Signets, or the Bathos of "Had I But Groaned"

A bit of a filler while I put together something of a little more substance; a bunch of old Signet covers, good and bad (both the covers and the books).

Magnums

(With thanks to the peerless John Self of Asylum, who drew these books to my attention. UPDATE: See the end of the post for more.)

Another imminent set of Penguin re-releases are the Magnum collection, a partnership between Penguin Books and the Magnum photo agency. Magnum is an unusual artistic co-operative of photographers, whose co-founders included the late and very great Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Capa.

These six books, for the most part classics of non-fiction or reportage, each use a dramatic Magnum photo on the cover, and have no text on the front (the title/author circles you can see below are removable stickers). The barcodes on the spines are a little bit ugly, but I guess you can't have everything. (Click for much bigger versions.)








I particularly like the cover for Hersey's (not Hershey, as the cover above has it) Hiroshima, a powerful little book about the nuclear bombing of that city, told by people caught up in the horror. The cover image is of the Peace Dome, a building that was the city's trade centre, and which survived relatively unscathed despite being at the very epicentre of the bomb blast. This photo, by Philip Jones Griffiths, dates from 1995. An earlier edition of Hiroshima from Penguin used a shot from soon after the attack, a scene of horrific devastation captured by Wayne Miller.



I also really, really like the cover to In Cold Blood, though I don't know who did it (UPDATE: See end of post). Interestingly, the cover for A Man on the Moon was not taken on the Moon at all. It's from a collection of photos by Rene Burri called "Space ruins": the remnants of the closed-down bits of the USA's space race installations.

By the way, if you're looking for another heart-breaking Hiroshima image, try this cover. What might at first glance be an ordinary-ish portrait of mother and child is transformed by its context into something horrible.



UPDATE: Mr Self has got his hands on the books, and has kindly filled me in more on the designs.

"The covers are matt (almost untreated?) card stock - which I was surprised by, as for some reason I expected them to be glossy. The writing on the back cover is nicely debossed. The inside covers have photographs overlaid with the usual book blurb (inside front) and a blurb about Magnum (inside back) ... I also got a press release which gives details of all the photos, so the ones you haven't identified are as follows:

In Cold Blood: Photo by Inge Morath (wife of Arthur Miller), taken during the 18 day road trip across the USA made by Morath and Henri Cartier-Bresson en route to the set of the The Misfits. It was Morath's first trip across the US.

The Fight: Photo by Abbas.

Hellfire: Image by Guy le Querrec, taken 8 Sep 1973 (inside images by him and Cartier-Bresson).

Hell's Angels: Photo by Dennis Stock."

New Old Searles, and a Phrase I'll Be Beating to Death

In the comments to this post, talented designer Ingrid Paulson says "I think you've stumbled on a cover meme. Sometimes I'll talk with other book designers in Canada and we'll look back on a season's worth of jackets and say, 'Well, that was a blue season,' or, 'Look at the number of cut-off heads.' Different publishers (even different genres), same visual conclusion. A cover meme. With the internet, I think cover memes are going international."

Cover memes is such a useful phrase for describing this weird confluence of images, where a number of books designed by different people all end up using similar images on their covers (as distinct from when they all use exactly the same image on their covers) that I'm going to steal it, use it, and probably beat it to death.

Here's another: poor, blameless chihuahuas being used to symbolise vacuous wealth, celebrity and mindless label-shopping, presumably thanks to a certain bizarrely famous media whore and socialite.




And in an addendum to my various Ronald Searle posts, its worth noting that new editions of his four books with Geoffrey Willans are coming out in October.






Here are what I believe to be the first edition covers.






UPDATE: By purest chance, I see that BibliOdyssey is showing pages from Searle's Winespeak.

Shock! Horror!

Above is the cover for the recent Pushkin Press edition of the alarmingly young Florian Zeller's novel Julien Parme. It uses an untitled photograph by Australian artist Bill Henson, one of his many moody, shadowy pictures of young people.



This is particularly interesting because Henson was recently the subject of a startling controversy in Australia, in which the country's media and self-appointed commentators went absolutely mental.

Australia has an odd history of censorship. It's an unusually plain-spoken country (example: when the CEO of my bank rang me recently in response to a negative letter I'd written about them to my local newspaper*, he began with, "I understand you're a bit shitted off with us."), where, for the most part, people are pretty relaxed about swearing, sex and violence on the telly and in print.

But Australia has occasional paroxysms of stupidity about "dangerous" art as well. Brett Easton Ellis's American Psycho has to be sold shrinkwrapped in plastic, with a big 'Rated R' sticker on it, to prevent impressionable youths from buying it or from flipping through the pages in bookshops. Laughably, it's completely banned in Queensland. There are no other books to which this law has been applied, other than photographs of hardcore pornography, which are technically illegal outside of Canberra.



The Henson photos were the focus of another of these sporadic eruptions last year. A Sydney gallery was going to host a show of his photos, and sent out invitations featuring one picture of a 13-year-old girl with visible nipples. All hell broke loose. The Prime Minister went on national TV to make a fool of himself, describing Henson's pictures as "absolutely revolting". The Opposition Leader rushed to agree, despite the fact that he (a millionaire ex-banker who tries to claim the common touch by saying that he's "lived in flats") even owns some Henson photographs. Police seized all the photographs and tried to put together an obscenity case.

In the end the police action fell apart, as it should have, and most people calmed the fuck down. You can see most of the exhibition online (though not the photo which triggered all the fuss), and more of Henson's work elsewhere. You can see that particular shot on the cover of a book about the kerfuffle, though it's been carefully cropped to avoid frightening the horses.



* Yes, I am officially becoming an angry old bugger.

Deepaks Everywhere

The wise and perceptive KevinfromCanada drew my attention to another recent theme emerging on a number of literary novel covers: the floating candle/coracle or deepak. He noted its use on three new novels: Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi by Geoff Dyer, Dreams of Rivers and Seas, by Tim Parks, and The Disappeared, by Kim Echlin.






All three of these novels feature Westerners getting lost (emotionally or spiritually) to various degrees in Asia, and to them I'd add a fourth novel, this time a new edition of an older book, Say a Little Mantra for Me, by Yvonne Burgess: a bitterly funny little novel about a woman seeking New Age enlightenment as her all-female family falls apart in 1970s South Africa.



I'm not sure why all use the same sort of image, other than it being an effective shorthand for exotic Indian/Asian spirituality, and the fact that the bright lights and colours of the deepaks against dark, watery backgrounds make for eye-catching imagery.

The Tim Parks cover makes use of a photo by Steve McCurry, one of the best-known photojournalists in the world. His most famous picture is much reproduced on postcards and calendars.



The UK edition of Geoff Dyer's book (the first of the two shown above) is credited to a Marc Quinn. I have no idea if this is the same person as the sculptor responsible for various fairly hideous statues of a half-dressed Kate Moss thrusting her crotch at the people willing to pay vast sums for the works, but it would make the world a more interesting place if it was (especially as the Dyer book features an inpired piss-take of the art shown at the Venice Biennale).



This (the deepak covers, not Kate Moss's crotch) is an unusual case of the same sort of idea apparently occurring to several different book designers independently (the books all have different publishers, in different parts of the world), with the unfortunate result of multiple books' dramatic covers losing some of their effect through familiarity.

UPDATE: Ingrid Paulson, who maintains a fine blog here, designed the Echlin cover. She has let me know that "..it's strange, because initially I looked at Steve McCurry's photographs for inspiration, among others. However, we did a few rounds and nothing was catching with the editors, so the art director suggested this very image used on the cover. There is an important scene in the book that involves a candle ceremony, so it isn't just a facile visual interpretation. But I hear you on how seeing that image everywhere has weakened the impact."