Not Sure What to Make of This

I spend $1.60 on this book the other day:

It's in lovely shape, considering it probably actually is 50 years old, and the paper dust jacket lacks a library-style mylar sheaf. (The actual cover is black hardcover, with white lettering on the spine.) The first image is the entirety of the copyright page. It's worth more than the buck-sixty I spent on it, but I'm not sure how much more--early book club edition copies seem to run anywhere from $25 to about $450, depending on the impression or printing or condition or author's signature. That's in comparison to non book club first editions, which seem to fall more in the $600 to $27 000 range.

The cover image sure beats the image on my paperback copy, which seems to be the most common mass-market version.

My Nicest Book -- Dead Souls (in Russian)

 

This is a 1974 edition of Dead Souls.  Purchased for me in St. Petersburg by a fellow Slavic Studies student. Cheers, F.C.!

 

This is inside the front cover.

 

This is an example of the pages and illustrations inside, although it looks more like a confusing picture of a cheap jade elephant. I was having trouble figuring out how to keep the book open without getting my fingertips in the picture. The elephant may not have been the best compromise. 

  

This is the back cover, complete with an inscription. I think the jade elephant is marginally less conspicuous here--although my homemade macro studio is more obvious. 

Gah

So, I bought this book the other day:

If I'd gotten a load of this when I was a kid, it would have haunted my dreams.

Patricia Wentworth

Patricia Wentworth's Miss Silver mysteries are pretty much a straight-up rip-off of Miss Marple. Sure, the characters' detecting methods are different--Miss Silver exploits her governessy authority over middle class characters where Miss Marple pretends to be flustered or befuddled to play up her apparent harmlessness--but they are both Victorian-style spinster lady detectives who knit as they detect, so there's a considerable overlap. (Dorothy Sayers's Miss Climpson, a secondary character in a few of the Peter Wimsey books, is another variation on the type; she's more emphatically Victorian than Miss Marple, and craftier than Miss Silver, and I don't recall many references, if any, to her knitting.)

Miss Marple's narratives sometimes strain credulity a wee bit--there seems to be a disproportionate amount of violent crime in her neck of the woods--but not to the extent that Wentworth's stories do. Christie wrote less than 15 books or story collections featuring Miss Marple, however, where Wentworth made use of Miss Silver more than 30 times, probably exhausting the possible uses of her spinster detective. (Christie was able to get way more mileage out of her eccentric Belgian former policeman, Hercule Poirot.) I think I've written this before, but Wentworth has to work awfully hard to insert Miss Silver into some plots; I suspect she's aware that few characters would cheerfully hire an elderly lady as a private detective, and so throws up her hands and resorts to something implausible just to get the story rolling. Hence, she half-heartedly has Miss Silver vacationing with her niece in the same town where an infamous crime takes place. Or happen to witness a faked shoplifting incident. Or be on the scene investigating a more minor crime before a murder takes place, rendering her available to "chaperone" ladies during their interrogation by official police. Pretty much all of her books also feature a young couple that can only be united by the successful resolution of the mystery; often, one half of the couple knows someone whose own happy marriage was enabled by Miss Silver solving an earlier crime in another book. Plus, Wentworth throws a couple of policemen with loads of social and professional connections into many of the stories, both of whom are always happy to have Miss Silver sort out their cases.

I've read a number of brief articles or blurbs suggesting that Miss Silver mysteries have been unjustly forgotten, but they really aren't as good as Christie's stories in the same vein. They're not only derivative, they're more obviously formulaic. I like them, but they're pretty fluffy.


The Wentworth books I own have pretty harmless cover designs--nothing as awful or just plain ugly as some of my mass-produced Christie paperbacks. This copy of Death At Deep End (a.k.a. Anna, Where Are You?), for example, features the worst of the covers I own. While the actual illustration is pretty stupid, it's not badly drawn, and it's not completely irrelevant to the book's content. The typeface of "Brilliant as Agatha Christie!" looks pretty low-rent, and its placement emphasizes the dead space on the cover all the more; if it weren't there, I feel like the cover would be about 10% better.

Yes, I did throw a completely random percentage into that last sentence, but otherwise, I think that the point stands: it's just not much of a design, and the type slapped across the top of the cover adds a touch of ineptness.




My copy of Wicked Uncle features a cover design that I've seen more often for Wentworth's books. Again, I think the design is neither terrible nor very good. I'm not crazy about all the white space inherent in this design, and find the really long quotation on this particular cover busy. But although I think the cover illustration is too cartoony for even a "cosy" murder mystery, at least I can understand the reasoning underlying that choice i.e. playing up the "cosy" angle. (After all, in a cosy mystery, the murder victim usually deserves his or her fate, so the death isn't really random or scary or a tragedy; if any murder can be called harmless, cosy murders are harmless.)

Still, this kind of cover seems...grandmotherly. Matronly? Spinsterish? I don't know. All it's missing is some kind of stylized feline nosing around the knitting in the logo. I'd kind of feel more embarrassed reading this publicly than I would reading a more luridly designed book.




I do quite like the recent cover series from Hodder's editions of Wentworth's books, with illustrations taken from advertisements circa the time period many of the books were originally published.

Sometimes the product advertised is obvious: 

And sometimes the product being advertised is... not so obvious:

Not all of the drawings are as good as these examples--I have one featuring a sketchy generic blonde standing in a featureless grey-white void--but I find the idea stylish and the uniformity of the covers pretty appealing:




Nice, right?

Christie Covers

I recently bought a pantload of Agatha Christie books from a second-hand store that was selling them off at 50 cents a copy. Most of them were paperbacks from the seventies and eighties, with a few hardcovers and more recent paperbacks thrown in. A lot of the books were from the same publishing house, Fontana, which seemed to favour pretty bad covers.

This is one of their better covers:


This is from the school of "photograph three items relevant to the plot" mystery-novel cover design, but the image itself is better than most--I think it's actually a photorealistic illustration, and not a photograph, which was a good choice for an image that features a stuffed-weasel-thing so prominently. The illustrated version is more stylish and less creepy than a plastic-eyed photograph would have been. (Although, I know I have read this book, and I honestly can't remember where the weasel-stoat creature comes into the story.)

This book cover follows roughly the same design as the one above, although I prefer the previous cover's fonts, and the white band across the bottom of the cover, to this mild tweaking of the format. While this drawing is done in the same skilled photorealistic way as the previous cover, the items illustrated are way more off-putting. I think, as a general principal, I would omit shrunken heads from the cover of a book titled anything other than Shrunken Heads.

This cover would be about ten times better if it had omitted the hand with the chocolate and bullet in the foreground. The illustrator seems to work better with nice straight lines and architectural detail and even reflections than with the always-difficult details of the human hand. At the very least, that nail polish colour was a bad decision.

This cover has a little too much going on, and none of it is drawn particularly well. The way the doorway and the figure in the doorway shade into the void is the first bad touch. The decision to put the flower vase somewhere off the cover but have the flowers themselves drip all over the foreground also seems bizarre, until you realize that the ornate clock had to be crammed in there, too. And I cannot make sense of the flamey-fire-cloudy business shooting out of the clock--that's about what it looks like when you're holding the actual physical copy of this book in your hands.

This cover is less willy-nilly than the one for A Murder Is Announced, but it's still not very well-drawn. The angle of the book when I took this picture actually minimized the problems with proportions--the girl's mouth and jaw seem out of whack both in relation to the giant flower and to the way the head behind that flower ought to be shaped. The effect is unsettling, but I'm not convinced that was the intention.

This is the lone bad cover not from Fontana that I am including here, and it is an excellent example of the "photograph three items" style of cover. I find it notable mostly because the lighting has turned the cat dim and cloudy, as though it were badly edited into this background from an entirely different photograph. The book is old enough that I can't tell if the cat was always dim, or if that is the peculiar and unforeseen result of the colour gradually fading.

And this is my favourite of the covers I picked up: so pulpy. The event that is illustrated actually kind of does happen in the book, but the character is not the kind of lady who dies her hair platinum blonde and runs to the cliffside in a negligee and leopard-print coat. I would be interested to know if this was an existing illustration that the designer noticed could be used here, or if this was a deliberate attempt to sex up the story.

My other pulp cover is less impressive:It's still a pretty stylish/stylized cover, and I like the simplicity; I guess I just wish the background was any colour other than mustard-yellow.

Sayers Covers

Because mystery novels from the 1920s and 1930s were a) hugely popular and b) paperback-format friendly, pretty much all of the books by the major writers from that era, whether cozy or hard-boiled, feature a range of covers from wonderfully apt to puzzling, odd, or off-putting.

Dorothy L. Sayers is one of the less prolific writers from the period. Agatha Christie wrote at least 80 mystery novels and had two major recurring detective-characters; Ngaio Marsh wrote 32 books featuring Roderick Alleyn; not counting posthumous releases, Margery Allingham published 20 books featuring Albert Campion. A slightly later writer who was strongly influenced by Christie, Patricia Wentworth, wrote 32 books featuring her Miss Marple-style spinster detective, Miss Silver. In comparison, the Lord Peter Wimsey books amount to only fourteen titles, although a few additional short stories do appear in a few other story collections. Maybe the more limited number of books prevented cover design teams from succumbing to fatigue, which I think is at work in some of the "slap together three concrete items relevant to the plot and photograph it" style of covers I see on some Christie titles. Fourteen books are not inconsiderable, but the covers for Sayers's books (at least the ones that I happen to own) tend to be much nicer than some of the covers for detective fiction by writers from roughly the same time period.


This is one of the older style of paperbacks I've picked up over the years, dating to sometime in the late seventies, probably. While it's not fantastic, it's also not bad--certainly, it's better than most of the seventies-era book designs I happen to own, whether literary or genre fiction. The book-title-to-author-name ratio is more radical than on other editions, but Sayers's name is always bigger than the book's name. "Dorothy L. Sayers" actually tells you more about the story you're going to read than a generic-mystery title Strong Poison. Also of note is the fact that this is my personal favourite of her books (along with Murder Must Advertise, which is actually a rare example of a book with a relevant and not-exactly-generic title).


This is also an older paperback, from the mid-eighties, and to me it looks like a circa-1986 idea of vintage Englishness. This is possibly my least favourite of the Wimsey covers I own. Again, it isn't terrible, but it is busy, with the Wimsey caricature, the addition of Harriet Vane's name above the title, some gratuitous lines surrounding Sayers's last name, and the quotation from the LA Times. The optic-illusion-ish check on the dead man's shirt isn't helping the overall situation. A narrower range of colours for the illustration, and a relocation of some print below the picture, might improve the cover, but I suspect it's just plain trying to communicate too much information at-a-glance.


This one is not a good cover by any means, but it's so bare bones that there is not much to offend. Four titles, the author's name in a different-coloured band, a drawing of two guys in full evening dress standing in a blue void. Bunter looks all right, if rather saucy-Cockney (which he emphatically isn't in the books), but Wimsey's face is a little...off. The shading on his face is heavy-handed and his lined hair looks like the kind of hair that I, who am not a professional illustrator, would draw. Drawing him with the monocle-in was probably a mistake, given the illustrator's apparent abilities.

This is a nice stylized sort of cover that seems to have been available for about two decades (eighties and nineties), with period-appropriate illustrations and a good font. I've got nothing bad to say about any of the covers I've seen in this series.

This is the most recent style of covers for a series-reissue, and it's one that I like quite a bit. While I'm not always crazy about photographs, these deliberately vintage pictures really work. I've seen a few of these covers, and most of them are careful not to show the pictured person's full face, which keeps the covers abstract despite other period details in the photos.

This cover includes almost as much information as the Busman's Honeymoon cover above, moreover, but has managed it much better. Here's the narrower colour-scale I was talking about; no one slapped gratuitous lines and frames all over the place to split up the pockets of information; the text spacing makes sense. The end product doesn't look all clip-arty the way the Busman's Honeymoon final product does.

I guess I have a lot of negative things to say about that cover described above as "not terrible," but, really, its clumsiness isn't totally off-putting. If the illustrator for the Omnibus above had also drawn a whole bizarrely-scaled but detailed background, and inserted those shading-heavy well-dressed characters into it, that would probably have been a god-awful cover, but the relative restraint there makes the final product okay (if a little amateurish looking, which is a problem throughout that edition--it's possibly the most typo-ridden book I own). I'll take some pictures of the some of the seventies- and eighties-era Agatha Christie paperbacks I've got to really illustrate "terrible" in this genre; there are a few doozies.

Faulkner Covers

My Faulkner paperbacks tend to feature unsavoury cover images.

The editions that slap a nice harmless photograph of the author on the cover strike me as the most successful covers, aesthetically. Faulkner looks good and literary, with his sweater-and-suit outfits, his pipes, his dashing hair and moustaches. The off-putting Faulkner covers arise when designers attempt to illustrate the concepts or themes strongly associated with his work--the stagnant South, family secrets, racial tensions, fraught inheritances, etc. These are all excellent and worthy concepts, but "Southern Gothic" isn't something easily illustrated without being laughable. I own five Faulkner novels, and my editions of his books have uniformly bad covers. Faulkner's books seem to pose a particularly difficult challenge to book cover designers, however. Not many current editions of his books have covers that'll knock your socks off; many of Vintage's more recent trade paperback covers aren't much better than the ones on my crappy old mass-market paperbacks. In fact,the newer book cover for Sanctuary bites its concept from the 1970s-era Light in August pictured here.

The current Vintage cover series seems to have opted to illustrate the environmental Southernness of the books. These covers display window panes with condensation, massing storm clouds and lush Southern greenery, usually in a bruised yellow / purple colour palette that could be an indirect indication about the "sicknesses" that emerge in those settings. Someone clearly put some thought into how to indicate the books' contents while also developing visual themes usable on all of the Faulkner books, regardless of the indivual text's content. As a result, on the one hand, the storm cloud cover for The Sound and the Fury seems to indicate that the designers asked themselves "What is the easiest way to illustrate that title?" and called it a day. On the other hand, the cover for Go Down, Moses is appealing and historically specific in ways that work much better than some of the vague, "atmospherically" Southern imagery. (After a quick search, I found that Eudora Welty took that photo, I'm guessing during her stint with the WPA, which means that the photo probably shows a scene more or less contemporaneous with Faulkner's writing).

My books' covers, pictured above, are for editions issued over a range of decades (as far as I can tell--the dating is imprecise in some of the older mass market paperbacks). The Sound and the Fury cover is from the 1950s, the Sartoris from the 1960s, the Light in August from the 1970s, and the As I Lay Dying from the 1980s. Only the Sartoris is a non-Vintage edition. The problem with most of these is not so much the design concepts, but the bad art plugged into those designs. The cover concept for Sartoris is fine, but the smudgy execution is not so hot. As I Lay Dying is cartoony and lurid, which isn't exactly incompatible with Faulkner's literary aesthetics, I guess, but it doesn't make me want to read the story that image illustrates. The Sound and the Fury cover makes more sense after you've read the book. However, at first glance, I thought it illustrated mis-matched convicts escaped from prison and fleeing the law while still shackled together. The cover colour is also awful. My Light in August has an okay cover that is actually more clever than I realized at first glance--it's the old condensation-on-the-window-pane image, but shot at an angle that makes the blind pull also suggestive of the gallows. However, the image in and of itself is kind of boring.

Nonetheless, it's better than this: I really don't understand what sold this cover aesthetic to the people at Vintage.

A tangential point: when it comes to Southern Gothic, I prefer Flannery O'Connor to Faulkner. I don't see her books as often, though, so I don't have the impression that her covers are doing a disservice to her books. Nonetheless, given her eschatological / Catholic apocalypticism, I'd expect more Christian-style iconography on her books; however, beyond the occasional patterned cross, the more dominant imagery for her book covers tends to be bird imagery (birds and peacock feathers). That more specific unifying imagery seems better than the rather generic imagery of "the South" used on the covers of Faulkner's books.

Dahl Covers

Roald Dahl was either my favourite or second-favourite writer when I was a kid (he and Judy Blume would have been jockeying for the top spot). I obsessively checked and re-checked his books out of my grade school library, but owned few of them. Since then, I've managed to pick up seven of my own--two are adult titles (Switch Bitch and a short story collection), but the other five are children's books, most of them second-hand.


This is what the Roald Dahl books looked like when I was little--brightly colored border, white frame, a cover illustration inset that looked like the drawings inside the book. This is pretty much the exact version of the book my grade school library had. Danny, Champion of the World was not one of my favourites among Dahl's books, though, and I probably wouldn't have bought it, not even second-hand, if it hadn't been this particular copy, and if it hadn't been very cheap. The plot was more grounded in reality than most of Dahl's books, and the poaching part of the book just didn't make much of an impression on me. What really stayed with me was Dahl's rapturous descriptions of the oddest food--e.g. "It was a cold meat pie. The meat was pink and tender with no fat or gristle in it, and there were hard-boiled eggs buried like treasures in several different places. " I'm not sure that description made me want to wolf down a cold meat pie, but I definitely had the impression that Dahl had dreamed about them at some point.


My two Charlie books are not so good. My Chocolate Factory isn't terrible, especially when I have always preferred books with solid-colour borders to the ones with illustrations making up the entire cover. My quibble is with the particular image. Grandpa Joe looks all wrong in his old man's checked jacket, Willy Wonka's a little too fey, and the children are all apple-cheeked and look very (too?) young. Charlie looks like a background character in Newsies who is about to join the big dance number. I think Veruca doesn't really look right here, either--more prissy than rich, and way too pink. I almost always dislike this photo-realistic style of drawing for covers, though, because it tends to date the book as much as a photo would, and can potentially limit the ways I can picture the characters. Mostly, though, I keep looking at it and noticing all these 'incorrect' details, and I wonder why, if they are in the room described at the very beginning of the tour, Violet and Augustus are missing from the scene. This copy at least has the Schindelman illustrations, which are the only ones I really appreciate , and which seem particularly integral to the story, as when Charlie is introduced with a nice little headshot of him inserted into the text.


The Great Glass Elevator copy I own is so dreadful that I kind of regret buying it, though. Ugh. If Grandpa Joe is bad on the Factory cover, he is alarmingly bad on here, with his double-breasted denim jacket, jaunty neckerchief, and inexplicable Colonial American sideburns with bangs. Charlie looks like a text book illustration of a dork, in his brown suit and matching shirt-and-socks. Plus, on the cover, at least, he looks too old. And I don't have the faintest idea why Charlie's parents are dressed like Eastern European peasants. This cover is probably from 1975 (the first Puffin date inside), and it looks it.

The Oompa Loompas aren't as terrible as they could be (and there's at least one kid out there who was thrilled that the cover of the book included bare bottoms), but they lack the character of the Schindelman Oompa Loompas. They're just shrunken semi-nude muscular people here. And I think the illustrator's approach to the sky was a bit misguided here, since this is supposed to be a room inside the factory. Oh, I just don't like anything about this 'interpretation.'

The inside illustrations are the same as the cover illustrations, so all my clothing critiques still hold, plus the illustration style itself is really busy with cross-hatching all over the place. The more abstract stuff--the space hotel, the knids--looks all right, but in a scenario with multiple characters and a bit of furniture, the eye doesn't know what to settle on.

Look at this:

I guess the babies are supposed to be the focus here, but the perspective is all off, and they've been plunked onto a quilted duvet in front of crumpled pillows (judging by the cross-hatching). Charlie's face is half behind the bed railing for no good reason, and Mrs. Bucket looks like she wandered into the scene from The Scream and is just starting to relax now. Colonial Grandpa Joe looks sad and Eastern European Mr. Bucket looks happy, which is just about the only decision here that makes sense, since those emotions are described in the text itself.

Anyway.


The Dahl book covers changed at some point in the nineties, differing just slightly from the template featured on my Danny, Champion of the World. The coloured border is mostly gone, with just a strip of colour around three sides, and Quentin Blake provides cover illustrations (and, in fact, it looks like Blake's illustrations replaced even the interior illustrations originally done by other artists). This series' design is fine--nothing special, but not awful. I do prefer the latest versions of the Dahl covers, which tend render Dahl's name in a more stylized font and provide backgrounds in bright colours, rather than the featureless white waste that looms behind the witches here on my example.

L.M. Montgomery

Back in the 1980s, Lucy Maud Montgomery's books all featured the same cover template, with fake-script lettering and photo-realistic(-ish) cover illustrations. Frequently, the heroine stands in tall grass in some sort of meadow, looking wistful. While I currently have a few of her books on my shelves, they are not the best examples of the mooning-in-a-meadow cover style, but it was rampant for the designs on books I originally acquired in the late eighties.


This copy of Anne of Green Gables is only about ten years old. I bought it for a university course I was taking, knowing that my original copy was a) an eight-hour trip away from my school and b) in lousy shape, the cover having pulled off years earlier. My original copy (from Scholastic) had a photo from the 1985 mini-series, but showed a nearly identical scene to this illustration--a kid, in a hat, clutching her carpet bag at the train station. (Although, Megan Follows may have been sitting on the bench that is behind illustration-Anne, here.)

This isn't a bad or cheesy cover, and probably would have solved some of my childhood puzzlement over what a "carpet bag" might be. Looks like what I imagined wasn't too far off (i.e. a bag made of a rug).





This cover is closer to the standard Montgomery cover-concept I described in my first paragraph: costumed girl in the foreground, a building of some kind (school house or beloved family home, usually) in the background, a prominent tree or treeline, a field in which we find our heroine knee-deep. Usually, the heroine is a little further back than Anne, here, more indistinct, and certainly not looking directly at the reader.

This setting does suit the character of Anne. It starts getting absurd when it is slapped on any female character Montgomery every wrote. See: Pat, Valancy, etc. This is, however, one of the worst illustrations of Anne I've seen on these books. That nose just isn't working for me.





This is a copy of a Montgomery book that I 've had since I was a child, and it seemed pretty unusual to me at the time, both because of the relatively abstract cover illustration, and because of its size--trade paperback. At the time, I don't think mass market trade paperbacks were all that common. It seemed like that format really caught on about ten years later.

I honestly didn't like this cover when I was a kid. The colour scheme is a bit garish, and of all the possible characters that might have been used to represent the book, I didn't understand why the artist settled on Gay Penhallow (I think--at least, Gay's the only character who could be described as girlish, like the young lady picture here), whose story I found both dull and aggravating. I liked Donna and Peter's story best.




This book was second-hand, so I can't take all the blame for the fact that it's held together with a rubber band. (The damage is to the spine, so the book is in two hunks). This is the best of the covers, I think. It's original compared to the photo-realistic Anne of Green Gables, and the illustration is suggestive of the book's content. As a bonus, the colour may be lime(ish)-green, but it's hasn't reached the 1970s level of garishness of my A Tangled Web's orange.

It's also probably the book I like best now, as an adult. It's contrived to the point of goofiness but it's a very charming story. Valancy is a more interesting character than Anne, and a little less annoying than Emily sometimes could be. (After the first book in her series, Anne could be a little too good, and Emily is sometimes embarrassingly intense in the way of self-consciously artsy girls in any era.)

Lolita Covers

I have multiple copies of only a few books. Usually, I buy the second copy by mistake, for about a dollar, from the bargain bin of a second-hand bookstore. I have consciously purchased more than one copy of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, and this is a big reason why:

This is the first copy of Lolita that I bought, at a Library sale in a very small town, when I was fourteen or fifteen years old. The cover was intact when I first got it; the front cover has since detached, and started flaking off towards the centre. In another 10-15 years, it will be down to Nabokov's name and the sunglasses.

The publisher of this edition is Corgi, which I think is a British publishing house. I don't own a single other Corgi book, at any rate. This copy is roughly 40 years old, being a 1969 reprint of a 1961 edition.








This was the second version of Lolita I bought, because I am a sucker. Obviously, it's The Anchor Review, not Lolita per se, although there's about sixty pages of the text plus the Nabokov-writing-as-himself addendum about the book that appears at the end of my Corgi copy of the book. This is supposedly the first version of the book that ever appeared in North America. The Olympia Press 2-volume edition was published in 1955, and this was issued in 1957. Putnam published the first American edition a year later.

I haven't actually read anything in this copy (Auden!) and I dropped a whole eight bucks on it.







And this is my current reading copy of the book. The annotations are especially helpful for glossing sentences written in other languages (mostly French). I am particularly fond of the inclusion of an ad that is described in some detail in the book itself--I assumed it was made up for the puposes of the story, but there it is in the end notes.

It's not a cover to write home about, though. The light's a little to mellow to really show that it apparently consists of illustrations of index cards and note paper. I've yet to see a cover for Lolita that I really like, though, even though Vintage got it very right with some other Nabokov books.