"Thomas Pynchon said, grandly"

[pynchonoid]

Paperback Writers
Cover me
By Richard Rayner
April 29, 2007
 
In 1935, the British publisher Allen Lane visited
Agatha Christie in the country and was miffed to
discover, while waiting for the train back to London,
that there was no decent book to buy at the railway
station store. Shortly thereafter, he came up with his
own remedy, a new imprint called Penguin, which began
publishing paperbacks in the summer of 1935. Within a
year, 3 million units had been shipped and a legendary
brand had been created.

Book lovers tend to get a little nutty about their
Penguins, wistfully eyeing the orange-spined editions
of "Pride and Prejudice" and "Moby Dick" they read in
college, or coveting the fiendishly tough-to-find
Philip K. Dicks in the Penguin "black" SF series.

"We think about it all the time. We talk about it all
the time," says Elda Rotor, executive editor of
Penguin Classics in New York. "We know what we have
here. The question is: How do you keep that going?"

Lane's original formula, of quality books at
attractive prices, never goes out of date, although
his means of brand identification — make all the books
look the same — has long since ceased to work in the
marketplace. So what's a publisher to do? For Penguin,
one solution was to develop Penguin Classics Deluxe
Editions, a new line of reissues that includes Jack
Kerouac's "The Dharma Bums," Shirley Jackson's "We
Have Always Lived in the Castle," and Hans Christian
Andersen's "Fairy Tales." Printed on uncoated paper
with ragged edges, and featuring introductions by
writers like Haruki Murakami, Doris Lessing, Jonathan
Lethem, Luc Sante and Eric Schlosser, these are
classics the way they ought to be.

Perhaps most striking are the books' covers, which
have been done by leading contemporary graphic artists
such as Joe Sacco ("One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest"),
Roz Chast (Stella Gibbons' "Cold Comfort Farm") and
Japanese cartooning legend Yoshiro Tatsumi (Jay
Rubin's new translation of Ryunosuke Akutagawa's
"Rashomon"). Chester Brown's superb continuity strips
for "Lady Chatterley's Lover" make liberal use of a
certain four-letter word, pushing the envelope much as
Penguin did in the early 1960s, when the British
government brought suit to prevent the publication of
D.H. Lawrence's rediscovered masterpiece. "We're
reaching out to a generation that's more visual,"
Rotor says. "And hopefully we're saying that these
books will matter to you and are modern."

Comics, of course, are an art of compression. But when
it comes to cover illustration, that compression has
to evoke the larger world of the book. In his design
for Thomas Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow," Frank Miller
— yes, that Frank Miller, creator of "Sin City" and
"The 300" — frames an upended V-2 rocket knifing
downward through a speckled and blackened bomb crater.
Once seen, never forgotten. Likewise, Charles Burns'
jacket for Upton Sinclair's 1906 novel "The Jungle"
features the flayed head of a cow, its single eye
looking very much alive and reproachful. These images
sock and shock you.

Other jackets offer a denser and more verbal
experience. Chris Ware's work for "Candide" is so
typically elliptical that you can spend nearly as much
time with it as with the novel. For a new and
substantially expanded edition of "The Portable
Dorothy Parker," the Canadian artist Seth created an
illustrated table of contents, then used the inside
back flap of the jacket for a funny and tender
continuity life. Seth uses low-key art-deco colors,
ruby-red and green, to hint at the classic Parker
period of the Algonquin Round Table and the early days
of the New Yorker. Bits of Parker's poetry are
sprinkled throughout the design.

Most often the artists are selected by Penguin art
director Paul Buckley, but occasionally authors chose
for themselves. Thomas Pynchon said, grandly: "Sure,
I'll put 'Gravity's Rainbow' in your series — but you
have to get Frank Miller." Amazingly, they did. A
second case proved simpler: Paul Auster and Art
Spiegelman are friends. Spiegelman's art for Auster's
"New York Trilogy" shows a deep and easy familiarity
with Manhattan, with the pulp fiction from which this
contemporary existential masterpiece emerged and with
Auster himself — an ink portrait on the back flap
shows a lean and youthful Auster, fountain pen in
hand, one eye blanked out by a magnifying glass.
Spiegelman weaves this motif throughout, rendering a
score of lost eyes staring from the background of the
cover. It's a haunting conceit, emerging from the work
while concentrating its meaning.

"I truly want the artists to go for it," Buckley says,
although sometimes this manifests itself in unexpected
ways. Take Daniel Clowes, creator of "Ghost World,"
who accepted the commission to do Mary Shelley's
"Frankenstein" just a few months before undergoing
open-heart surgery. "I thought the work would
resonate," says Clowes. "I began by reading the book
very carefully and then waiting around to see which
scenes stuck with me most. There were so many I could
hardly choose. The descriptions of the creature are so
specific — black hair and lips, yellow skin stretched
taut over muscles etc. — that I was surprised at how
unlike this any of the famous pop-culture versions
are."

On the inside flap of the book — which comes out in
the fall — Clowes re-creates the famous moment when,
by the shores of Lake Leman, Byron, Shelley and Mary
Shelley discussed the gothic horror stories they were
going to write. Here, Clowes portrays the clueless
Mary almost like one of the anxious, dweeby teenagers
from his own strips, tweaking the very notion of
"Frankenstein" and reviving the story for our
wised-up, information-sated age. The effect, through
different means of artistic sleight of hand, is
repeated again and again throughout the series. Like
those original Penguins of 70 years ago, these books
will serve as capsules of time, memory and design.

Richard Rayner is the author of several books, most
recently the novel "The Devil's Wind." Paperback
Writers will appear monthly.

http://www.latimes.com/features/books/la-bkw-rayner29apr29,0,7199951.story?coll=la-home-right1>

http://pynchonoid.org
"everything connects"
http://nonhumancommunications.com
"for the rest of us"


 
____________________________________________________________________________________
We won't tell. Get more on shows you hate to love 
(and love to hate): Yahoo! TV's Guilty Pleasures list.
http://tv.yahoo.com/collections/265