{books} – Page 405 – { feuilleton }

Barney ascendant

Poster by Barney Bubbles for Elvis Costello’s Get Happy!! (1980).

Adelita, the publishers of Reasons To Be Cheerful: the life and work of Barney Bubbles, announced this week that Paul Gorman’s essential collection of BB graphics has been named Book of the Year in Mojo magazine:

Reasons To Be Cheerful – the acclaimed study of the life and work of the late graphic genius Barney Bubbles – has been declared Book Of The Year by the UK’s leading rock monthly Mojo magazine.

Described as “fascinating and definitive” by the Sunday Times and “moving and lovingly researched,” by GQ editor Dylan Jones in The Independent, Reasons To Be Cheerful was written by Paul Gorman (author of style bible The Look and Straight with Boy George) and published by British independent popular culture imprint Adelita (sales and distribution through Turnaround Publisher Services).

Mojo will name Reasons To Be Cheerful Book Of The Year in its January 2010 issue (published November 27) with an exclusive interview with Factory Records designer Peter Saville praising its publication.

A quarter of a century after he took his own life at the age of 41, Reasons To Be Cheerful has transformed Barney Bubbles’ cult status by elevating him into the pantheon of graphic design greats. Among fans of the book are such prominent musicians as Paul Weller, Jah Wobble, Mick Jones, Nick Lowe and Billy Bragg.

Reasons To Be Cheerful is the first and definitive exploration of this important visual artist’s body of work, with more than 600 images including student sketchbooks, private paintings, product, brand, underground and music press and examples of the hundreds of record sleeves, posters, adverts, promotional items and music videos he created for the likes of the Rolling Stones, Hawkwind, Ian Dury, Elvis Costello, Nick Lowe, Squeeze, Depeche Mode, The Specials and Billy Bragg.

Reasons To Be Cheerful has also spawned a spectacular online presence featuring fresh interviews, information and rare and previously unseen images (see http://barneybubbles.com/blog) and has been well received in the UK and US (where it is distributed by D.A.P). Author Paul Gorman will also curate a Barney Bubbles exhibition to be inaugurated at London’s Chelsea Space gallery during Design Week in September 2010.

By coincidence, two days after Mojo appears the All-Day Barney Bubbles Benefit Memorial Concert will be staged at the 229 Club, Great Portland Street, London. Bands featured include various members of the Hawkwind/Hawklords family led by Nik Turner. There’ll also be the return of Turner’s post-Hawks outfit Inner City Unit, for whom Barney created some of his last designs, and the resurrection of the Imperial Pompadours, a one-off rock’n’roll collaboration between Nik and Barney. That’s happening on 29th November and Turner’s website has all the necessary details.

The Elvis Costello poster above comes from a feature about the Get Happy!! album at Paul Gorman’s BB site. I was never a great fan of Costello’s records but the designs Barney created for those early releases were outstanding and represent the peak of his career. (See the Armed Forces sleeve design for a real eye blast.) Paul’s post shows how much work went into creating a range of integrated graphics for the album, singles and promotional material, and he also has some exclusive material which didn’t make it into Reasons To Be Cheerful. The BB book has been a continual treat to look through this year, and the book design I happen to be finishing has not only been inspired by Barney’s example but also manages to make passing reference to him inside. More about that later.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Hawk things
• Who is Heeps Willard?
• The Sonic Assassins
• Reasons To Be Cheerful, part 3: A Barney Bubbles exclusive
• More Barney Bubbles
• Reasons To Be Cheerful, part 2
• Reasons To Be Cheerful: the Barney Bubbles revival
• Barney Bubbles: artist and designer

Hollywood’s Favourite Cowboy

Hollywood’s Favourite Cowboy | Cormac McCarthy and The Road.

More book covers

One of my Cthulhu portraits as it appears in Image Swirl, a new Google feature-in-search-of-a-purpose. Yes, I own a portion of the Googleverse, or the Googleverse owns a portion of me; the latter seems more likely. As well as being the cover of my Lovecraft volume, that picture appeared earlier this year on a reprint of The Call of Cthulhu from Barnes & Noble.

While we’re on the subject—and book covers are never far away, as yesterday’s post demonstrates—I was asked to contribute to this week’s Mind Meld discussion at SF Signal, answering the question “Which are the most memorable book covers in science fiction and fantasy?” Some of the entries in my list have been discussed here in the past. Compared to the other responses I come across like I’m giving a lecture… And there was further sf cover discussion at io9 this week. Good to see older generations of artists and designers still receiving enthusiastic attention.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Science fiction and fantasy covers

Wildeana

The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1907).

I finished reading Neil McKenna’s excellent biography recently, The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde, a book which makes an ideal companion to Richard Ellmann’s 1987 life of Wilde. Whilst reading about the two trials I remembered that among five pages of digitised Wilde volumes at the Internet Archive there’s a 1906 book, The Trial of Oscar Wilde: From the Shorthand Reports whose contents are what you’d expect from the title. Browsing through the other files there revealed further items of note such as this edition of The Ballad of Reading Gaol published a year later and illustrated throughout by J Latimer Wilson. The page layout of text plus a narrow picture is uncommon, and from the date of publication it’s interesting to see that despite Wilde’s shattered reputation there was still money to be made printing his books.

The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1907).

Among the other volumes are two finely illustrated editions of his short stories. The edition of A House of Pomegranates below comes with drawings by Ben Kutcher, an artist about whom I know nothing other than his style is very similar to that of the great Harry Clarke. The introduction is a surprise, a serious appraisal of Wilde’s life by HL Mencken who admired the way the author stood against the prevailing morality of the day. There’s also an edition of The Happy Prince and Other Tales from 1920 illustrated by Charles Robinson.

The House of Pomegranates (1918).

These books are mainly of note for their decoration, however. Of more interest to Wilde enthusiasts is a first edition of Robert Hichens’ The Green Carnation from 1894. Hichens was a friend of Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas and, according to McKenna’s book, a fellow Uranian (ie: gay) who knew the pair well enough to be able to pen a scandalous roman à clef based on their relationship, helping to confirm for public opinion much that was suspected about Wilde’s outrageous lifestyle. Both Wilde and Douglas disowned Hichens and repudiated the novel but, coming a year before the Queensbury libel trial, it did neither of them any favours. Those curious to read the exploits of “Esmé Amarinth” and “Lord Reginald Hastings” may download a copy here.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Oscar Wilde archive
• The book covers archive
• The illustrators archive

Nabokov book covers

Flowers are the sexual organs of plants, which may have been what designer David Pelham had in mind when he created this cover for the Penguin debut of Nabokov’s densely-written and erotic novel, Ada in 1970. (Butterfly orchids also feature in the text, of course.) The Russian maestro has been unavoidable lately on account of the publication this week of his final, unfinished work, The Original of Laura. The design of the new book by Chip Kidd is slightly more daring than I’d have expected from something which the publisher will be hoping to sell in large quantities, and I’d love to know how much argument was required to push the cover through the marketing department. The contrast between boards and dust jacket is very satisfying and adds value to the book as artefact, a feature impossible to replicate in ebook terms even if this was an ordinary novel rather than sketches on index cards. If people want books to stay physical then smart design needs to be applied a lot more often.

The ragged item above is my battered second edition of the original UK (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) printing of Lolita, now fifty years old and with a cover designed by Eric Ayers. There’s a more pristine copy on display at this comprehensive gallery of Lolita covers, fascinating viewing if you’re interested in seeing how the same book can be presented over 150 editions. From a drab beginning things quickly degenerate into outright salaciousness, a development which would no doubt have dismayed the author. That gallery link comes via Venus febriculosa who recently held a competition to redesign the cover; you can see the results here, many of which are a lot more inventive than the published editions.

Meanwhile, the advent of Nabokov’s final novel has meant that all of his works are being reissued by Vintage. Ace cover designer and art director John Gall was tasked with redesigning the corpus for which he assembled a team of designers and requested that they each fill a butterfly specimen box with material to suit their allotted title. You can see the gorgeous results here. And if that’s not enough Nabokov, you can read Martin Amis taking his favourite author to task over The Original of Laura here.

• The inside story of Nabokov’s last work

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive