Book Jackets

When Orbit unveiled the cover art for Nicole Peeler's debut novel, Tempest Rising, last winter, a small but vocal contingent reacted negatively to the illustration of Jane True, the book's protagonist, emerging naked from the ocean. "It makes me slightly uncomfortable to look at it," a reader named Grace wrote. "It looks like kiddie porn." At the time, creative director Lauren Panepinto, reminding readers that Jane is in her mid-twenties, compared Sharon Tancredi's artwork to Mark Ryden and Tara McPherson, and emphasized the deliberate intent to create a look at odds with the "typical" urban fantasy cover. "This is an art style, that while may be read exclusively child-like to some who have only seen it on a Bratz doll, has had very adult art and usage and connotations along with it for over a decade," she elaborated. "I enjoy the controversy because it means we’re pushing the envelope on the art, and that’s something I’m very happy to do, and Orbit supports."

Peeler came to New York City last week to meet with Orbit staffers and prepare for the book's publication this fall, and we took advantage of the opportunity to meet up with her and discuss the controversy. She doesn't just love Tancredi's work, she told us—if it's at all possible, she wants to have Jane True tattooed on her arm. She also took a moment to explain to us why, beyond its more provocative aspects, the cover's visual "tone" aptly reflects the story's deviations from other urban fantasy tales—a mode of storytelling that may have more in common with Pushing Daisies than The Dresden Files.

It's no secret that Stephanie Murg, the co-editor of mediabistro.com's design industry blog, UnBeige, is a huge Chip Kidd fan (just like us!), so we weren't surprised to see her writing about the cover Kidd designed for Obsession, an "erotic tale" by Gloria Vanderbilt, which features striking photography of mannequin heads from the author's personal collection (which Murg links thematically to an earlier Kidd cover for a Haruki Murakami novel). UnBeige also showcases the first page of the novel—Kidd created the interior look-and-feel as well as the cover—so you may want to check that post out...

In an article for the BBC website, actor/screenwriter Mark Gattis pays tribute to the Doctor Who novelizations of his youth, which were produced by a British publishing company named Target.

"Scarcely anything was repeated on TV in those days... so, if you missed something, you missed it," Gattis recalls. "In an age before video and DVD, the Target novelisations were a chance to relive the television adventures. Many of the black and white 1960s stories had been wiped by the BBC altogether, so the books were the only record. Through them you could experience stories that had disappeared into the programme's folklore."

This was also true for American fans who discovered the show in syndication in the late 1970s and early 1980s, as they rarely saw anything predating the Tom Baker era; imported editions of the books were one of the few ways we had of fully comprehending the show's rich backstory. (Once, a long, long time ago, we even had a copy of Castrovalva that was signed by Sarah Sutton!)

"The Target Doctor Who novelisations were phenomenally successful," he points out. "They ran to 156 titles and the books sold millions of copies world-wide, becoming one of the best-selling ranges of children's books ever published." Virgin Publishing acquired Target around the time that the original show ended, and when the novelizations ran out, they published several original books. Once the BBC revived the show in 2005, the network's publishing division decided not to adapt the episodes but has continued to publish original stories featuring the characters.

(via io9, which has a whole lotta covers from the Target series on display)

A while back, Penguin UK invited design students to create "a fresh and bold new look" for Donna Tartt's The Secret History "in order to bring it to a new generation of readers," and the judging committee—which included Penguin Press art director Jim Stoddart, novelist Hari Kunzru, and British designers Frith Kerr and Amelia Noble—declared the above submission by Peter Adlington the best. "I wanted to look at the hierarchy within the group, as well as their merging whilst in a catatonic state," Adlington writes of his design and its effort to reflect the book's plot. (Also, note "[the] black void in the middle, which represents the impending doom that the group faced from the moment they committed the first murder.")

The judges considered it "a bold, beautiful and distinctive cover that mirrored the themes of the book in an imaginative and succinct way," but not everybody agrees:

As far as we know, though, this is not going to be the new cover for the British edition of The Secret History. Instead, Adlington will get to spend six weeks in the Penguin design studio on a work placement assignment, plus a £1,000 cash prize.

(with apologies to Spike Jones)

The good folks at Nylon passed along a link to an item on their website about a new set of Penguin Classics covers by fashion illustrator Ruben Toledo which, according to Rebecca Willa Davis, "certainly add a stylish edge to book club mainstays." In addition to Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (seen at right), Toledo also did illustrations for Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice and Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights.

If you've been reading GalleyCat for a while, you know we're a big fan of this sort of Penguin Classics makeover: It's a theme we come back to again and again and again. Although we're still waiting for them to hire Evan Dorkin for one of these gigs...

UnBeige, mediabistro.com's design industry blog, had an item yesterday about the cover of the new issue of Opium, which contains a nine-word short story by artist Jonothan Keats called "Time." The only thing is, as UnBeige learned from Wired, the cover employs "a double layer of standard black ink, with an incrementally screened overlay masking the nine words." In other words, it looks black now, but after prolonged exposure to ultraviolet light, the top layer will fade and reveal the words underneath, one at a time—and it will purportedly take 1,000 years for the process to be complete.

In the meantime, you could always try to track down all the words to Shelley Jackson's "Skin."

Last week, inspired by a comment from a fan on Twitter, writer-artist Colleen Coover posted a set of illustrations to her blog based on the characters from Clue, the ever-popular murder mystery board game. When we spotted the digital artwork, we immediately determined that it would be the most awesome thing ever if Coover was hired to create new covers for some P.G. Wodehouse classics—and Coover was as enthusiastic about the idea as we were.

"You can probably tell just by looking at my Mrs. Peacock that I'm enamored of Bertie Wooster's Aunts, and I love the title Aunts Aren't Gentlemen," Coover emailed us over the weekend. "I think I was thinking about Bertie's dangerous redheaded girlfriend Bobbie Wickham when I drew Miss Scarlet, albeit a Bobbie Wickham who's been around the block a few extra times... Wodehouse's men are continuously being put-upon by his women, whether through dominant personalities (Aunts), recklessness (Bobbie), or empty-headedness (Madeline Bassett). The idea of all these poor fellows in a constant state of semi-panic is hilarious, and makes for great cartooning!"

Now we just have to figure out how to make this happen! Our original idea was that Coover could take part in the ongoing Penguin Classics project of pairing comics artists with great literature; maybe, we dreamt, they could assign her Uncle Fred in the Springtime. (Coover allowed as how she's a big fan of the Blandings House characters, and particularly enjoyed Fish Preferred, Heavy Weather, and Full Moon.) But then we were reminded that Random House re-acquired the paperback rights in 2006, and then we stumbled onto the first dozen covers from the new editions published last year in the UK and Canada by Random's Arrow Books. (Like the editor of Première de Couverture, we thought these latest covers were a terrible step backwards from the Penguin covers from the late 1990s.) We aren't sure what's going on with Wodehouse paperbacks in the United States—they don't show up in Penguin Group USA's online catalog anymore—but if Random does have the rights, and it plans to augment the handful of titles published by Vintage. we think the art department should seriously consider Coover's illustration portfolio.

(And if that assignment isn't available, we encourage other art directors to take that same look!)

"I know that many TPO authors (myself included when I didn't know any better) lament the lack of a paperback coming out the next year as one of the drawbacks/disappointments associated with no hardcover," Joe McGinniss, Jr. emailed us yesterday afternoon. But when Grove/Atlantic's Black Cat imprint went back for a fifth printing on his debut novel, The Delivery Man, they decided to tweak the cover as well, resulting in what the author cheerfully calls "a paperback of the paperback." (Compare the two versions above; the new edition's on the right.)

"Along with better pricepoint, higher sales, fewer returns and the chance to grace the shelves of Urban Outfitters," McGinniss enthused (and The Delivery Man isn't the only book that's been turning up there), "the shot at a paperback of your paperback original is one more argument for ditching cloth altogether."

We're unabashed fans of Hard Case Crime, but when the monthly "care package" from the pulp fiction specialists showed up in our mailbox recently, it seemed a bit thicker than usual. A cover letter from editor Charles Ardai explained that while the house's usual "sweet spot" for its novels is 50,000 to 60,000 words, Peter Blauner's Casino Moon is more than twice that size. The boxing novel is also a departure for Hard Case in that it was first published in the mid-1990s, nearly a half-century ahead of its usual reprint strategy. But "I love this book," Ardai explained, "and I don't think it got the readership or the attention it deserved the first time out, in part because the original paperback edition had one of the least appealing covers I can remember."

Surely that old cover couldn't be that bad, we thought, firing up the Google. Well, in fact, it wasn't as bad as Ardai made it out to be—it was significantly worse.

The Hard Case cover, which we think everyone can agree is a substantial improvement, features an original painting by Ricky Mujica, who made his Hard Case cover debut late last year on burlesque perfomer Jonny Porkpie's The Corpse Wore Pasties... (CORRECTION: We had a calendar brain fart looking at the Hard Case website, as Porkpie's novel is a December 2009 title.) The former Golden Gloves competitor and Broadway performer has also worked on children's adventure tales like Armstrong Perry's Call It Courage and Steven Kroll's Breaking Camp.

Two books about navigating the grueling world of celebrity worship ended up with the same cover.

The book covers for Mark Ebner's new book Six Degrees of Paris Hilton (Simon Spotlight) and Howard Bragman's Where's My Fifteen Minutes? (Portfolio Hardcover) both share the same stock photo of paparazzi poised to pounce on a celebrity. Jossip first spotted the similarities, and GalleyCat readers love tracking such coincidental art.

Here's more from the post: "what photo is appearing on what book cover isn't put on an intra-office memo that's circulated throughout the industry. We'll just chalk this copycat scenario as a statement on celebrity: So banal there's less and less variety, and yet nobody seems to care."