are advised to try some of his work available from the New Yorker.

His newest book is entitled When You Are Engulfed in Flames. The title, as Sedaris has explained, comes from a badly translated emergency booklet in a Hiroshima hotel: "It was called ‘Best Knowledge of Disaster Damage Prevention and Favors to Ask of You.’ And it was broken up into different chapters. ‘When You Check In a Hotel,’ ‘When You Find a Fire,’ and ‘When You Are Engulfed in Flames.’ It just slayed me."

As well as a fine title, it makes use of an excellent Van Gogh painting on the front cover.



The painting is Skull with a Burning Cigarette, from 1885.



UPDATE: Have finally got my copy--I seem to have inadvertantly ordered the large-print version, so the size of the type is a bit scary. I note that the cover is a Chip Kidd design.

I Obviously Have Nowt Better to Do

I've just failed to start two lawnmowers and I almost electrocuted myself with a dying automatic garage door opener (thank God for safety switches), so why not blog instead?

It's another one of these posts, this time with the Australian version of Geraldine Brooks' March, and Nerys Jones' Godiva.



That they use the same cover photo is more apparent when you superimpose one on the other.



On a completely different note, here's a cover I really do like and know nothing about. It's from the NYRB Classics reissue of The Family Mashber, an incomplete Yiddish masterpiece from an author killed in Stalin's gulags. When I can get hold of a copy I want to find out what this cover image is from.



UPDATE: The excellent Sara Kramer of NYRB has explained in the comments that the Mashber cover image is by Christian Boltanski, a French photographer and installation artist. A brief biography is here, and a good starting guide to his works online is here.

Covers Containing Covers

I just stumbled across a review of a promising-sounding book called Harry, Revised by Mark Sarvas. Sometimes when this happens I forget about the book soon afterwards, while at other times I scribble down the name and author, determined to order it. Harry, Revised falls into the second category. What made the difference? The cover, by Jonathan 'gray318' Gray.



When I first saw this I knew that I knew that torn cover, and the design was a giveaway that it was one of the older Penguin Classics. Some determined hunting round turned up this:



Success! I think this works really well. The image in the painting, by the way, is a self-portrait by Jacques-Louis David.

UPDATE: Apparently The Count of Monte Cristo is relevant to the plot of Harry, Revised, so that explains that.

It reminded me of another cover which was cleverly created from a different book's cover. This was Frank Portman's hilarious King Dork, about the tribulations of high school and music fandom, which looked like this...


..because the protagonist is incessantly being told to read The Catcher in the Rye, which he hates, by every authority figure in his life.

An extended sneer at Australia's bestsellers [Part Two]

(Continued from the last post)


5: Underbelly by John Silvester and Andrew Rule
The true-crime account of Melbourne's ongoing gangland wars, waged by apparently moronic criminals intent on wiping each other out. This was recently a hugely successful TV series with lots of violence and lashings of nudity. Hence this cover, which puts this book into the weird genre of non-fiction accounts with fictional versions of the protagonists on the covers: see, for example, the memoirs of Iris Murdoch which feature Judi Dench and Kate Winslet, or the Truman Capote biography with Philip Seymour Hoffman on the cover. Very odd, when you think about it.


4: Change of Heart by Jodi Picoult
When I worked in a bookshop, my boss described Jodi Picoult's books as being novels for people who don't like to read. Though that's probably a bit unfair, they're not much good. Nor is this dull-as-dishwater cover. It looks like a paracetamol ad. More interesting is that Picoult recently did a short-lived stint as writer on the Wonder Woman comic, Wonder Woman being a character created by the deeply odd psychologist William Moulton Marston, "polyamorist", co-inventor of the lie-detecting polygraph machine, and bondage enthusiast (see almost any issue of the comic which he wrote).


3: Breath by Tim Winton
Holy shit--a genuine work of literature by a genuinely good writer, with an attractive cover. What's it doing on the bestseller list? Excuse me while I fall off my chair.


2: A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle
The publisher Penguin get a lot of raves on this blog for their classics line and many of their cover designs. On the other hand, they do publish some real, Z-grade raw sewage. This mimsy, Oprah-hawked self-help cod-philosophy book does its best to ride on the coat-tails of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth in the promo material, which conveniently ignores the fact that it's exactly the sort of self-obsessed, it's-all-about-me, blinkered mindset that books like this inculcate which has helped contribute to the hideous state of the world we are now dealing with. The leaf skeleton on the cover does indicate the threadbare nature of this book's contents, though I suspect that was not the designer's intention. Go and read some Emerson or some Thoreau, you Oprah-addled numbnuts!


1: 4 Ingredients by Kim McCosker and Rachael Berminngham
My wife's impressive collection of food books attests to the huge leaps that food photography and cookbook design have made in the last couple of decades. There are many, many genuinely gorgeous books in this field. But sometimes a publisher decides, "Fuck it, let's go for the boring, the obvious, the uninspired!" And the book becomes a number-one bestseller, thus showing that all the design brilliance in the world appears to mean fuck-all to the average book-buying punter.

An extended sneer at Australia's bestsellers [Part One]

Something I've been meaning to do for a while is a post which looks at the covers of the ten best-selling books. It hasn't happened yet, because the top ten are invariably, as a group, uninspiring when it comes to cover design. But then I thought to myself, "You're supposed to be caustic, aren't you? They don't need to be good for your purposes!"

So here we go: an extended sneer at the covers for Australia's current best-selling books.


10: Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert
Subtitled "One Woman's Search for Everything", this is one of those female midlife crisis books: Gilbert ditches husband, family, home, and pisses off to Europe to eat food and fuck strangers. Back in my bookselling days I remember selling a lot of copies of Mary Moody's autobiography Au Revoir, which was the same story, to a lot of frustrated middle-aged women. At least they weren't out buying turbocharged penis-substitute sports cars like their husbands. The cover designer's not done a bad job here: the type treatment is quite clever. The copies in bookshops usually seem to have the ugly Oprah-recommended sticker on them, though. A nice try, I suppose, and better than the book deserves.


9: Hold Tight by Harlan Coben
Does what it's supposed to, in that it features the 2 standard elements of every crime novel cover published in the last 10 years. One: moody photo in subdued, depressing colours that features no human faces. Two: Big author name, smaller title. Like so (all these images are from Amazon UK's current top-twenty crime novels--click for bigger versions):

It's sad, because some of these would be genuinely arresting photographs for covers if they didn't look so identikit in design.


8: New Moon by Stephanie Meyer
There seems to be a huge boom in romantic/erotic/horror novel series these days, spawned by the daft Anita Blake series by Laurell K Hamilton, and presumably all descended from Anne Rice's Vampire Lestat potboilers. And here's another one, book two in a series. The cover's not bad for this sort of thing: at least it doesn't look like a Mills & Boon & Bloodsuckers the way a lot of these things do:



7: This Charming Man by Marian Keyes
Penguin's infuriating promo website for this book says, 'Honest. Funny. Reliable. Trust Marian.' In other words, they mean unthreatening, predictable Irish-flavoured chick lit. The cover's dull and unthreatening too. And do you think Marian knew that the original Smiths song from which she pinched her title was about a predatory homosexual picking up a boy whose bicycle has suffered a punctured tyre on a remote road?


6: Twilight by Stephanie Meyer
See number eight, above. Also, it's another one of these, only without the nudity.

Books one to five will follow soon.

Nathan Burton does Pat Barker

Nathan Burton's appealing cover for Pat Barker's most recent WWI novel, Life Class, is shown here.

It's not a bad book, either, though not her best. The occasional anachronism would pull me up: the word 'robot' is used during the First World War by one of the characters, for example, even though Karel Čapek did not coin it with that meaning until his play Rossumovi univerzální roboti was published in 1920.

Getting back to the subject of covers, though, Penguin has decided to republish Barker's earlier WWI trilogy with new covers by Nathan Burton. For extra grooviness, the three covers fit together to form one image. (Click for a much bigger version.)



Nice stuff. My only criticism, and it's that of a design pedant, is that it would be nice if Pat Barker's name wasn't distressed identically on all four covers. For example:

1984 Then & Now

A very quick comparison of two covers for the Signet edition of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.


As elegant as the newer version is, I can't help feeling something has been lost. Cleavage, mostly.

Faber Finds

One of the more interesting initiatives in publishing this year is the launch in June of Faber Finds. This is basically a print-on-demand offshoot from Faber & Faber whereby old books that might not support normal print runs, but which Faber folk want to see in print, are made available again in POD editions. They're also taking requests for potential titles, and I was thrilled to know that the brilliant Patrick Hamilton's first novel, Monday Morning, is scheduled for later in the year.

So what will the books look like? Nothing special, unfortunately. They have "automatically generated" covers, whatever that means, and they all basically look like this.






I'm not sure if they different colours indicate different genres, the way the original Penguin paperbacks did. I don't really like the typeface (it's very 1983) or the decorative doodads, either. They're inoffensive, I suppose, but nothing great.

Still, if it gets Patrick Hamilton and other writers like Roger Longrigg, Rex Warner and Lionel Davidson back into print, it's not all bad.

Suicide Foiled by Nuclear War

Have you been missing the end-of-the-world posts? Well, here's one for you. It's a rather good book by an author I can't find out anything much more about. The book itself is Few Were Left, a cheery story about a homeless depressive who is about to commit suicide by throwing himself under a New York subway train when total nuclear war erupts.

The would-be suicide ends up as de facto leader of a group of other survivors, all of them protected from the devastation by having been underground when the nuclear missiles went off. They crawl through the tunnels, looking for ways to sustain themselves, and meet up with others. Fights break out, and an already bleak state of affairs deteriorates further.

The cover of my (I think) first-edition Methuen hardback from 1955 is suitably grim and grimy. (Click to get a bigger version.)



The back has a melancholy effect on me, too--who were these authors, all of whom, like Rein, seem to have vanished into the past with their books, unread and unloved?

The cover of Few Were Left was done by John Minton (1917-1957). He was a painter, a very successful illustrator, a theatrical designer and an art teacher. He was also an alcoholic, and (appropriately enough for this post) committed suicide via drug overdose. Frances Spalding produced a biography (John Minton: Dance Till the Stars Come Down), which features this self-portrait on the cover.



Minton's face is probably best-known through a portrait by his close friend, Lucian Freud.