Heaps of Hoyningen-Huene

The cover of an interesting-looking new novel from Serpent's Tail (Petitie Mort by Beatrice Hitchman)...

..also seems strangely familiar: this photo by George Hoyningen-Huene has graced (I us the word advisedly) a number of book covers in recent years:

..and not only in English:

This photo is much too classy for horrible old Ayn Rand--a  fistful of dog turds wrapped in cellophane would be more appropriate.

A Japanese publication, the title of which translates as 'The History of World Costume'

UPDATE: Sharp-eyed commenter Gervase Fen pointed out another, the about-to-be-published Black Roses, which oddly enough also uses the identical typeface to Petite Mort.

Radicals

The first of Verso's Radical Thinkers series of philosophy paperbacks have been out for a while, but I didn't see them until the most recent releases in the series came out in January. They've taken the potentially difficult task of illustrating complex ideas and tackled it using elegant, sometimes abstract and sometimes punning, line illustrations and patterns on a clean white background. I would once have suspected it would take a gun to the head to make me read more Baudrillard, but now I realise it might just take a pretty face!

Here are some of my favourites from the series so far. Click for bigger versions.

For more Wilhelm Reich sex madness, see this post

Infernal Addendum

To anyone who has ever corresponded with me because of this blog, I apologise that you have probably received a spam email recently via my hacked Yahoo account. Some bastard in Brazil has broken into my account via some recently discovered security holes in Yahoo, and spammed every single person I have ever emailed. If Dante were alive, I'm sure he'd be proposing a new tenth circle of hell for people like that.

Infernal

Penguin seems to be going Dante crazy at the moment. Above is a new cover design for a new Penguin Classics UK edition of Inferno. They don't seem to have matching versions for Purgatorio and Paradiso, but then, as with Proust, most people don't make it past volume one, so perhaps they know their market. To be fair, Inferno is the most entertaining of the three: Dante is at his best consigning everyone who ever pissed him off to the flames, and less fun when he's just going on about Beatrice.

The above edition joins the recent hardback version, with a Coralie Bickford-Smith jacket:

Penguin Classics US, meanwhile, have just released a Graphic Classics edition of the full Divine Comedy, with cover artwork by Eric Drooker. I only know Drooker's work from his excellent wordless graphic novel, Flood. His other work includes a visual adaption of Ginsberg's Howl!, but as I pretty much loathe Ginsberg and his poetry, I haven't investigated that one.

Click to see it in all its glory

To see some of Flood, visit Drooker's site here.

Of course, none of these have quite the same effect as this edition of Inferno from Del Rey. I can't think of anyone who will buy this book because of its cover or videogame association who won't be bitterly disappointed, and anyone who wants the book for its literary value is not going to go with this edition. It's a perfect example of a misconceived book.

I don't remember scenes like this from the book:

(Typed laboriously while trying to wrangle an 11-day-old baby, so please excuse any typos...)

Last week I was interviewed on the IEEE Techwise Conversations podcast, talking about Whiskey Priest Books and the practicalities how to be a not-very-rich publisher of lost classics. Another chap on the program has published nearly 1,000,000 books, and makes rather more money--but at what cost?!!

Whisky Priest Books discussed:

So if you'd like to enjoy my honeyed tones, listen here or there.

A Possible Disruption in Services

A quick note and apology for what I suspect will be a disruption to blogging over the next few months, as I will soon bugger off on 3 months of paternity leave. Knee-deep in infant's poo and vomit as I suspect I may be, blogging will probably become less frequent.

This, despite my intention to be an example of:

who aims to be able to say:

and definitely hopes NOT to be thinking:

Every Christian Needs a Chainsaw

Thanks to the Guardian, who covered Caustic Cover Critic not too long ago, I now know of Lousy Book Covers, which everyone enjoys the awful category here should visit. Warning: if you use the Archive link, your eyes may bleed. Some of LBC's recent highlights include:

And then there's Najgorsze okładki, a site doing which has just sterling work in the same area, shaming the (self-)publishers of Poland: