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E.M. Keeler reads Geoffrey Brock's translation of Carlo Collodi's Pinocchio (aka The Real Pinocchio) and is surprised by what she finds there:
"The Pinocchio that traipses around Collodi’s story is a real brat. Not only does he lie and skip school and take things that aren’t his, but he’s finicky and whiny and a picky eater to boot. He’s basically already a real boy, before some kind of scary fairy makes it so." [read more]
If you like the photo above, you might enjoy Corpus Libris
And here's more on Tim Rollins and K.O.S—the collective behind the artwork on the cover of our edition of Pinocchio.
Finally, Caustic Cover Critic covered our cover, as well as earlier visual depictions of Collodi's puppet, on his site.
The new cover art is in honor of the animated movie My Dog Tulip, which features the voice of Christopher Plummer as J.R. Ackerley, along with Isabella Rossellini, Lynn Redgrave, and Brian Murray in smaller roles. Veteran animators Paul and Sandra Fierlinger animate and direct.
Don't worry, the portrait of Ackerley, with his "Alsatian bitch" Queenie (Tulip's real name) gazing up at him with hearts in her eyes isn't gone, it's just moved to the frontispiece.
The illustrator Eric Hanson has a madcap style, reminiscent of the work of Ben Shahn, so we were very pleased when the opportunity to have him bring to life the anarchic Edie Cares, heroine of Terrible, Horrible Edie (clearly she had no part in the naming of the book). Eric recently sent us some of the early ideas for Edie, and we thought we'd share them with you.
By the way, Eric Hanson doesn't just have a blog and illustrate books (though he's just done the cover of John Waters's memoir, making Mr. Waters and Edie siblings of sorts), he's also written a book. It's called A Book of Ages, and will help you realize that you haven't done much with your life, no matter how old you are.
Louise Bourgeois, detail of Untitled (Legs and Bones), 1993; courtesy Gallerie Karsten Greve, Cologne; photograph by Beth Phillips
Louise Bourgeois: 1911–2010
"We sit in Louise's web, a wonderfully tatty parlor, watching the
paint peel, waiting nervously. There is a round coffee table with a
dozen bottles of liquor on it. Esrafily pours and says: 'Louder! Like
we're having a party. If she thinks she's missing a party, she'll come
down.'' Cloud taunts us: ''Man, she's gonna lay waste. I call this place
the smack-down shack, 'cause it ends in tears, man.'
"Then she appears, and it's hard to imagine this small, opalescent
woman in a pink tunic, black slip over black leggings and tiny black
Nikes smacking anybody down."
From "Always on Sunday," a profile of the artist and her circle that appeared in The New York Times in 2002
"My Life in Pictures": Bourgeois comments on photographs of herself from age 2 to 85, also in the Times.
And for Barbara Comyns admirers, we hear that her novel Our Spoons Came from Woolworths will soon be republished in America (it's available in the UK from Virago). More details to come.
We came across these lovely images of The Summer Book at photographer Marina Kapeleris's blog, The Spoonbait.
Congratulations are due to Thomas Teal, who has just been awarded the Bernard Shaw prize, igiven tri-annually for a work translated from Swedish, for his translation of Tove Jansson's Fair Play.
Teal has been contemplating Tove Jansson's novels since 1975, when he translated The Summer Book. Jansson was so pleased with his work that she invited him to the island she shared with Tuulikki Pietilä in the Stockholm Archipelago (he discusses their unorthodox setup a bit here). After Sort Of Books made The Summer Book a best-seller in the UK a few years ago, they began a project to translate some of her previously untranslated (in to English, at any rate) work. Teal's translations are a pleasure to read, and we could not be more pleased to see him receiving the recognition he deserves.
While we're on the subject of Tove Jansson, don't forget that her newly translated novel, The True Deceiver is currently on sale at a 30% discount. You can also read Ali Smith's introduction to the book, as well as the first chapter on our site.
The start of the school year got us thinking about Jenny Linsky's first days at school, and how scary they were for her. As you know, the most common word used to describe Jenny Linsky is "shy"—so it wasn't easy for her to adjust to life at the boarding school she went to when the Captain was "obliged" to go away to sea. At first Jenny was intimidated by all the things the other cats already knew. For instance, this little tune:
"If you will learn manners,"
The dear Teacher said,
"Then you shall have Catnip
Before going to bed."
"Oh give us our Catnip,"
The kittens insisted.
"Without any Catnip
Our Manners get twisted."
"Untwist your best Manners,"
The kind Teacher said,
"For you shall have Catnip
Before going to bed."
and they all lined right up for their catnip before Jenny had any idea what was going on.
To make matters worse, that brash creature, Pickles the Firecat (who might be familiar from his own book) picked on Jenny mercilessly, as you can see from the pages below.
We don't want to give anything away, but in the end, Jenny does manage to gather courage, and make new friends at The School for Cats—including the formidable Pickles.
The School for Cats was originally published in 1947 and the design of the title page below has a surprising Bauhaus flavor. Look at that use of Futura, which complements Averill's simple drawings and at the same time suggests a schoolroom ABC chart. Someone very hip must've been designing children's books for Harper (Jenny's original publisher) back then!
We've been sitting on this preview of Alistair Reid and Ben Shan's Ounce Dice Trice for a while now. And even though the book isn't on sale yet—we've only just received a few advance copies this week—we couldn't resist sharing some choice pages. The only problem was, figuring which pages to choose, since almost every one contains something delightful. Alastair Reid, who for many years worked at the New Yorker, drew on "odd notebooks" for wonderful, private, obscure, mouth-bending words. He addressed his young readers in a very short introduction to the book:
"And if you grow to love words for their own sake, you will begin to collect words yourself, and you will be grateful, as I am, to all the people who collect odd words and edit odd dictionaries, out of sheer astonishment and affection."
An aside: A few months ago, Vicky Raab just happened to run into Mr. Reid on the subway, and she wrote about the chance encounter at the New Yorker's Book Bench blog.
Joanna Neborsky, a student in the MFA illustration program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, has produced an illustrated edition of many of Félix Fénéon's concise reports of crimes and misdeads in early 20th-century France (aka Novels in Three Lines) as her thesis project. The work will be part of an MFA student exhibit that's on view until May 16, 2009 at the Visual Arts Gallery.
You can see more of Ms. Neborsky's work at the website of Gigantic Magazine.
Look, we're a textbook example of something! And that something is "the optical center." A visual principle that, according to the very wise publication, Essentials of Visual Communication by Bo Bergström, is illustrated by our series design by Katy Homans (and more specifically the cover of My Century by Aleksander Wat, featuring an image by Aleksandr Rodchenko that was originally the endpaper to his photo album Red Army):
If the title of a book is placed on the cover at the optical centre, it will create a harmonious whole.
Thanks Bo, you look pretty harmonious yourself!
A gift from us this week before Halloween, the story that Olivia Laing recently
called, "Scariest story ever, so horrifying that to this day I can't keep it in my house" and puts on par with stories by Bram Stoker and Stephen King. And perhaps more importantly, Edward Gorey selected it for his anthology,
The Haunted Looking Glass. 
Download "Casting the Runes" by M.R. James
Via LineBoil and MyToons, some preview clips of the recently completed animated feature film, My Dog Tulip (based, of course, on J.R. Ackerley's memoir of his "ideal friend"), created by the team of Paul and Sandra Fierlinger. Christopher Plummer provides the voice of J.R. Ackerely. The cast also includes Lynn Redgrave, Isabella Rossellini, and several distinguished stage actors.
The filmmakers intend to enter the film in next year's Cannes Film Festival.
The first clip, featuring as it does a comparison between the bowel movements of Tulip and the emporer Napoleon, reassures us that the film has not been neutered in the interests of gentility. Is this the first animated example of a dog shitting on the sidewalk (or, in English, "pavement")? If not, it must be the best. Enjoy these three clips, and then have a look at the official MyDogTulipFilm.com site for excerpts of a documentary about the making of the film, wonderful for the way it shows the Fierlingers at work (frequently accompanied by their dogs).
top: front cover featuring Pinocchio by Tim Rollins and K.O.S.; back cover
middle: title page (and facing) with two illustrations by Attilio Mussino (1911)
bottom: final pages showing another Mussino illustration (spoiler: Pinocchio becomes a "proper little boy")
from: The Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi, newly translated by Geoffrey Brock, introduction by Umberto Eco, afterword by Rebecca West, available November 2008
Yes, it's July and miserably humid in Manhattan, but we were greeted this morning by a bracing sight: just-printed copies of our Christmas offering, Rock Crystal (Bergkristall).The book will go on sale in time for the holidays, but it might have been more useful as an August release. After all, snow (and the blizzard-transformed alpine landscape) is as much a character in this novella as are its ostensible protagonists, a brother and sister who lose their way in a Christmas-eve storm.
The photo above does not do the volume justice, but it should give some idea of the beauty of the finished book, which is due in large part to its cover art. Kenneth G. Libbrecht, chairman of the physics department at Caltech, and taker of the cover photo, has turned his scientific research into a natural wonderland. Check out Snowlfakes.com to see his many beautiful photographs of snow crystals, taken with a special photomicroscope.
Luckily, the novella is as beautiful inside as it is out. The story transcends its Christian particulars to embrace the entirety of the natural world—which is not to say that it abandons its underpinnings in Stifter's Catholic faith. In an unpublished review (collected in Reflections on Culture and Literature), Hannah Arendt writes of Stifter's
"overwhelming, neverending gratitude for everything that is. Out of this grateful devotion, Stifter became the greatest landscape-painter in literature...: someone who possesses the magic wand to transform all visible things into words and all visible movements—the movement of the horse as well as that of the river or of the road—into sentences.... For Stifter, reality actually means nature and, for him, man is but one of its most perfect products. Again and again, he describes the slow, steady, and blessed process of the growth of a human being as it lives and blossoms and dies together with the trees and flowers of which it takes care during its lifetime."
Along these lines, John (aka Johannes) Urzidil, in a 1948 review of Stifter's Abdias that appeared in The Menorah Journal, writes about Stifter's universalism:
"Born into the simple popular Catholicism of his Bohemian backwoods, Stifter occasionally describes how he adhered to it with pious devotion during
his childhood. Later on he filled in this Catholic outline with the
purified values of Humanität and of Catholic Christianity. It was Goethean Humanität that transformed the dictum “Anima naturaliter Christiana” into “Anima naturaliter humana.”
At least, he bestowed upon his Christianity such a world-wide sympathy
that it led to an understanding of all forms and fates and destinies."
Which is all a fancy way of saying that, even if your the Grinchiest of Grinches, you should still give this book a try. But don't take our word for it, read what what Stewart, Mark, and Terry had to say about it.
Those of you who have read Paul Theroux's essay on The Widow by Georges Simenon—either as the introduction to the NYRB edition of the book, or when it appeared in the TLS—might have wished that it had come with a visual footnote to this sentence:
[The Widow] was even resurrected as
a 1950s pulp fiction paperback with a come-on tag line (“A surging novel of
torment and desire”) and a lurid cover: busty peasant girl pouting in a
barn, her skirt hiked over her knees, while a hunky guy lurks at the door –
price twenty-five cents.
Well, here you have it. And as a bonus, we bring you the back cover's illustrated dramatis personae: "THE PEASANT WOMAN, THE EX-CONVICT, THE TEEN-AGE GIRL" and the plot synopsis that, while not strictly misrepresenting the facts of the book, gets its tone all wrong: "...Tati knew that only the most devious devices could hold a man with fatally twisted emotions"!
The TLS article bore the title "The existential hack"�which doesn't seem to have been snapped up yet as the title of a freelance writer's blog, register it while you can.
Introducing the re-designed cover of J.A. Baker's The Peregrine. Now featuring 100% more . . . peregrine!
It seems the old cover showed a bird that was nothing like a peregrine. In fact, it was a red-tailed hawk. Pity, because I was fond of that swooping bird. Not so our hawk-eyed readers, one of whom suggested that having a red-tailed hawk on the cover of a book about peregrines was like featuring a dog on the cover of a book about cats.
The print shown on the new cover is by Dame Elisabeth Frink, whose "Birds of Prey Series"�which can be viewed on-line at the Tate's site—has a lovely naive quality.
We nearly made a similar error with the recently released Goshawk by T.H. White. Luckily we were saved by someone infinitely more knowledgeable about such things than anyone on our staff. He suggested a painting by the Swedish artist Bruno Liljefors. And it turned out quite handsome.
The Midnight Folk, the companion book to John Masefield's Box of Delights, isn't coming out till next September, but—the necessities of publishing being what they are—we already have the cover in house.
Nikki McClure, whose paper-cut illustrations are all done by hand, and who illustrated the cover of the earlier Masefield book (and kept us in line, reminding us that wolves weren't really evil—no red eyes!—and that metallic inks are environmentally unfriendly) has outdone herself here with a suspenseful image of Kay Harker and his rat pal shrinking in a basement corner while the witchy Sylvia Daisy Pouncer and her coven march down the steps.
We've been fans of Nikki's ever since noticing her work (including her yearly calendar, which has a cult following & which has been spotted around town at several of our favorite shops) at Buy Olympia.
Last year Abrams brought out a book collecting the works in all of the previous years' calendars.
Some of us in the office, though, have been aware of Nikki's work since prep-school days, and one of us is even the proud owner of an early rare work, Sent Out On The Tracks They Built: Sinophobia in Olympia, 1886, which she collaborated on with Sarah Dougher in a more rocking incarnation.
Read and interview with Nikki McClure here.
By: Rebecca,
on 4/18/2007
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Nowadays we are not expected to correspond to our names. Our friend Makepeace may be a bully, and a girl born in December may be called April or June. But in the past, people looked on the name as part of an individual. Knowledge of a hero’s name gave allowed the enemy to do him harm. To be sure, at all times there have been cowardly boys called Wolf or Leo and battered wives called Brynhild (bryn- “armor,” hild-“battle”), but things may not turn out the way we predict. (more…)
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