Posts Tagged ‘novels’
“The covers of this book are too far apart”*…
You can judge a book by its cover, it just depends on the talents of the artist and their understanding of the book they are illustrating.
Tom Adams (March 29, 1926 – December 9, 2019) was such an artist. His covers to novels by Agatha Christie, Raymond Chandler, John Fowles, Kingsley Amis, among others added greatly to the book and made them stand out on shop shelves making them all highly desirable. Indeed many of Adams’ covers are great artworks in their own right.
Adams career started with a bet. He was working as an illustrator for Jonathan Cape in 1961, when design director Tony Colwell made a wager with Adams that he couldn’t come up with a trompe-l’oeil design for the first novel by John Fowles. Adams design for The Collector exceeded Colwell’s expectations and helped make Fowles’ dark tale of kidnapping a best-seller. Fowles described Adams design as: “the best jacket of the year, if not the entire decade”…
Understandably, Adams’ design attracted considerable interest from other publishers. Patsy Cohen, the design director at Collins was greatly impressed by Adams work and commissioned him on spec to design a cover for Agatha Christie‘s novel A Murder is Announced…
Adams used a variety clues from Christie’s tale. He avoided the traditional tropes of the detective (or in this case Miss Marple), a dead body, or the shadow of some menacing murderer. His style owed more to the symbolists and to the surrealists, which became particularly notable on book covers for Christie’s Destination Unknown and A Caribbean Mystery. Adams said symbolism leant itself to surrealism. It opened up a whole new way of illustrating crime fiction…
His covers for Christie’s novels also impressed Lou Reed, who commissioned Adams to come up with the design for eponymous debut album in 1972…
More about Adams– and more examples of his exquisite work– at “Murder by the Book: Tom Adams’ Brilliant Agatha Christie Covers.”
* Ambrose Bierce
###
As we inspect imaginative invitations, we might send pulpy birthday greetings to Frederick Schiller Faust; he was born in this date in 1892. Much better known by his pen name, Max Brand (though he had 17 others), he was an extraordinarily prolific author– he published over 15 million words of prose. Among his more famous creations were Destry Rides Again (probably the best know of his many Westerns) and the character of young medical intern Dr. James Kildare, who featured in a series of pulp fiction stories and then over several decades in other media, including a series of American theatrical movies by Paramount Pictures and MGM), a radio series, two television series, and comics.
“I got a little bored after a time. I mean, the road seemed to be awfully long.”*…
Explore– and enjoy: “14 classic works of literature hated by famous authors.”
* Aldous Huxley on On the Road
###
As we devour the dish, we might send prolific birthday greetings to E. Phillips Oppenheim; he was born on this date in 1866.
After leaving school at age 17 to help in his father’s leather business, Oppenheim wrote in his spare time. His first novel, Expiation (1886), and subsequent thrillers caught the fancy of a wealthy New York businessman who bought out the leather business at the turn of the century and made Oppenheim a high-salaried director. He was thus freed to devote the major part of his time to writing. The novels, volumes of short stories, and plays that followed, totaling more than 150, were peopled with sophisticated heroes, adventurous spies, and dashing noblemen. Among his well-known works are The Long Arm of Mannister (1910), The Moving Finger (1911), and The Great Impersonation (1920). [source]
“I use a whole lot of half-assed semicolons; there was one of them just now; that was a semicolon after ‘semicolons,’ and another one after ‘now'”*…
What’s a novel without its words? Just punctuation. But when you take those lines of commas, periods, exclamation points, and quotes, then arrange them in a big spiral, you can still tell something of the character of the original work: the endlessly curious and expository quality of Ishmael’s narrative in Moby Dick, for example, or the titular wonder of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
Between the Words by Chicago-based designer Nicholas Rougeux is a series of posters that takes the text of classic novels like Pride and Prejudice, Huckleberry Finn, The Christmas Carol, Peter Pan, The Time Machine, and more, then strips them of all their words until they are mere swirling vortices of punctuation. The project was inspired by Stefanie Posavec’s Writing without Words data visualizations, which colorfully chart the structure—but not the actual prose—of many classic novels…
See the charted novels in larger, zoomable form at “Between the Words“; more background at “8 Classic Novels Reduced To Their Punctuation.”
* Ursula K. Le Guin
###
As we eat shoots and leaves, we might send insightful birthday greetings to Barbara Wertheim Tuchman; she was born on this date in 1912. A historian, Tuchman wrote two books (The Guns of August and Stilwell and the American Experience in China) that won Pulitzer Prizes, and several others that could/probably should have: e.g., The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890–1914, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century, and The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam.)
“We are all fools in love”*…
The most common assumption about romance novels, buoyed by the success of Fifty Shades of Grey, is that they are anti-feminist. And though the so-called bodice rippers of the 1970s (in which men who look like Fabio ravish passive sweethearts) are still quite popular, the genre has also expanded rapidly in recent years to include fiction of the paranormal, gay, evangelical, steampunk, time travel and Gothic variety (and many more). Its female leads, in many contexts, have evolved with the times, rendering the notion that romance novels are full of oppressed, unthinking women, profoundly ignorant. Not only is the industry itself rife with female entrepreneurs; its heroines always get what they want. In fact, the only formula that rings true across all romance novels is the HEA: the Happily Ever After. It is unanimously believed to be the defining principle of the genre. “The women always win,” says [filmmaker Laurie] Kahn. “And that doesn’t happen in most places.”…
Find out “Why romance novelists are the rock stars of the literary world.”
* Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
###
As we still our pounding hearts, we might recall that it was on this date in 1776 that the Illuminati was founded. While the name has been given to a number of organizations– real and imagined– over the years, this first incarnation was real enough. It was started by Adam Weishaupt, the only non-clerical professor at the Jesuit University of Ingolstadt– an experience that turned him into a rabid anti-cleric. He first tried to become a Freemason, but couldn’t afford the initiation fees and dues; so he created his own organization– the Iluminatenorden, or Order of Illuminati. In some ways a typical Enlightenment secret society, the Illuminati’s goals were to oppose superstition, obscurantism, religious influence over public life, and abuses of state power. And like other secret societies with similar goals, it was pretty promptly outlawed by the State at the urging of the Church. Still, rumors persisted– and persist still– that the Illuminati built a world-wide conspiracy of powerful folks who pull the world’s strings from behind the curtain.
The cover of an Illuminati pamphlet, featuring their “logo”: the owl of Minerva – symbolising wisdom – on top of an opened book
“I hate the word ‘gothic’ but I would like to try doing something like that”*…
OK, it makes one’s heart beat faster– but is it a gothic novel? The Guardian is here to help:
When Horace Walpole published his ‘gothic story’ The Castle of Otranto, he launched a literary movement which has sired monsters, unleashed lightning and put damsels in distress for 250 years. A horde of sub-genres has followed, from southern gothic to gothic SF, but are some novels more gothic than others? We return to the genre’s roots in the 18th century for this definitive guide…
More (and larger) helpful pictograms at “How to tell if you’re reading a gothic novel.”
* Kelly Osbourne
###
As we struggle with spinal shivers, we might recall that it was on this date in 1910, in an attempt to “conquer time,” that Quentin Compson committed suicide. While Compson was “only” a character created by William Faulkner (Quentin featured in the novels The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom! and in the short stories “That Evening Sun” and “A Justice”), his death is commemorated by a plaque affixed to the Anderson Memorial Bridge, over the Charles River, near Harvard, where Quentin was enrolled when he took his life.
“QUENTIN COMPSON Drowned in the odour of honeysuckle. 1891-1910”
You must be logged in to post a comment.