An Ape with a Cigar IN YOUR FACE

Coming next year from Vintage Classics UK is the somewhat new concept of 3D book cover art*. They're publishing a set of five science-fiction classics, each of which will come with a pair of red/green 3D glasses in order to appreciate the covers. Here are the covers... (click on the first three for much bigger versions, especially if you already own a pair of old anaglyph glasses)

These aren't bad at all, though the Lovecraft misses the opportunity to do something which actually hurts the eyes, which would have been appropriate.

(UPDATE: And as Óscar Palmer notes in the comments, the two Vernes are the work of Jim Tierney, who also did these gorgeous Verne covers as part of his student work. Tierney is now working for Penguin in the US, a well-deserved role.)

And here's another of the Vintage Classics D. H. Lawrences with a Carla van de Puttelaar cover photo (see here for the others).

* Relatively new for non-lascivious purposes, in any case. The only other 3D books that I've seen in bookshops are along these lines...

And for more unlikely ape action, look here.

Atlas

Last night I devoured the most beautiful book: the Atlas of Remote Islands: Fifty Islands I Have Not Visited and Never Will, by German writer and artist Judith Schalansky, published in English by Penguin's Particular Books imprint. It's wonderful: like one of Borges's eccentric encyclopaedias (The Book Of Imaginary Beings or A Universal History of Iniquity come to mind), each entry is a piece of art in itself. Alongside the maps of the islands in question are stories from their histories--tales of utopians, murderers, prisoners and dictators; of the lost, the mad, cannibals and scientists; of nuclear bombs and tonnes of accumulated birdshit. It's all described with a voice that is both lucid and poetic, a style which, while explaining things, actually makes the world seem more mysterious. It is, in a word, great.

 

Click for bigger, readable versions.

Social Relevance

I've discussed the cunning ploy used by publisher Orion/Gollancz/Weidenfeld for republishing classic books owned by another publisher: get hold of the cheap hardback rights, and publish the book as a small hardback at a paperback price. It's a tactic they're already using on a number of H. G. Wells' most famous SF works (see below), and they're about do it with five of his best 'social novels'. The designs for these paperback-sized hardbacks were done by Luke Roberts and Simon Cox, who won a competition run by design group D&AD. They run with the 'social problem' aspect by using a period newspaper look, with an object lying on the newspaper which interacts with a newspaper photograph in some way.

See more pictures here, and other entries in the competition here. (I especially like this, this, this and this.)

Penguin owns the paperback right to Wells' work, hence this hardback scheme. As I said before, a number of Wells' SF works are now in the Gollancz SF Masterworks series as cheap hardbacks. This excellent collection of books was recently given a facelift. Unfortunately, as I remarked before, part of this facelift involves tinting all of the covers a urinous yellow colour, a not entirely successful nod to the mid-20th-Century yellowjacket look of the Gollancz SF line.

And to compare, here are the Penguin Classics editions of these various titles, featuring the screenprint cover designs of Kate Gibb.

Striking a Light

In October 2007, two fascinating books were published which revealed the impressive and attractive world of Indian matchbox and matchbook art: Tara Books released Shahid Datawal's Matchbook (which is actually in a slipcase in the form of a giant matchbox, with a striking edge and everything...

..while Ten Speed released Warren Dotz's similar Light of India, also in a matchbox-shaped slipcase.

Now Penguin is following this lead with 2011's Kipling re-releases, all of which are decorated with groovy Indian matchbox labels.

For more of this matchbox art, see this impressive collection.

Desolation

The book is a look at early-'70s Britain, economically wrecked, incompetently run (the government of the day declared no fewer than five states of emergency over a four-year period) and terrorist-plagued. Some living there now might wonder what has changed. But what gets me here is the cover. It's like something out of Cormac McCarthy's The Road.

The photo is the work of John Bulmer, and it's of a Manchester street in the early 1970s.

See more of Bulmer's work here. I don't yet know the book's designer, but they're very clever indeed.

UPDATE: The designer is the excellent Jim Stoddart.

Minter

When Penguin Classics US published Angela Carter's edition of Charles Perrault's fairy tales (he is responsible for the classic versions of Cinderella, Red Riding Hood, Sleeping Beauty and Puss in Boots, among others), they used an attractive but pretty conventional image for the cover (by John Hassall).

But when Penguin Classics UK published the book, they used something different: a striking photo by New York artist Marilyn Minter.

It's an image ('Stepping Up', 2005) that reveals more over time: at first it just seems to be Cinderella in her glass slippers. But then you see that the feet are spattered with water and mud or shit; like all really good fairy stories, there's both sexiness and murkiness here.

In January, Penguin UK are republishing two more Carter titles: her lush, sexy and strange science-fiction novels Heroes and Villains (an end-of-the-world story) and The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman.

Again, these are great: erotic and creepy in equal measure, like fashion photos from an orgy at the decadent collapse of some technicolour civilisation, where faces turn into molluscs on glass.

For more of Minter's work, see her gallery, Salon 94, here and more here. Or read these Minter monographs:

(The Infernal Desire Machines was also one of the Penguin Decades (see here). For a different style of Angela Carter covers, see Roxanna Bikadoroff's work here.)

With thanks to Alan Trotter for the two newest Angela Carter cover images.