Upcoming British Book Covers

The Queen’s diamond jubilee, the olympic games in London… it’s a big year for Britain. In literature, at least two big names of fiction will be coming out with brand new books later in the year—and the covers of these books have both been revealed in the last few weeks.

One of these much-awaited novels is J.K. Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy, a foray into adult fiction for the immensely famous author and, more importantly, the first book she publishes that has nothing to do with the Harry Potter universe. Her new book sounds extremely British: it tells the story of a rural town left in shock after the death of a parish council member, revealing all the intrigues and feuds that lie behind the community’s idyllic facade.

And the cover is, well, a little bland? I’m not too sure what to think about it. The color pallet and hand-cut font reminds me of the cover for Al Alvarez’s The Writer’s Voice (although maybe not as nice, actually, there’s something squeezed about the way the title is written). I do appreciate that they didn’t put anything other than the author’s name and the title on there; it would’ve been so easy to write “universal bestselling author” or “from the writer who brought you the books that sold the most after the Bible” or something like that. Let’s hope they don’t mess that up before publication. I’m sure the temptation is huge.

And then, as I’ve mentioned earlier this year, Ian McEwan will be publishing a new novel in August: Sweet Tooth. Obviously there isn’t as much hype for this one, but it’s bound to sell decently and get reviewed everywhere and—who knows?—maybe even get long listed for the Booker Prize. We’ll see.

In the meantime, both the British and American covers have been revealed (still no cover in Canada, although we’ll probably get the same one as in Great Britain). Here they are, US cover first, and British cover after:

Comparing them is very interesting, because while the subject is essentially the same (lone woman walking in heels, slightly menacing atmosphere), the treatment is entirely different. The American cover, which I quite like, gets its inspiration from the novel’s 1970′s setting for the font and colour theme, and uses a sober, sepia-toned image. You get the sense of danger in a subtle, elegant way that matches McEwan’s careful prose. On the other hand, the British cover goes all out: apparently based solely on the novel’s spy-genre content, it screams INTRIGUE! MYSTERY! DARK ALLEYS! like a low-brow thriller, complete with awful photoshopped shadow-effects, silhouetted man, and elegant protagonist turned away from the viewer (which is meant to make the whole thing look even more menacing). It’s a complete failure, if you ask me, unless maybe Jonathan Cape, McEwan’s british publisher, are trying to open him up to new readerships by marketing him as “popular” fiction.

What do you think?

One Book, Three Boats

As you may have guessed by now, I love to compare covers of the same book that appear in different places, or else over the course of different editions. Sometimes these comparisons can be very funny because of the wide disparity between covers for the same book — so much so that at times you wonder if the covers belong to the same book at all. The publication of Michael Ondaatje’s new novel The Cat’s Table at the end of the summer has given me am opportunity to compare and contrast the book’s covers in the UK, the US, and Canada. This particular book caught my attention for a comparative study because, unlike what is sometimes seen, all three covers feature the same elements — namely a large boat at sea — but interpret the subject in slightly different ways. 

I’ll start with the US edition, published by Knopf, whose cover caps this post. The image used on the cover, in shades of coal-grey and black, has a nostalgic quality to it. It looks like a grainy, poorly developed black and white photograph. The dreamy effect is hightened by the tight framing of the image on the very front of the boat. I quite like it, although if anything maybe the white border at the top and bottom where the text appears makes it a little bit too serious. 

The Canadian edition, published by McClelland and Steward, has a similarly quirkiness to it, created by the slanting of the photo of the boat. The picture is also taken from a much greater distance, and the entirety of the boat and a swath of grey sea is revealed. A sense of age and nostalgia is signified by the sepia tint, the washed out clouds, and the classic border. The effect of the entire composition is much more conservative and toned down (and even, dare I say, boring) than the US cover, despite the bolder font and use of some color. 

As for the British cover, published by Jonathan Cape, the subject is, again, a boat, but it is treated much more boldly by a cartoonish image — it could be right out of a Tintin album — in tones of white, black, and yellow against a dark sky. The main boat is also flanked by two tug boats, rendered in darker shades, one of which stands at the forefront of the image. Like in the US cover the boat is facing and sailing towards the viewer, which makes the illustration much less static. Moreover the energetic imagery and block-lettered, shadowed font used for the title makes this cover eye-catching and interesting to look at. Both the subject and the aesthetics remind me of the cover for Tagore’s Nationalism, published in the trove of beautiful book covers that is the Penguin Great Ideas series. 

I haven’t read The Cat’s Table so I can’t say if the cover respects the content of the novel (although it looks promising since I know the action takes place on a boat), but I wonder how efficient these covers as stand-alone works of commercial art? I would argue that I find the UK cover more interesting than the others, but do you think there is one that works better than the others aesthetically, or from a marketing standpoint? I’d love to know your thoughts…

Atwood Covers Here and Elsewhere, Continued

My last post was about the covers of Margaret Atwood’s books in the Canada. Now I’d like to turn to the cover designs of her books in the US and the UK. Like McClelland, Atwood’s American publisher, Anchor, also created a consistent template (black strip with authors name and colored strip with novel’s title at the bottom, with the image, usually a collage, taking about two-thirds of the space, at the top). I can’t say they’re as bad as the old Canadian covers, but then they’re not terribly attractive either. There are a few exceptions, however: maybe because they’re the last books of fiction she published, The Blind Assassin, Moral Disorder, Oryx and Crake, and The Year of the Flood have their own individual cover designs (I haven’t included them here). 

In the UK, Atwood’s books are divided between two publishers. Vintage, a publishing house renowned for its stunning cover work, owns the rights for Bodily Harm, Life Before Man, Bluebeard’s Egg, Dancing Girls, and The Handmaid’s Tale. They’ve created a consistent templates for their catalogue of Atwood paperbacks. The other covers feature figures cut out in paper, which are a little bit strange but certainly intriguing. I love the typography they use to write Atwood’s name, with the leafy double-Os.

The exception in the Vintage Atwood catalogue is The Handmaid’s Tale, for which they have no less than four different paperback covers: one as part of their normal Atwood series, one for their Vintage Classics series, on in thier Vintage Future Classics, as well as a special edition for the 21st anniversary of the publishing house. 

Virago, which has the publishing rights for many more of Atwood’s books in the UK, like The Blind Assassin, Alias Grace, Cat’s Eye, The Rober Bride, and so on, commissioned talented graphic designer Nathan Burton to create the covers for their collection of Atwoods. The result is stunning, and the series remains one of my favourite cover designs ever. These have all been showcased on the Caustic Cover Critic’s blog before, I put a few just to give you an idea. Aren’t they wonderful?

Atwood Covers Here and Elsewhere

This is the North American cover for Margaret Atwood's book on science-fiction, out in October. I'm not entirely sure what to think about this one; the angle in the writing at the top makes me a little dizzy.

When a writer has been productive over a large number of years and has reached a certain level of prominence, you’d think this author’s publishers would take the opportunity to create elegant, consistent designs in order to make the books stand out as a group. In the case of Margaret Atwood, the famous Canadian poet, novelist, inventor, and ecological activist, this opportunity was certainly there, although what her Canadian, American, and British publishers did with the designs of her books has not necessarily given the most fortunate results. 

Same book, different cover. The British cover design for In Other Worlds uses the same elements as the North American cover, but has fit them into the rest of their Atwood collection.

For one, Atwood’s Canadian publisher, McClelland, used to have horrendous covers for her novels, featuring sepia-toned, blurry images of naked women and odd collages. All the covers had the same, plain black border. I’ve put some bellow. Most, as you see, are not particularly attractive, some are interesting, others are plain ugly. 

More recently, McCelland have released new paperback Atwoods, with generally nicer monochrome images and more modern (although a tad redundant) font work. Although some of these new covers remain a little bit unremarkable, they’re all a great improvement on the old ones, and some of them are quite good. I especially like when the photographs have been tampered a bit to look old or grainy. The covers I prefer in this collection are Alias Grace and The Handmaid’s Tale.

As an aside, the image used on the cover of The Blind Assassin is the same one Penguin used on the cover of their Red Classics edition of The Great Gatsby.

For Atwood’s American and UK covers, see the next post!

Harry Potter Cover Design

Millions of people around the world have read the Harry Potter books, but not everyone has the same covers on their editions. This is the famous Bloomsbury children's edition cover for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the final book.

J.K. Rowling’s series of books for children, Harry Potter, has become the world’s most popular and lucrative publishing venture, but very few people talk about the book’s covers. Naturally, because these covers get so much visibility  (for a very long time, before the publication of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the only clues we had about the book were the released Bloomsbury cover image, with its cryptic goblin hand holding the sword of Gryffindor) the covers are immediately recognizable, but people don’t often pause to study them, both individually and as a group. Because Harry Potter is a long series, it’s important that there be a certain amount of continuity between the covers, so that they be immediately recognizable as Harry Potter, while each having their own, vivid individuality. The covers for Harry Potter must have been all the more difficult because 1) the series is very long, so the cohesion must not stifle the individuality of each cover (something like the British edition of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials wouldn’t have applied, because the covers are too much alike) and 2) at each book in the series (except the last one), the next books weren’t written yet, so the sense of cohesion had to be projected in the possibilities of the following books.

Since I’m Canadian, I’m used to seeing the UK Harry Potter covers, because in Canada the series is published jointly between Bloomsbury and Raincoast books. The covers have a nice sense of cohesion, but, interestingly, are painted by different artists; the last three covers, however, were done by Jason Cockcroft. They usually show realistic paintings of particular moments in the book. What I’ve always really liked about the Bloomsbury covers is that they have little surprises on the spine, the back covers, and tucked away on the inside of the flaps. The back cover of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, for example shows a deserted staircase inside Hogwarts with a ghost floating near the top. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows has several very important secondary images on it, like the drawings of a stag patronus and Nagini enclosed in a magical orb on the flaps, and the symbol of the deathly hallows at the top of the spine. The artist who painted the covers illustrations for Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Cliff Wright posted so preparatory artwork on his website, as well as communications he had with the publisher and Jo Rowling.

These are all the Bloomsbury children's covers. (I'm sorry about the quality, I couldn't find a picture online with all 7 books in the same image, so I photographed my own copies.)

Eventually, Bloomsbury also started publishing so-called adult editions of all the Harry Potter books alongside the normal editions, with darker covers usually portraying a magical item that appears in the book (the sorcerer’s stone, the Slytherin locket, the Half-Blood Prince’s copy of Advanced Potion-Making) presumably to make versions of the books more easily marketable with an older audience, or an initial audience that was growing older. For me, however, although these covers have a greater cohesion between each title, they don’t represent the true essence of Harry Potter. Moreover, I find the use of heavily digitized images in the last few covers a little unfortunate.

The darker, adult covers, published by Bloomsbury.

Several months ago, Bloomsbury also launched a third series of newly designed Harry Potter books, in an effort to introduce a repackaged version of the books to a new generation of readers. Bloomsbury redesigned the way Harry Potter was written on the covers, creating a golden wave of cursive writing underlined with a magical swish, and commissioned Scottish linocut (which is increasingly used in book design) artist Clare Melinksy to create the illustrations. Although these can be a little bit stiff, I quite like the designs, which have the added interest of illustrating different moments in the books from the ones on the original Bloomsbury covers (for example, the game of wizard’s chess in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone). The white backgrounds also show off the images beautifully and makes the covers a little more modern, which is a good thing. Magic doesn’t need to meed dark and musty.

The signature covers, with linocut illustrations by Clare Melinsky.

Rowling’s American publisher, Scholastic, hired the same artist, Mary GrandPré, to draw the illustrations for the covers of all seven books. The result is one of great cohesion, although there’s a more marked similarity between the first three (which show action scenes and try to include many elements from the book) and last three covers (which are more monochrome and sparse, with a lot more emphasis on Harry himself). Harry is depicted on all the covers with the same pastel podginess. It’s also these covers, I think, which the gave the movie title screens the famous P leg shaped like a thunderbolt. Another interesting aspect of the Scholastic covers is that the title of the volumes are written differently and integrated in some way within the illustrations, instead of being blandly written at the top, as in the Bloomsbury covers.

The seven Scholastic covers, drawn by Mary GrandPré.

Harry Potter, of course, has also been translated in 70 languages (including Greek and Latin), and, although many publishers recycle the American covers, lots of countries have their own distinct editions. I’ve always found the French ones, by Gallimard, particularly ugly, but I thought it would be interesting to take a look at what the books looked like in other languages. Pleasant surprises include the German and Swedish covers. 

The French Gallimard cover for Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. I'm not entirely sure why, but I've always found them a bit unfortunate.

This is the French cover for the last book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. It's interesting how bland it is, and how contemplative Harry is on the cover, compared to the original Bloomsbury cover, which is so full of action and colour.

Despite the ugly covers, I do like the elegant box set Gallimard did, with a much nicer illustration appearing when all the spins are together.

I really love the Swedish covers, which are wonderfully dark and detailed. This is the one for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.

The swedish cover for Harry Potter and the Deahtly Hallows, which kind of looks like a manga cover, but I find works very well. I love how the swedish covers cater for both adults and children.

The Netherlandish covers are a bit more unfortunate because they use such poorly made computer images. The little doe patronus head that pops up in the author's name on the cover of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is especially hilarious.

I actually quite like the German covers, which are a little bit crazy. They always have Harry looking inquisitively at the reader. This one is for Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.

This is the Italian cover for Harry Potter and the Chamber of secrets. The italian covers are a lot more imaginative and dreamy; this one shows Harry flying in what must be Tom Riddle's diary.

The Danish covers are very realistic, and look aimed for an older audience because they're often violent, and even disturbing. This is the cover for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, with Harry leading an army of magical creatures against Voldemort.

Finally, in the hypothetical covers category, graphic designer M. S. Corley has created these covers, which are meant to look like vintage Penguin covers. They're simply stunning.

NYRB Classics

I’ve been following the exciting new titles published by the New York Review of Books for a few years, and now that I’ve finally read a few of their books I can confirm for myself that this is a truly exciting and necessary publishing house. NYRB Classics, specifically, specialize in the publication of lost classics, with an emphasis on discovery and difference: “The series includes nineteenth century novels and experimental novels, reportage and belles lettres, tell-all memoirs and learned studies, established classics and cult favorites, literature high, low, unsuspected, and unheard of.” The series has also published more well-known authors by giving exposure to the works on the fringe of their oeuvres. For instance, they’ve collected some of Mavis Gallant’s short stories under Varieties of Exile, The Cost of Living, and Paris Stories; they’ve also given a second life to Henry James’ late novel The Outcry and created a collection of his New York stories (edited and introduced by Colm Tóibín, who portrayed Henry James so beautifully in The Master), including the novel Washington Place.

I’m much interested in the literature related to Paris in the 1920s, so the first New York Review book I read was Memoirs of Montparnasse, by the Montréal poet John Glassco. Glassco, a McGill student, fled to Paris toward the end of that mythical decade and rubbed shoulders with people like Gertrude Stein, Hemingway, and Ford Maddox Ford. The so-called memoir, originally published in 1970 — by which time Paris in the 20s had already become mythical, Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast having been published in 1964 — was later revealed by critics to be in large part fictitious reconstructions. That does not change the fact that it is a compelling and very pleasant read. It’s also a rather sad story; as one of Glassco’s friends remarks in the book, he “arrived a little late” to the party that was Paris, bringing “a fresh vision to bear on a dying epoch”. Glassco eventually contracted tuberculosis and was forced to return to Montreal in 1931 in order to get treatment. The party was over for him, as well. As far as I know, the book was never republished after 1970, until NYRB came out with their edition in 2007. 

Another NYR books I read were Grief Lessons, which is made up of 4 plays by Euripides, translated (and with six excellent accompanying essays) by the poet/classicist Anne Carson. Euripides is always fantastic, of course, but these translations really breathe new life and and emphasize the twisted morals and sheer oddity of the worlds the fifth century Greek tragedian creates in his plays. The book includes some of the lesser known works, like Herakles and Alkestis. The final NYR book I read a few weeks ago (and unfortunately had to leave behind me in England) was Chaos and Night, a short novel by the French writer Henry de Montherlant, about a bitter old Spanish man, exiled in France after the civil war in Spain. It’s a sad, moving book about disillusion and old age, and the character’s ability to face the truth about his identity and his past.

The other two important aspects of NYRB, which makes it so recommendable, is that they do a lot of translations, like Chaos and Night, thus giving the English speaking world access to some outstanding material they wouldn’t otherwise get a chance to enjoy (we all know how rare that is, with recent statistics about the poverty of books in translations published in the US), as well as creating really great covers. Many of them have been showcased on the excellent Caustic Cover Critic — I particularly liked the article on Neil Krug photographs, one of which was used on a French crime novel by J. P. Manchette (the first one, bellow). I don’t usually like book covers that always reuse the same template, but in the case of NYRB, because they use such beautiful illustrations, I find the small square upper-center with the title and author is surprisingly effective in creating a cohesion in the design of the series, while allowing for interesting and aesthetic covers that look really great. I’ve put some of my favourites bellow, which also show off the wide range of the series in terms of genre.

NYRB are always looking for new classics to publish, and they’re open to suggestions on their website. If you think a great, long-lost work of literature — be it fiction, memoir, or other — needs to be rediscovered, drop them a line. If you’re the first to recommend the title and they publish it, they’ll send you a free copy!

Reading with Intent

Reading with purpose? Don't just pick up any old book; you've got to choose it carefully.

While it is true that I always know what book I’m going to read next (as if having some kind of hole between books could open up a chasm of non-reading out of which I could never emerge), my choice of books has generally been whimsical. Except for school books, I read what I like, what I think will interest me, what I expect will be good for me, and what trusted friends or reviews recommend. However, I always admire readers who read book with intent, according to some kind of plan, which they set up for themselves and follow carefully, sometimes in the hope that some kind of literary (or other) illumination will ensue. These long-term literary cures seem to be all the rave these days, and countless blogs detail the lives of readers as they lumber through lists of must-read books or calculate the average number of pages per hour (reminding me of A. J. “The Know-It-All” Jacobs, who spent a year reading all 32 volumes of the Encyclopædia Britannica) in order to… well what exactly? Why would you read according to a plan? In order to learn something about yourself by implementing restrictions on what books you read? In an effort to gain sovereignty over your reading habits by setting your own limits? So that you are forced to read stuff you know you should but never get around to? Let’s take a look at a few people who read or have read by design, and see what they’ve gotten out of the experience.

The first type of intentional reading I encountered was Susan Hill’s memoir Howard’s End is on the Landing, in which the author recounts her year of reading “from home” (you can read the introduction here). Hill explains that she has a country home full of books, many of which she hasn’t read, while she has always wanted to reread many others. The solution: Hill locked herself up in her dusty old home for a year and read, refusing to buy new books and minimizing her use of the internet during that time, as a way to get to know her library again, “to repossess [her] books, to explore what [she] had accumulated over a lifetime of reading, and to map [her] house of many volumes”. The idea is interesting, but the memoir she wrote as a result — although I was a very excited about it at first — turned out to be rather uninteresting. Indeed, Hill’s perusing of her bookshelves is a way to recall her past, and to revel in some poorly dissimulated name dropping. The book could by a bibliophile’s dream, a charming account of the pleasures of reading and rereading; it turns out to be the wild fancy of a frustrated old English lady with something to prove. I’m being harsh, but then, I’ve had something against Susan Hill every since her unnecessary rant from last year about being asked to display a short story she wrote anonymously beside stories by other writers, some of them — God forbid! — amateurs.

At least the cover is nice.

On a more human (and certainly less self-indulgent) note, last week saw the long-awaited publication of Tolstoy and the Purple Chair: My Year of Magical Reading, by Nina Sankovitch. As a way to recover from her sister’s death, Sankovitch, after three hectic years, decided to stop and sit and read — one book a day for a year. She is living proof that bibliotherapy works, that there is something fundamentally human and helpful in literature. For Sankovitch, turning to reading allowed her to slow down, to pace her life and find a new center, and, in her own words, “not a way to rid myself of sorrow but a way to absorb it.” The phenomenon of intentional reading is also greatly aided by the internet, whose new platforms urges people to constantly update, to always keep everyone out there posted. Nina Sankovitch therefore decided to blog about her year of reading, writing a review for all 365 of them on her website Read All Day. She’s also very active on Twitter and now writes book reviews for The Huffington Post. I haven’t read Tolstoy and the Purple Chair yet, but it sounds very promising, and since I’m incapable of not getting books about books I will no doubt be reading it soon.

Sankovitch's highly praised grief memoir cum reading diary.

The final reader I wanted to talk about is a recent discovery of mine; I found out about her blog by seeing a picture of her library on a “my bookshelves” picture group on Flickr. This picture immediately caught my attention (and the attention of many other bookshelf-savvy commenters) as, with its rows and rows of glistening, faded penguin covers (orange, blue, green, and the unifying beige stripes), this woman’s bookcase is simply stunning. Her blog is called A Penguin a week, her goal is to collect all 3,000 penguin titles published before 1970 (they’re numbered from 1-3,000, which facilitates the collecting part) and to read and review one of the books each week (she now owns about 1,500 of them). The rationale behind the project is that the only interest nowadays in these old penguin titles is purely aesthetic, for the book design and the history of publishing paperbacks, and while many of these titles are certainly good books, they remain unread because many of them aren’t in print anymore. The blog seeks to give these books a new life and rediscover a number of long-lost, really good books — saving them from the abyss of time. It’s a highly intriguing, laudable project.

Ample proof that books do, indeed, furnish a room (or two).

At the heart of all these purposeful readings is an urge to discover, or rediscover, something that was lost — either in the reader or in what is being read. Perhaps the intentional reader feels that his or her relationship with books has become too whimsical and fleeting. You read a book, and then you put the book down and read another one. For all the time and energy you spent reading and thinking about the first book, once you’ve turned the last page, you move on quickly to something else. What remains? In truth, very little. Perhaps giving a purpose to one’s readings is a way to fit all the books one reads within something more vast, and more lasting. It’s a way to implement order upon the act of reading, a way to keep track and leave traces. As for the blogs and memoirs that emerge from these (apparently life changing) reading experiences, they are definitely a way to break the boundary of solitude which usually rules upon the act of reading; it’s a way of reaching out to the community of readers. That, maybe, is the wider purpose of these journeys: to communicate and instigate more widely an interest in books.