Breasts Seen from Above

An interesting example of marketing at work: a  publisher changes the title and cover design pretty radically between the hardback publication and the paperback version. This is the most unsubtle case of this I've ever seen (and this is no knock on the author: I've really enjoyed Tim Parks's novels and translations over the years, and his NYRB posts about translation and literature are always fascinating.)

Original hardback

Forthcoming paperback

The bust-featuring cover also features a much more lowbrow paper to quote a blurb from.

My original assumption was that this was a case of the publisher desperately compensating for poor hardback sales, but it's more complicated: Sex is Forbidden was Parks's original preferred title, and the title under which the book was published in translation.

Z X Z X Z X Z X ZXZXZXZXZXZXZX [SPACE] "Shit!"

A funny, nostalgic design for The Art of Failure, a new book on the frustrating nature of video games from MIT Press:

(Designer as yet unknown)

Fire, Water

Following this marvellous cover for Ben Marcus's last novel, The Flame Alphabet...

..Peter Mendelsund has done it again with a matching watery cover for Marcus's new story collection. Both books are from Knopf. (See my interview with Peter here.)

Peacocks in Russia

One of the most beautiful books I have bought this year is the new, massive collection of novels, novellas and stories by the great Nikolai Leskov, published by Vintage UK. The cover design is by Suzanne Dean, making glorious use of an illustration by Finnish artist Klaus Haapaniemi. Here are the front and back...

Click for bigger--you really need to

..and here is the full book, shown with the reason for the lack of recent blogging, for scale.

Here is the US edition, which is very elegant, but it can't help but look diminished in comparison.

Click.

From Penguin South Africa, a pair of books describing the author's euthanasia of his mother, and the legal consequences. The covers are really clever: stark and elegant.

Designer unknown. Click for much bigger versions.

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: