Judging Books by Their Covers
JBbTC 104: Frantz Fanon pt.4
Posted May 21, 2012 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks was initially published in 1952 by Editions Du Seuil. I've been digging around and have yet to find a cover for that first edition, the best I can do is a 1965 edition from Du Seuil, to the right. There is usually little to say about French covers, and Continental covers more broadly from this period, because they are almost all clean and austere, with minimal graphic qualities and simple series' markings and the title and author in a clean typeface. (For the run down on the English-language editions of Black Skin, click HERE).
JBbTC 103: Frantz Fanon pt.3
Posted May 14, 2012 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
If Wretched of the Earth is Fanon's manual for anti-colonial revolt, Black Skin, White Masks is the intellectual backbone behind it. Originally published in 1952, and based on his rejected doctoral thesis, it lays out the ideas behind the revolt—the psychological effects of colonialism. Although it is Fanon's first book, it wasn't published in English (by Grove Press) until 1967, six years after his death, and four years after Grove published Wretched of the Earth.
Black Skins is not a handbook for revolution, so it demanded a different cover treatment. What Grove went with was straight type, hand-rendered, which is very similar to the original Wretched dust jacket (see HERE), and a definite break with the Wretched paperback which was circulating in 1967.
JBbTC 102.5: A Brief Hiatus
Posted April 26, 2012 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
Hello book cover fans! I wanted to share a short note to say I hope that JBbTC will back on a regular weekly schedule very soon. Between working on Occuprint, the Interference Archive, and now installing a Justseeds show in Berlin, I've been way, way too busy, and the book posts have taken a back seat. I hope to be back on track ASAP.
In the meantime, it appears as if German crime novels in the 1970s included a lot of scenes with helicopters!!
JBbTC 102: Frantz Fanon pt.2
Posted April 2, 2012 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
Let's start off part two of the covers of Fanon's Wretched of the Earth (read part one HERE) with this beautiful cover from the 1961 Portuguese edition published by Editora Ulizzeia. Aesthetically I find this design stunning, the landscape of the mask flattened by the orange overprint, the strong tall gothic type springing from the forehead of the mask, everything is in balance. Politically it's a bit less convincing. Although Fanon's first book is entitled Black Skin, White Masks, the use of a Sub-Saharan African mask on a book about the Algerian anti-colonial struggle seems a bit off. In the coming weeks as I go through all the Fanon titles and their covers, you'll see how this mask theme keeps coming back, regardless of whether it is appropriate for the specific book or not.
JBbTC 101: Frantz Fanon pt.1
Posted March 26, 2012 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
I can't quite remember exactly when and where I was first introduced to Frantz Fanon. I do remember pulling down the pocket paperback to the right (Grove Press, 1968) off a shelf at a bookstore, and being intrigued by the orange and black mass in motion on the cover. I assume I knew who Fanon was, or picked it up because I had been told I should by someone, but those specifics have slipped away. Then again, if the title Wretched of the Earth didn't completely capture me, I suspect the subtitle added to this American edition—"The Handbook for the Black Revolution that is Changing the Shape of the World"—would have been more than enough to convince me to fork over the $3 it likely cost. The cover is graphically compelling in its own right, with the orange and black bodies in motion at the bottom and the horizon receding to black. It is not exactly clear what is happening, but the fire-like shape on the right side, and the bodies leaning down to pick things up (rocks?), give the viewer a good sense that they're looking at a riot in action. The top half of the field of black is smarty left alone, the middle is quite literally filled with sharp Helvetica (or a typeface very similar). It all adds up to being somewhat mysterious but absolutely intriguing.
JBbTC 100: B. Traven pt.10
Posted March 12, 2012 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
What better way to celebrate 100 posts about book covers than another batch of B. Traven designs! Here's part ten of my features on Traven, this time adding 34 more covers, bringing the total posted here over the past two years up to 194! (To see all the others, look HERE.)
I've been digging around bookstores and online, tracked some new ones down on Flickr, Amazon, and the Open Library. Traven covers are like the gift that keeps on giving, just when I think I've found most the them, dozens more show up!
We can start with The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. To the right is the dust jacket of the second German edition, published in Zurich by Büchergilde Gutenberg in 1942. The image is designed by Richard Paul Lohse, and is actually an enlarged version of the same character that was printed much smaller and directly on the cloth cover of the first edition (midway down the post HERE). The red figure with turquoise highlights makes for a bold cover, especially without any text to distract from it.
JBbTC 99: Hammers & Sickles pt.1
Posted March 5, 2012 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
One of the most compelling political symbols of the 20th century is the hammer and sickle. Although it was created during the Russian Revolution, and became the official symbol of the Soviet Union as a nation, it has taken on a much broader array of meanings. The hammer and sickle have come to mean any form of communism, not simply the Soviet variety, and as such, they get thrown around by all kinds of people. Youth who want to look rebellious pin button-versions on their graffitied backpacks, sectarian Communist relics dutifully keep them in the masthead of their musty newspapers, and right-wing nutters photoshop them as tattoos onto Obama's forehead.
More than a fair share of books are graced with the iconography, and I've been picking these up over the past couple years. I present the first part of my collection here. I'm also really hoping some you out there have some other great examples and will send them in to me. Email images to: josh at justseeds.org.
JBbTC 98: Black Power
Posted February 27, 2012 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
Working on the Angela Davis covers has got me thinking about representations of Black liberation. In particular, I've been trying to sort out and understand the surprisingly successful cover to Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton's Black Power, the 1967 text which defines the transition from the Civil Rights movement to the Black Power movement.
The original cover for the 1967 Random House first edition dust jacket was designed by Larry Ratzkin, a well-known graphic who created upwards of 1000 book covers. Ratzkin passed away last year, and in all of the writings about him and his work I could find online, including Flickr groups and other image collections, not a single one mentioned or included Black Power.
JBbTC 97: Angela Davis pt.3
Posted February 13, 2012 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
Here's the last hurrah of the Angela Davis covers (pending any great ones y'all might send in to me!), a collection of books by other authors about Davis and her trial. I found my first copy of If They Come In the Morning, and got turned on to Davis and her prison-activism, when I was a young, budding activist working with the Anarchist Black Cross in 1993. I picked up that book in a store in Texas while on a cross-country trip (along with a copy of George Jackson's Soledad Brother). Soon after I was introduced to the flip side of representations of Davis while digging through a strip mall book exchange in Massachusetts. Amongst the pile of Harlequin Romance novels I found the copy of Angela by "The Professor" on the right here (Leisure Books, 1971). This ghost-written book is pure exploitation, an attempt to cash in on Davis's fame—which I would suspect was successful to some extant since copies of this book are much easier to find than If They Come.
JBbTC 96: Angela Davis pt.2
Posted February 6, 2012 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
Onward to the Angela Davis pamphlets! Because these have been produced by a diverse collection of publishers and activist groups, the design is much broader and more interesting than the mainstream books. There must have been at least a dozen different groups organizing for Davis' release while she was on trial in 1972, and all of them produced publications in support of her cause. One of my favorite covers is the pamphlet to the right, On Trial: Angela Davis or America? with a main essay by Civil Rights Movement veteran and celebrity Ralph Abernathy (Angela Davis Legal Defense Committee, 1971). This cover has all the elements of good publication design. The type treatment is subtle, clean, and modern (literally, it is Futura!), leaving the singular central graphic to do the primary communication work. And that it does. The simple gesture of turning the stars on the U.S. flag into vertical bars instantly conjures prison associations with the word and idea of "America," and clearly answers the question in the title of which is on trial. In addition, the designer (uncredited) is smart enough to play to the strengths of single color printing, and the necessary conversion of the flag into black and white furthers the prison association.
JBbTC 95: Angela Davis pt.1
Posted January 30, 2012 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
While working on my posts about the covers of books about prisons (JBbTC 39–45, 52), I started a folder of Angela Davis covers, which has now grown large enough to be the basis of its own series of posts. About a third of these covers are books I have, another third are from friends (thanks again Ret!), and the final third from trolling the internet. Although an academic and an intellectual, it was Davis's connections to action that first brought her into the spotlight. In 1970-72 she was arrested (after a national manhunt by the FBI), tried, and eventually acquitted for kidnapping and manslaughter for her alleged role in Jonathon Jackson's failed attempt to liberate the Soledad Brothers.
JBbTC 94: Penguin Political Leaders
Posted January 23, 2012 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
I've never hidden my admiration for the sheer volume of creativity, thoughtful illustration, and sharp design that has gone into the production of Penguin Books, especially from the 1950s through the 1980s. I would guess most readers out there over the age of 30 have at least one 60s or 70s era Penguin paperback sitting on a shelf, and its cover is likely to be handsome, or quirky, or crisply efficient, or some combination of the above. For those not familiar, there is a great introduction to the press and its design history—Phil Baines' Penguin by Design (Penguin, 2005).
Rarely do I dig through a used bookstore and not stumble upon an old Penguin paperback with a phenomenal cover I've never seen before. Earlier this year I was at Brooklyn's Book Thug Nation and picked up two books from Penguin's "Political Leaders of the Twentieth Century" series, one on Mao and one on Ho Chi Minh. [Actually the series was put out by Pelican, the "serious" non-fiction imprint of Penguin.] Both carry variations of the style for the entire series, top 1/3 of the cover is title, the bottom 2/3 are an image of the leader/subject of the book, with a page tear separating the two. The edition of Mao Tse-Tung by Stuart Schram I have (to the right) is from 1966 and the cover design is attributed to Snark International.
JBbTC 93: Kronstadt pt.4
Posted January 16, 2012 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
My friend R. Marut in London has come through again with some more books I had missed, so here are the last three Kronstadt covers. First is this handsome Freedom Press pamphlet, The Kronstadt Revolt by Anton Ciliga (1942). This is pretty standard for Freedom in the forties, a split color cover with nice letter-pressed bold type, this time Bodoni Poster and Bodoni Poster Italic.
JBbTC 92: Kronstadt pt.3
Posted January 9, 2012 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
This week I've got even more Kronstadt covers, with a lot of help from Dave at Recollection Books in Seattle (thanks!). To the right is the dust jacket of the first edition of Paul Avrich's Kronstadt 1921 (Princeton University, 1970). Somehow in exploring all the covers of this books two weeks ago (HERE), I missed the first edition! This design takes the path less traveled for the more "pro-Kronstadt" books, choosing to focus on the large white expanse of snow and ice of the location, rather than the heroics of the soldiers. The slightly Cyrillized (doubt that's a word?) poster type is a nice touch, as is the line of ellipses that become a break in the image midway down the cover.
JBbTC 91: Kronstadt pt.2
Posted January 1, 2012 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
I wanted to start this week off with a counterpoint to last weeks generally pro-Kronstadt sailor covers. To the left is the cover of Kronstadt by Lenin and Trotsky, published by the Trotskyist Pathfinder Press in 1994. The cover clearly shows who the authors and publishers are aligned with, because instead of the striking sailors, we are given an image of the Red Army soldiers that attacked and slaughtered them. As a design it is quite effective, the soldiers emerging out of the snow (and the white field of the cover). In addition, the A in the word Kronstadt in the title is literally crushed, put at an extreme italic. It's those little details that can really make a cover.
JBbTC 90: Kronstadt pt.1
Posted December 26, 2011 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
This week's post is inspired by the book to the right, which I came across on Alec's bookshelf during a recent visit to Pittsburgh. Emanuel Pollack's The Kronstadt Rebellion (New York: Philosophical Library, 1959) caught my eye, with the roughly drawn hand lettering—almost as if the title was graffiti painted with a broad brush—and the sketchy black drawing with bright white highlights on a red field. What's not to like? (Once again I apologize for the slightly blurry cell phone photo.) If it hasn't become abundantly clear, unlike most of the reading public in the U.S. I'm not a fan of straight photographic book covers. With the spread of digital pre-press in the late 90s/early 2000s, it became easier and easier (and cheaper) for publishers to run large 4-color process photographs on their covers, and the book trade very quickly became dominated by them. I would guess that about 65-75% of all covers are now graced with full color photographs, with that number being even higher for nonfiction books, likely upwards of 80%. This is all just to say that heavily illustrated and uniquely lettered covers like Pollack's are rarely produced these days.
JBbTC 89: Cienfuegos Press pt.6
Posted December 19, 2011 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
Some of you might have noticed I've shorted the name of these posts to JBbTC, but I've also re-sorted and organized them, as well as titled them by content, so they are much easier to find and read! Now you can easily scroll through all the book cover blogs by simply clicking HERE.
This week is another update post. Over the past couple years I've been posting all the covers of the British anarchist publisher Cienfuegos Press. I believe I've finally tracked down the last of their titles, and share them with you now. The earlier posts with additional background info can be found HERE.
One of Cienfuegos' flagship projects was it's Anarchist Review. It ran for six issues, from 1976 to 1982. The original goal was to publish is bi-annually, and it would be a definitive reader of all things anarchy, including news, historical research, and reviews of all of the anarchist publications over the time period of it's publication. Unfortunately it's budget never caught up to it's ambition, and it only came out roughly once a year, but the middle issues, numbers 3 through 5, were amazing thick almanacs, and a fabulous slice of what was going on in antiauthoritarian politics in the late 1970s.
JBbTC 88: Updates
Posted December 12, 2011 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
Every once in awhile I need to catch my breath from doing these covers, and that's a good moment to go back and fill in any missing pieces and odds and ends from earlier posts. This is one of those weeks.
To start with I found one more cover for the magazine Sha’un Falastinya, featured in JBbTC 82. To the left is issue #198, from 1989. The watercolor cover is subdued, but buoyant. It appears to be half day, half night (or maybe the sun in the top left is simply a huge moon), and the women are holding up not only large pots and baskets, but act as architectural pillars, holding up the community itself. In addition, my entire post was translated in French and reposted on Info-Palestine.net! (You can check it out HERE.)
JBbTC 87: Boni Paper Books pt.3
Posted December 5, 2011 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
OK, I couldn't help myself. Even though I went through the eight Boni Paper Books I actually have over the past two weeks (HERE and HERE), I started getting so curious about what the others looked like that I tracked down (online) covers for a bunch of them. Few of the images are as nice as my scans, and I don't have any of the back covers or endpapers, but here are some of the other Boni covers. Where possible I've attributed the designer (unfortunately not very often).
JBbTC 86: Boni Paper Books pt.2
Posted November 28, 2011 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
Here is part two of my series on the early American paperback experiment known as Boni Paper Book. To read the back story, and see the first four books I looked at, check out last week's post HERE. I love the Sun Way cover to the left, so I started off with that, but I'm going to go through the books just like last week, from first published to last, with the back covers included and as much info as I have.
JBbTC 85: Boni Paper Books pt.1
Posted November 21, 2011 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
Two weekends ago I got a chance to take a short trip to Pittsburgh to get a much needed mini-vacation and visit with fellow Justseeds' members Bec, Icky, Mary, and Shaun. Most people who know me have come to the understanding that I can't go anywhere without a quick scan of the local used bookstores, and Icky and Shaun obliged. In the basement of one shop I found a great mini-collection of old Boni Paper Books.
Boni Paper Books where a brief early experiment in American paperback book publishing. Charles and Albert Boni, New York publishers of reputable hardback books and co-founders of the Modern Library book series, began this experiment in 1929. They teamed up with designer (and Leftist) Rockwell Kent to create a series of well-made and inexpensive paperback books, a novelty at the time (by comparison, Penguin Books—the first large scale paperback publisher in the UK—wasn't founded by Allen Lane until 1935). The books were primarily distributed as a book of the month club, with each new titled published and mailed out to subscribers (who had paid a $5 annual charge) on the 25th of the month.
JBbTC 84: The Man Who Was Thursday pt.2
Posted November 14, 2011 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
Here is part 2 of the covers of G.K. Chesterton's 1908 anarchist exploitation novel The Man Who Was Thursday. You can see the first 17 covers from last week HERE. This weeks first cover (to the left) is from the 2008 edition from the Crime Classics series of Atlantic Press. Atlantic is a young UK independent publisher, and this series of books is generally gorgeous. White borders, duotone printing, and the simple sans serif publisher/line/series name at the top set the style, and then each one is illustrated uniquely. A little digging online shows the designer of the series is Wallzo. The Thursday cover is fabulous, and really captures the spooky, underground adventure aspects of the novel I was talking about last week.
JBbTC 83: The Man Who Was Thursday pt.1
Posted November 7, 2011 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
A couple months ago I was looking around a great local Brooklyn new/used bookshop, Unnameable, and I stumbled on a book cover featuring an cool looking illustration of a riot scene, an illustration that looked really familiar. It was an image by Félix Vallotton, a late 19th century Swiss avant-garde printmaker with deep sympathies towards anarchism. It turns out that the book was a new Penguin edition of GK Chesterton's 1908 thriller The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare (see right).
On the one hand, the image is quite fitting, it is from the period of the book, and could be illustrating a scene straight from its pages. On the other hand, Valloton fell far on the other side of the political fence from Chesterton. While anarchists and police are the subject of the novel, Chesterton shows no sympathies to the rebels. Valloton did quite the opposite, regularly satirizing the police. The placing of the two texts literally on top of each other is a fascinating rewriting of history, both humorous, but also in a way stripping both historical figures/artists of their beliefs, and flattening them out into a period "style."
JBbTC 82: Sha’un Falastiniya
Posted October 31, 2011 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
About a month ago I started getting emails from my friend Charles, who works for the Journal of Palestine Studies. He started digging up old issues of an Arabic language sister journal Sha’un Falastiniya, with amazing covers. According to Charles, "Sha’un Falastiniya (Palestinian Affairs) was first released by the PLO’s academic department. in 1971—in Beirut—called the Palestine Research Center. It was edited for a while by the legendary Palestinian poet Mahmud Darwish, before it and its staff were eventually pushed into exile in Cyprus with the rest of the PLO, during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. It finally stopped publishing in 1993 in Cyprus. It contained political, literary and academic articles, analysis, criticism, and book reviews."
Although I only have these ten issues to draw from, the early issues have a similar vibe to some of the design work in the Cuban journal Tricontinental (produced by OSPAAAL, the solidarity organization well known for its poster design). They are diverse and open in color scheme, and use a lot of found imagery, mixing things that otherwise wouldn't go together (for example, 18th or 19th century landscape etchings with photographs of Palestinian guerrillas!). At the same time the clean masthead and limited palette (most are duotone or tritone, not cmyk) combine with the classical print imagery to generate a very clean, efficient, and almost conservative design.
JBbTC 81: Fizz
Posted October 24, 2011 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
This week I'm going to jump back to Germany in the 60s and 70s, and look at Fizz, an antiauthoritarian political paper which split with Agit 883. Editors from Agit left that paper in 1971, and produced Fizz, which lasted for 10 issues. Since I don't know much German, my research into this has been limited, but it appears as if one of the main reasons for the split were that Fizz wanted to more whole-heartedly support the RAF. In many ways Fizz looks and feels like Agit, with a head-spinning mix of montage, illustration, news clippings, re-purposed photographs, and other cultural detritus. On the other hand, Fizz embraced more traditional anarchist imagery, with lots of bombs and black and red flags (which is interesting in the context of the split with Agit, as the RAF were far from antiauthoritarian). Each issue also featured a poster in the center, usually honoring a "hero," from Bakunin to Leila Khaled. I believe most of these issues were banned by the West German government. [I apologize for the low-quality images, I had to take them on a cell phone and try to touch them up. Hopefully at some point I'll be able to replace them with better versions.]
JBbTC 80: New Anarchist Review
Posted October 17, 2011 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
About three years back I bought a small collection of cheap, but relatively handsome, UK Anarchist pamphlets under the title New Anarchist Review. They stretched from 1984 into the early 1990s, and were largely composed of reviews and lists of recently published anarchist books, advertisements from antiauthoritarian publishers, and a short article here and there. I was initially drawn to them because they seemed a humble heir to the Cienfuegos Press Anarchist Review of the late 70s, which had similar content, but was much more comprehensive and completest.
It turns out that New Anarchist Review (NAR) was published by the same consortium of anarchist groupings that put together the early London Anarchist Bookfair, including the publishers involved in A Distribution (such as Pheonix Press, Freedom Press, and Rebel Press), the Anarchist Book Service, and the anarchist bookshops Freedom and 121 Centre. There is a really nice history of the London Anarchist Bookfair and the New Anarchist Review that you can read HERE. I don't think it is intended to be anonymous, but I couldn't find an author attribution anywhere!
JBbTC 79: Agit 883 pt.5
Posted October 10, 2011 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
Here's the last batch of Agit883 covers! These all rely on some version of collage and montage, to varying effects...I'm actually up to my neck in a poster project for the Occupied Wall Street Journal, so this week all the covers will go completely without comment! I hope to be back to my usual overly verbose self next week.
JBbTC 78: Agit 883 pt.4
Posted October 3, 2011 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
This week we've got more Agit 883. Like last week, I'm blitzed with other work and life issues, so I'm mostly going to just let these ride, and speak for themselves. General info: All the covers this week are largely made up of re-used and re-purposed photographic images from other newspapers and sources. Some are used in the celebratory sense of reproducing images of resistance, and others in a critical sense of satirically focusing on people in power.
The cover to the right, for issue #16, is a satirical use of an image from Vietnam, the brutality wrought on children by the war is commented on with the title "International Children's Day."
JBbTC 77: Agit 883 pt.3
Posted September 26, 2011 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
Here's week three of covers of the German anti-capitalist paper Agit 883. This week I want to look at the covers that use the conventions of popular comic books to convey political ideas. Although there was a huge alternative comics scene that developed in the US in the late 60s, it was often more challenging aesthetically than politically "radical" in content. Outside of Spain Rodriguez and a small number of other artists that did some comics about political histories (such as those in Anarchy Comics), the U.S. was much more counter-culturally identified. It appears as if Agit either borrowed clearly political comics for a number of covers, or had a comic artist in their crew (issue #24 to the left is a good example).
This has been a crazy week, with much time spent at the Wall Street Occupation, so I'm going to leave it at that for now, and mostly let the covers speak for themselves.
JBbTC 76: Agit 883 pt.2
Posted September 19, 2011 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
Here's week two of covers from the German 60s/70s publication Agit 883. Last week (HERE) I looked at the covers of the first 13 (of 88) issues, and broke the covers roughly into four different design types. This week I'm going to look at some of the covers that fall into type 1: variations on the singular illustration or editorial cartoon as central graphic element.
Issue 18 to the right is a perfect example, the large title "Kollectiv" and the illustration of 9 people—represented as camels—fill the cover. Not exactly sure of the context of the image, but possibly the 7 tethered to the Agit logo are cartoons of the editorial staff?
JBbTC 75: Agit 883 pt.1
Posted September 12, 2011 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
Continuing and expanding on last week's post on the covers of Sabat, an '80s German ultra-left magazine, this week I'm going to go way to the late 60s, and look at some of the covers of one of the publications that was a main organ for the emerging German ultra-left and armed left, Agit 883. Agit 883 published 88 issues between 1969 and 1972. Little is written about it in English, but there is a great book in German about the publication, Agit 883: Bewegung, Revolte, Underground 1969-1972 (Assoziation A, 2006) which includes a CD which contains pdf scans of all the papers, including the covers (which is where the ones here come from). Those scans are also available online HERE. The paper was founded by Dirk Schneider (and possibly others) and had a rotating editorial staff over it's four years of publishing. It began with a Marxist/critical theory bent, but became more anarchist and anti-Leninist over time. It appears that the paper split and eventually ceased publication because of a combination of internal political disagreements and state repression, both largely related to support for the RAF and other armed groups.
I'm not going to show all 88 covers, but I'll look at the first 13 issues this week, and then look at more of the run over the following couple weeks. Like many '60s German counter-culture papers, Agit 883 covers started out as mock versions of existing German publications (this is also true for Linkeck and Fizz, both of which I'll look at in future posts). The cover of issue #1 (left) looks like a more traditional newspaper with a little Dada thrown in, and issue #2 (below) places the Agit 883 logo behind a clipped out title for Die Deutschen Bullen (which itself is emerging from a clip art pile of riot cops).
JBbTC 74: Sabot: Hamburger Info Sammlung
Posted September 5, 2011 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
I think I'll keep exploring the covers of obscure ultra-left political journals for awhile! Although not exactly known for their graphic sensibilities, there are definitely some interesting looking antiauthoritarian political journals out there, including a whole bunch from Germany. Last year I picked up five issues of Sabot: Hamburger Info Sammlung (Hamburg Info Collection), a 1980s squatter/anti-imperialist/autonomen publication based out of Hamburg. It ran for 23 issues from 1985-1989. Because of its support of the armed wing of the German left (RAF, etc.), especially through printing communiques with little or no commentary, the publication was often facing state repression—publishers were arrested and imprisoned,—and it was discontinued after the 23rd issue.
JBbTC 73: The Ripening of Time
Posted August 29, 2011 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
I'm trying to decide what feature this week while riding out this hurricane hitting the east coast. Hopefully I'll get this up and posted before the power goes out (if it goes out, seems unlikely at this point).
Given the strange circumstances, I was thinking I was just going to post a handful of cool pamphlets I've picked up over the years, starting with this issue of the Irish political journal The Ripening of Time. This is issue #12 and the only one I've ever seen in person. I assumed that it was one of the dozens and dozens of issues of random political journals I've collected over the years that seem completely lost to history, but it turns out this one was important to people, and a number of different sites have been archiving different issues, and an Irish TV show even produced an episode about it! (you can watch it HERE).
JBbTC 72: B. Traven pt.9
Posted August 22, 2011 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
My friend "Ret" has sent me some great covers a couple times now. Originally a couple of B. Traven ones, and now a lot more (plus some Angela Davis covers I'll be featuring in the near future). A couple months back Ret sent me a great folder of a dozen Traven covers I hadn't previously featured, and that's what I'm going to share today. This will actually be the 9th week I've focused on Traven, and with these 11 covers, a total of 159 Traven editions! You can check out all the past covers HERE.
To start out, to the right is an interesting 1971 Penguin edition of March to Caobaland (the same as March to the Monteria, but according to Ret, an earlier translation). It's a great cover, and feels way ahead of it's time, a real slick post-modern mix of fonts, classic design elements, and contrasting color scheme. It has none of the human hand typical of late 60s/early 70s eclectic design (a la PushPin), so seems more late 80s or early 90s.
JBbTC 71: Ukranian Modernism pt.3
Posted August 15, 2011 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
This week will be the final round-up of the Ukranian covers I've been looking at for the past couple weeks. If you're interested and haven't seen them, you can check out those entries HERE and HERE.
To the left is the cover of Dmitro Bedzik's Underground Thunder. Bedzik was a Ukranian writer and playwright, born in 1898, but I don't think this book was published until 1971. I haven't been able to find much out about it, but it is some sort of historical novel about the Ukraine, and given the block prints inside, it must have some connection to a story of revolution and repression. The cover is really nice, a paper-wrapped hardback, printed in red and black on an unbleached stock. The title is in a clean sans serif Cyrillic font, and the right 2/3 of the page is covered with a powerful red and black block print of emotive working class faces piled up below a banner.
JBbTC 70: Ukranian Modernism pt.2
Posted August 8, 2011 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
Here's the second part of the Ukranian communist book stash I found in upstate NY. (Part one can be found HERE.) To the left is the cover for a book which is oddly titled Honor and Dignity of Russian Names (Moscow, 1973). The red type has that fabulous Western look, which I would suspect read as something completely different in 1970s USSR. The blue floral fill is very conservative/classical, but the concentric frames around it add a more modern touch. Paired with the patriotic/space program red stripes and stars at the bottom, it all makes for quite a quirky cover.
Below we have the back cover, which lists either the author or publisher, Soviet Committee for Cultural Relations with Overseas Compatriots. The name is stretched and squished line by line into a tight little box of blue type, wrapped up in a frame emanating from a little red star, like the star is exclaiming the words!
JBbTC 69: Ukranian Modernism pt.1
Posted August 1, 2011 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
A couple months back I got to spend an amazingly fun and relaxing weekend at a strange old Ukranian summer camp in Monroe, NY called Arrow Park. It was the first annual retreat of the political collectives Resistance in Brooklyn and Wild Poppies, and although Dara and I aren't members of either, we we're friends and fellow-travelers enough to be able to get away to the beautiful grounds and lakefront of this retreat center frozen in time. It was like walking into a 1970s-preserved camp from the 1930s! At some point the place must of been connected to the Communist Party, either here or in the USSR, as the bookshelves contained a small but interesting collection of Communist literature in Ukrainian, Russian, and Byelorussian, all in Cyrillic characters.
I turned to my favorite Slavophile and Russian language student (and Justseeds member) Alec Dunn, who kindly translated the pile of covers I photographed at Arrow Park. To the right is a simple floral cover that exclaims Great October.
JBbTC 68: The Black Jacobins
Posted July 25, 2011 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
I recently got the word from PM Press that I'm designing two covers for reprints of C.L.R. James books. It's quite an honor, as James is one of those interesting figures of the 20th century Left that has both contributed significantly to the theory of revolution and liberation, but has also been present and involved during many political upheavals, including Detroit in the 40s and 50s as the foundation for the Black workers' struggles to come in the 60s and 70s was being laid, and again in West Africa during decolonization in the late 50s and early 60s. Although much of his political thought evolved from Trotskyism, he split with most of its doctrinaire tenants and mined it for deeper liberatory potential, particularly for the Global South and African diaspora.
Although I'll be doing covers for State Capitalism & World Revolution and
A History Of Pan-African Revolt (both co-publications betweeen PM Press and Charles H. Kerr), my eyes were first opened to James through reading his seminal study of the Haitian Revolution, The Black Jacobins. James articulates that one of his reason for writing this book was deeply partisan, to show that Black people could carry out a successful revolution. His book and his reasons for writing it have been deeply influential to my understanding of history and how it can be written.
JBbTC 67: Updates (Eberhardt and New Century Publishers)
Posted July 18, 2011 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
For the next week I'm in Pittsburgh helping Justseeds install our piece in the upcoming Pittburgh Biennial, so unfortunately I don't have a ton of time for the next couple weeks blog posts. I'm going to keep these pretty brief, and build up some energy and research for the weeks to come!
This week I've got a couple odds and ends, including a nice postcard from Eberhardt Press I recently dug out (to the right; if you want to see the rest of Eberhardt's books, check out the posts HERE), and handful more covers from New Century Publishers, to follow up on last weeks post (see HERE).
JBbTC 66: New Century Publishers
Posted July 11, 2011 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
A couple months back I was browsing the shelves at the awesome Book Thug Nation bookstore in Brooklyn and I came across a nice paperback copy of Julius Fuchik's Spanish Civil War book Notes From the Gallows (to the left). The cover is fabulous, a three-color print job used to strong effect with yellow overlapping red to make orange, and black outlines pulling everything together where necessary. Aaron at Book Thug told me he had seen other nice looking books from New Century Publishers (who put out the Fuchik book in 1948), and that sent me on the hunt.
There is very little information about New Century online, but I can deduce from what they have published (William Z. Foster, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn) that they were a post-war Communist Party, USA front publisher. I tracked down another dozen books that appear to have been put out by the same New Century between 1946-1963 (there are a number of other non-commie NCP's out there), none have as nice a cover as the Fuchik, but there are some other nice ones. Like most CP books, as far as I can tell none of these give info for the cover designers, but the Fuchik cover has the signature "Nydorf" in the top right corner. This may be Roy Nydorf, a painter that I think was associated with the CP. If anyone has any more info on New Century or Nydorf, make a comment below, or send me an email.
JBbTC 65: Mozambique Revolution
Posted July 4, 2011 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
I'm very excited to have a new studio, which will also be the home of Interference Archive, but between packing, moving, building shelving, and regular freelance work, I haven't had a minute to think about book covers in the past couple weeks. Over the next couple weeks I think I'll just be pulling together small little pockets of covers I've collected over the past couple years.
While doing research for Signs of Change, I came across an English language publication produced by FRELIMO, the liberation movement of Mozambique. It appears that Mozambique Revolution was FRELIMO's English organ of communication with its support and solidarity movement. This is just a smattering of covers—9 total—while the publication was monthly and ran from 1963-1975. There's some pretty interesting and smart design here, which like many 60s and 70s movement publications, seems driven in part by the technological limitations of producing quick and inexpensive output at high volume.
JBbTC 64: Insurrection
Posted June 27, 2011 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
I had intended to follow-up last weeks post about Elephant Editions Anarchist Pocketbook series (check it out HERE) with the covers of another of their popular book/pamphlet series, the eight publications printed under the label Bratach Dubh (Black Flag in Gaelic). But, I still feel unhappy with my research, and keep turning up new info and new covers (i.e. it appears that Bratach Dubh was originally it's own publisher, and was folded into Elephant Editions in 1990 when Weir reprinted all of the original pamphlets from the 70s and 80s), so I'm going to wait on that for a couple weeks (If you've got any info on the origins and history of Elephant Editions beyond the basics (see last week's post) please drop me a line!
Instead I'm going to look at the covers of the seven issues of Insurrection magazine, published by Jean Weir concurrently to running Elephant Editions press. To the left is the first issue, which is technically issue #0 (the pilot). The cover is generally unremarkable design-wise, other than the designer was smart enough to not obscure the striking photograph of a Native American (possibly Sitting Bull, but I don't know for sure?).
JBbTC 63: Elephant Editions pt.1
Posted June 20, 2011 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
Dove-tailing off of last weeks post on the UK publisher Shortfuse, this week I'm going to start a series of posts on the UK/Italian anarchist publisher Elephant Editions. I believe Elephant Editions was begun in the UK in the early to mid-80s by insurrectionary anarchist Jean Weir. I'm not an expert in insurrectionary anarchist history, but in 1982 Weir began producing an anarchist magazine/broadsheet called Insurrection, which ran for seven issues throughout the 1980s (I will be featuring the covers of this magazine in a future post). Within the pages of Insurrection their is a melange of anti-militarism, critiques of the organizational forms of politics, records of state violence, and a defense of illegalism (for lack of a better description, individualist armed struggle). In addition, Weir translated and published some of the first writings by the Italian anarchist Alfredo Bonnano into English. Elephant Editions as a publisher seems to have begun in the mid-80s as an extension of Insurrection.
Like the magazine, Elephant is a diverse and interesting brew. Their publications fall into roughly three groupings, the early Anarchist Pocketbook series, the Bratach Dubh pamphlet series, and a small collection of other pamphlets and publications. This week we'll start with the Anarchist Pocketbooks.
JBbTC 62: Shortfuse Press
Posted June 13, 2011 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
In January 1994 I made my first visit to the UK and to London. At the time there were two functional anarchist spaces in town that were open to the public: the 121 Railton and 56A Infoshops. At the time I felt like 121 was where all the action was: it was based in Brixton, had an old printing press, a large meeting and event space, a cafe, etc., etc. My memories of 56A are foggier. My main memory was that there was a food coop there, which was decidedly less interesting to me than the 1 quid veggie burgers and Anarchist Black Cross meetings at 121. Turns out 121 was soon to collapse, and 56A has held on and maintained itself as a thriving social centre in South London.
I went back in the Fall of 2007 and ran into Chris, who I had met there almost 15 years earlier. We got to hang out, and he gave Icky and I free run of the 56A archive, which we helped organize. We tried to document material from it that would be useful in a future issue of our journal Signal. Two years later I was back in London, and this time met up with Chris and his mate Mark, who together make up the main major force behind Short Fuse Printing and Bandit Press.
JBbTC 61: Eberhardt Press pt.3
Posted June 6, 2011 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
This week I'm looking at the final bits and pieces from Eberhardt Press. I've got a couple book and pamphlet covers here, and some things Eberhardt printed but didn't design. Also, over the past couple years I've collected a bunch of other Eberhardt printed ephemera which I've included.
No printer in the U.S. can survive on printing political books and pamphlets alone. The way Eberhardt has dealt with this problem is two-fold. Charles does a lot of "job work" or printing for other people, to make ends meet, and has been lucky enough to carve out a very diverse client base which produces much that he is at least sympathetic to. He regularly prints for Microcosm Publishing, he has printed or helped print the magazine Communicating Vessels, he prints Anarchy Magazine for Ardent Press, and he has done a lot of printing for us here at Justseeds, including the calendar we co-published with AK Press and our yearly organizer.
In addition to the job work, Charles designs and prints a wide array of notebooks and cards which he sells. His design aesthetic is strong and unique, a combination of Victorian figures in action (with a steam-punk-y vibe) and naturalistic, graphic representations of animals. The notebook cover to the above left is a good example, a 19th century man experimenting with a light-bulb helmet!
JBbTC 60: Eberhardt Press pt.2
Posted May 30, 2011 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
Welcome to part two of my series focused on the Portland, OR printer and publisher Eberhardt Press. Over the past 7 years Eberhardt has developed a series of signature stylistic flourishes that are often very effective design-wise, and highlight the synergy between content, design, and production that a joint designer/printer/publisher can bring to a book project. As an example, the Midnight Notes pamphlet, Towards the Last Jubilee! (to the right is the pamphlet cover below the dust jacket, which can be seen below) successfully pulls together Charles Overbeck's (the principle behind Eberhardt) use of metallic inks on black paper, dust jackets on pamphlets, and strategic use of spot colors.
The dust jacket is a strong use of black and red, lots of negative space, and a type treatment that works graphically, references Modernism, but is also creative and a bit quirky in its own right. The text completely dominates the cover, wraps around from front to back, but the creative repetition of both "30" and "MN" allows for the jacket to work as a whole, or simply as a front cover. Below the dust jacket is a clock striking midnight, the silver on black evoking the shimmer of moonlight. But the clock isn't ornate or romantic, it's clean and utilitarian, midnight is a fact, not an event.
JBbTC 59: Eberhardt Press pt.1
Posted May 23, 2011 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
After looking at one of the anarchist presses with the best cover design of the 1970s and 80s, I wanted to look ahead and see who is doing something comparable today. The two largest contemporary English language anarchist publishers are AK Press and PM Press, and both have some great covers, but both also work with many different designers and put out over 20 titles a year. There is little design consistency in their output. Maybe in a future post I'll pull out some of my favorites from those two, but for now I want to hone in on a smaller project, a publisher with a more consistent and evolving design sense.
Eberhardt Press was begun in 2004 by Charles and Esther. Eberhardt is not only a publisher, but also a printer. They started on a Chief one-color offset press, and have graduated to a 2-color Ryobi. Charles runs the shop solo now, and does a lot of job work (other people's jobs that he prints) to keep it running, but over the past 7 years has designed, printed, and published a small catalog of specifically Eberhardt Press titles. Although diverse, these publications retain certain design elements that are distinctly Eberhardt, a rare treat in the 21st Century!
JBbTC 58: Cienfuegos Press pt.5
Posted May 16, 2011 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
Here's the second half of the remaining Cienfuegos Press covers. The image to the left is the cover of Towards a Citizens Militia. It seems so audacious now (and maybe did back in the 80s to), but as the title says, this pamphlet purports to illustrate "Anarchist Alternatives to NATO and the Warsaw Pact." That's right, anarchist counter-military strategies to neutralize multi-national military organizations! I've always loved the simple black and green illustration and the type, particularly the letter arrangements in the subtitle.
JBbTC 57: Cienfuegos Press pt.4
Posted May 9, 2011 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
OK, now turning the corner on the follow-up posts and into new material, this week I'm going to look at the covers of the British anarchist publisher Cienfuegos Press, which existed from the mid-70s through the early 80s. About half of their covers were designed or illustrated by the Italian artist Flavio Costantini, and I featured all these covers back in posts #6-8 (see HERE, HERE, and HERE). I've tracked down most of the rest of their covers, and will spread them out over this week and next. In general Costantini's work was the best, and gave the press a real consistent feel that I still associate with late 70s UK anarchism, but there are some gems in the other covers. Case in point is the cover to the left, for Marcus Graham's anthology culled from his publication MAN! The figure at the top has seemingly pushed open the visual field on the cover, revealing a giant swath of pitch black, with the title illuminated in red. The bold confidence of creating an almost entirely black cover is impressive. I believe this is only the second book published by Cienfuegos, in 1974.
JBbTC 56: B. Traven pt.8
Posted May 2, 2011 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
Here's the last of the B. Traven covers. This week I've rounded-up 33 covers, so I'm going to forgo much of my witty banter and pretty much just dump all the covers below. Enjoy!
The cover to the right is one of my favorites of the batch, a really nice 1973 edition of Bridge in the Jungle from Barcelona, published by Circulo de Electores. The watercolor, patterns, and nice thin sans serif type makes for a more subtle and open design than most of the heavy-handed Traven covers (which are usually appropriate, given Traven's writing style).
After the break are a couple Italian editions of Bridge in the Jungle, both by Longanesi. The first, from 46, is a bit romantic for my tastes, the second, from 52, is a bit more interesting, with the Mexican figure being swallowed by the jungle.
JBbTC 55: B. Traven pt.7
Posted April 25, 2011 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
By far the most response to this book cover blog over the past year was to the six-week installment about the covers of the mysterious German-born, Mexican-bound, antiauthoritarian novelist B. Traven (Weeks 14-19, which you can see HERE). Both Jared Davidson (in New Zealand) and "Ret Marut" (thought to be the real name of Traven) emailed me images of the 1974 Panther UK edition of The Death Ship. Ret also sent me a great link to something they wrote on Traven, which you can read HERE. There is also a somewhat "official" Traven site at BTraven.com, which has tons more info on Traven, plus full bibliography, small images of tons more covers, and a collection of his photography.
Spurred on by all the interest in Traven, I've scoured the web and used bookstores trying to find more covers. I've come up with 17 more covers of The Death Ship (all below), as well as about 20 additional covers of other books (which I'll share next week). If anyone out there has even more Traven covers, definitely email them to me! (Images at least 300 pixels in width are preferred...)
JBbTC 54: Victor Serge pt.1
Posted April 18, 2011 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
So I've got all these Cienfuegos Press and B. Traven covers to follow-up on last year's posts, but I haven't had the time to pull them all together. Instead, for this week, I'm going to take a quick look at some covers for books by Victor Serge. The inspiration for this is the covers created by the UK publishers Writers and Readers in the 1970s (yup, the same Writers and Readers that went on to do all the "For Beginners" books!).
In 1977/78 Writers and Readers published the three volumes of Serge's Victory-in-Defeat, Defeat-in-Victory" cycle of novels about the Russian Revolution. Men in Prison is the first volume, then Birth of our Power, and finally Conquered City. The covers of these three books are simple, and maybe because of that I find them really attractive.
JBbTC 53: New World Paperbacks pt.3
Posted April 11, 2011 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
Following up on last weeks post, and some of last years covers that slipped through the cracks, here is a cool selection of New World Paperbacks (NWP) covers. The original NWP posts, including their story and a dozen covers can be found HERE and HERE. Since those posts, I've picked up a half dozen additional NWP books and found a clutch of good images online.
To start with, I found 3 books of poetry, one from 1968, one from 1971, and one from 1982. The first (to the left), The Portable Walter, is definitely designed to appeal to youth culture, and their attraction to psychedelia. The color scheme of pink and purple, and the watery letter forms and shapes are reminiscent of the Haight-Ashbury rock posters so popular in 1966 and 67. It's actually quite suprising to me that the Communist Party would so quickly pick up on the aesthetics of the counter-culture, especially since they were simultaneously expelling young members they felt were becoming to anti-authoritarian. At the same time, there is still something awkward and staid in the cover. The figure, who I'm assuming is Walter Lowenfels, isn't wearing tie-die, or even jeans, but looks like he's at the beach on break from his office cubicle.
JBbTC 52: Prisons pt.8/George Jackson
Posted April 4, 2011 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
Well, I have to say, I'm pretty excited that I've now done a full year's worth of "Judging Books by Their Covers" blog posts! Week 52! In what has otherwise been an insane and erratic year, this blog has been one of the only consistent things in my life. I feel pretty damn accomplished!
As a bit of a celebration, I'm going to chill out for a couple weeks and rather than dig up a bunch of new subjects (plenty of which will be coming during year 2!), I'm going to go back over the past year and fill in some things I missed. Throughout the year, as I've been collecting new covers, I've come across a whole selection of great ones that fell through the cracks. Submitting to my completist tendencies, I'm going to fill in some of these gaps.
I'll start with the prison series, and in particular the political prisoner book covers. While at my friend Amadee's house awhile back I stumbled across a nice UK paperback edition of Angela Davis' If They Come in the Morning, her edited collection of writings about political prisoners from the early 70s. In many ways it echoes the US covers (which you can see in the week 43 post HERE), but the close up on the face with the full bleed is more inviting, and the simple sans serif title in orange and white is efficient and convincing. I think it is the most effective and least dated of the 3 covers.
JBbTC 51: Arbeiter Ring's Semaphore series
Posted March 28, 2011 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
After filling the last 3 months with two different five-week series (prisons and Kropotkin), I'm ready to jump into something completely different. For the most part over the past year I've been focusing on book covers from the turn of the 20th Century to the 1980s or 90s, so I thought it would be cool to try to look as some more contemporary cover design work.
About 5 years ago a series of books being produced by a small independent publisher from Canada started catching my eye. The series is named Semaphore, and the publisher is small collectively-run press named Arbeiter Ring. The series kicked off in 2002 with a book by Ian Angus, and reached eight titles at the end of last year with Grammar Matters by Jila Ghomeshi. I haven't read all the books (though I have read a couple, and they were quite good!), and the insides aren't my focus here, instead this is a review of the outsides.
JBbTC 50: Kropotkin pt.5
Posted March 21, 2011 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
Here's the final installment of the Peter Kropotkin book cover series, 19 covers this week, 69 total over the 5 week series. Although what initially drew me to doing these post about Kropotkin was a focus on the all the different representations of his beards, he is actually an interesting subject for this kind of visual inquiry, as his writing has been published by hundreds of publishers in dozens of languages for more than 100 years. I'm sure these 69 books are merely the tip of the iceberg, and some additional research could really illuminate how Kropotkin was represented in different geographies in different time periods, and how those representations related to the design conventions of the day. But that is a project for a different day.
Today I'm going to go through the last of these covers, starting with another one of Kropotkin's popular books, Memoirs of a Revolutionist. I like the 1962 Anchor pocketbook edition to the left for a couple different reasons. First, the simple sans serif text and the almost tourist-like photo of pre-Soviet Russian arabesque architecture are unassuming, it takes a minute to see that the building is actually completely dwarfing the people, and that it would take some serious revolutionary zeal to face off with the power of the Russian Czar and Church, a power literaly inscribed into the landscape. Second, the downplaying of the "Revolutionist" in the title is hard to imagine on a cover made today. This book would be published not by Doubleday or a any major publishing house, but a niche political publisher like AK or PM, who would likely feel the need to play up both Kropotkin as an important individual and his anarchist credentials in order to appeal to their audiences.
JBbTC 49: Kropotkin pt.4
Posted March 14, 2011 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
Over the next couple weeks I'm going to dig through the rest of the Peter Kropotkin covers I've found. Most are beardless, and many are banal at best, but there are some gems hidden in here. The cover to the right, for instance, is really interesting and strange. A giant generic pink head fills the field of the cover, with a large albatross flying out of the head, out of the person's mind? I'm not sure if the bird is an oblique reference to Mutual Aid, Kropotkin's most influential work, but this is definitely not that book, it's a German edition of his overview of anarchist philosophy and politics. The type is unfortunate, this would actually be an even more challenging and engaging cover if the title was in a cleaner sans serif font and dropped to below the chin, leaving the entire space of the head empty except for the bird in flight.
JBbTC 48: Kropotkin pt.3
Posted March 7, 2011 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
No more beards, but this week I've found cool old-school Kropotkin covers, 19th Century to early 20th. The one to the left is a great Czech modernist cover for Anarchist Morality, designed by Josef Capek and published in 1919. There is little to the design other than the text, yet it explodes off the page.
JBbTC 47: Kropotkin pt.2
Posted February 28, 2011 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
Here is the next batch of Kropotkin beard covers. Like I mentioned last week, most covers of books by classic anarchist protagonists seem to focus on portraits, but since most of said dudes lived in the 19th or early 20th century, their are limited photographic or photo-like representations of them, so the same basic images get cycled through over and over again. The cover to the right, for Caroline Cahm's study of Kropotkin from 2002, mixes an often used image with an edgy and well-designed type treatment. Although the time period covered by the book pre-dates the constructivist style by 40-50 years and makes little actual sense in relation to the subject, the cover looks cool, and is far superior to most of the Kropotkin books out there. The actual image of Kropotkin is also nicely distressed, looking almost photocopied, which adds an additional anachronism to the design and a solid post-modern "wink-wink" to the rest of it being out-of-time. The image is listed as being courtesy of the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam, but the designer is not noted. In addition, and it is hard to see at first glance, the source photo for the cover image is the same one as the cover for the Grove Press edition of Memoirs of a Revolutionist I featured last week.
JBbTC 46: Kropotkin pt.1
Posted February 21, 2011 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
Given the last 2 months of book covers relating to prisons, I thought it would be nice to take a little break and go off on some tangents. To start, I've been collecting a bunch of classic 60s and 70s anarchist book covers, and some of favorites have great illustrations of the old bearded protagonists of anarchy, so lets take a jaunt through some cool Kropotkin covers. Who doesn't love a big white beard! This first week is my favorite Kropotkin beards, next week I'll tour more Russian facial hair, and then some other non-bearded Kropotkin covers.
The above left is one of my all-time favorites, largely because the illustration is so unique. Anyone with a even a small shelf of anarchist classics at home knows that the same handful of images of Kropotkin, Bakunin, Proudhon, Goldman, etc. get recycled over and over. The source photo for this cover is actually a much used image of Kropotkin (check out next week for many more permutations), but the artist has used some creative license to fabricate a younger Peter, which is rare. The almost regal cross hatching on his balding head makes it look like this image was created to put on currency, but then the duotone black and red in the beard is totally trippy, a seeming product of the times (this edition was produced by Grove Press/Evergreen in 1970). Unfortunately the art and design are uncredited.
JBbTC 45: Prisons pt.7/Mumia
Posted February 14, 2011 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
So moving on, this is the final entry of the posts covering the covers of prison books. I've missed a lot along the way, and maybe I'll do a follow-up post in the future with some of the gems I skipped over this time through (if you have some handsome looking prison-related books, take pictures and email them to me!).
Last week I looked at the books by and and about George Jackson, the 60s/70s political prisoner par excellence. This week I turn to the closest thing to his contemporary equivalent, Mumia Abu-Jamal. For those that don't know much about Mumia, rather than take the time here, you're better off checking out his backstory HERE and HERE. Mumia was a Black Panther like Jackson, but he survived the original government crackdown on the movement, and was living as a journalist in Philadelphia in the 1970s until he was arrested and imprisoned in the early 1980s.
JBbTC 44: Prisons pt.6/George Jackson
Posted February 7, 2011 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
In many ways the quintessential political prisoner of the 60s was George Jackson. At age 18 he was caught robbing a gas station, and sentenced to an indeterminate period of one year to life in prison. He was politicized while in Soledad Prison in California, and eventually joined the Black Panther Party. Jackson and two other prisoners were accused of killing a guard, and became known as the Soledad Brothers. While in solitary confinement he wrote two books, the first, Soledad Brother, is comprised of letters to his lawyer and became an international bestseller. The cover to the left is the mass-market paperback edition that was very widely circulated. (A slightly different cover was published on a later edition, with two boxes at the bottom, one with the image of Jackson, one announcing new material inside.) The image of Jackson walking cuffed and chained became an icon of the era, not only reproduced on his books, but in underground press articles about him. And notice the stencil font for the titling, near ubiquitous for prison-related titles.
JBbTC 43: Prisons pt.5
Posted January 31, 2011 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
Now I'm going to move into the next sub-collection of prison book covers, books about political prisoners in the U.S. Officially the U.S. does not acknowledge that it holds political prisoners (PPs), but at last count by the Anarchist Black Cross, a political prisoner support organization, their are over 50 PPs being currently held in U.S. prisons and jails. For those of you asking "What is a Political Prisoner," here is a good definition by Bill Dunne, a revolutionary that has been in prison for over 25 years: "those persons incarcerated as a result of political beliefs or actions consciously undertaken and intended to resist exploitation and oppression, and/or hasten the implementation of an egalitarian, sustainable, ethical, classless society, predicated on self determination and maximization of all people's freedom."
JBbTC 42: Prisons pt.4
Posted January 24, 2011 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
About 3 or 4 years after I first got involved in the then-tiny prison activist movement, the movement began quickly growing on college campuses, and a new round of activist, academics, and journalists began writing and publishing on prisons again. Many of these authors were friends or people I had organized around prison issues (Eli Rosenblatt, then director of the Bay Area Prison Activist Resource Center and Daniel Burton-Rose are two of these) or writers that had some experience working within the growing movement (Eric Cummins and Christian Parenti are two of this variety). By the year 2000 there was an entirely new literature about prisons published, with dozens and dozens of titles. There is no way I can look at them all, so I'm focusing on ones that I've read, have a copy of, or have interacted with in some way. The first book, to the right, is by Eric Cummins, and is a good example of the visual look of this new batch of books. The graphic tropes are slightly updated to seem modern, but they are the same old visual tropes: bars, bricks, barbed wire, and that damn stencil font!
JBbTC 41: Prisons pt.3
Posted January 17, 2011 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
The real game changing book for prison studies was Michael Foucault's Discipline and Punish. Interestingly, the covers of the book in English, from the first hardback to the current paperback, don't focus on it's inventiveness or trailblazing qualities, but seem to want to brand it a classic straight out of the box. Over the covers I'm only going to show three, but they are a fair sample of all the English-language editions I've seen. The one to left us the first (I believe) Penguin edition. The classic penguin style laid over the expressionist painting of the prisoners really works for me. I don't have the actual book for this edition, so I am unsure of the painter, but it is almost reminiscent of Van Gogh, and carries with it that sense of being classic. The early American hardback (not shown) and paperback (below to the left) use historical etchings to evoke the classic quality. I do like the inventiveness of the type of the paperback, if it does feel a little dated today. And finally the current American edition, which follows the post-modern style of the entire series of Vintage-published Foucault trade paperbacks. Objects referenced by the text float in a empty space that is given depth through shadow, and then a classic (yup, there's that word again) titling box is laid on top. As a whole series, these are quite nice, even if as a one off this cover doesn't do to much for this particular title.
JBbTC 40: Prisons pt.2
Posted January 10, 2011 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
I first became sensitized to the problems within the U.S. prison system in the early 1990s. A friend brought me to an event in Washington, DC about the political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal (stay tuned, Judging Books #45 will be entirely dedicated to books by and about Mumia). The event (and Mumia's case, more generally) was a great introduction to how the U.S. prison systems sit at the intersection of many important issues in out society, in particular race, class, violence, and political engagement, but also gender, health care, sexuality, age discrimination, and much more. Once my eyes were opened to the basic facts (yup, facts, there's no arguing with them) that the U.S. imprisons more people per capita—by far—than any other developed nation and that percentage-wise the vast majority of those people will be poor and people of color, I started digging around for more info. It turns out that there had been a significant movement to reform/abolish prisons in the 1970s, and a lot of books had come out in the 70s and 80s, but by the mid-80s the Reagan revolution was in full swing, and "tough on crime" was the mantra of most politicians, left, right, and center. For the next couple weeks I'm taking a look at the books from that era that my friends and I were able to track down and read. After that I'll be looking at the next generation of prison books, which started coming out in the mid-90s and my peers began publishing.
The book to the right is the oldest of the books I'm looking at, a nice Penguin from 1962 with a great perspective-heavy view inside a prison.
JBbTC 39: Prisons pt.1
Posted January 3, 2011 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
For the next month of so I'm going to focus on the covers of books about U.S. prisons. Something uplifting for the new year! I first became involved in prison-related activism (including support for political prisoners, whose books will also be featured in the upcoming weeks) in the early 1990s, and slowly have amassed a large collection of books and publications on prison issues (in order to keep this manageable, I've pretty much stuck to books with spines, leaving out pamphlets, magazines, and chapbooks, as well as keeping it U.S focused). In addition, a couple friends have pretty large collections as well, so I've photographed some of theirs (thanks Dan Berger!), and pulled a select few off the web. This week we'll start with prison riots. And the daddy of the modern U.S. prison riot, Attica. Although it had begun to be an issue before, the Attica rebellion in 1971 awoke the American public to the fact that their were serious problems in the prison system, and a slew of both scholarship and sensational writing followed, including a series of reports like the ones to the right and below.
JBbTC 38: Medu Art Ensemble Newsletter
Posted December 27, 2010 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
In 1978, just across the border from South Africa in Gabarone, a group of exiled South Africans formed the Medu Art Ensemble. Medu became an armed cultural wing of the African National Congress (ANC) specifically, and the anti-apartheid struggle more broadly. They were composed of poets, playwrights, painters, musicians, dancers, and graphic designers. On top of the production of posters, publications, and theatre perfromances, some of the more militant members also used Medu as a cover to engage in more direct militant aid, sneaking into South Africa to train troops for the ANC military wing, Umkhonto weSizwe.
JBbTC 37: Homage to Catalonia pt.2
Posted December 20, 2010 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
Orwell was lucky to be published in the UK by Penguin, one of the publishers with the best record of concern for, and investment, in their book covers. The cover to right isn't Homage to Catalonia, but a collection Penguin put together of Orwell's shorter writings on Spain. It carries the silver bottom bar of the 2000-2001 editions of Penguin's Modern Classics series, and one of a series of images/covers designed by Marion Deuchars for Orwell's books on Penguin. The montage of a POUM poster and the back of a man in casual dress carrying a rifle do a much better job at capturing the spirit of Orwell's writings on Spain than the cover I started off last week with (HBJ's American edition of Homage). The poster creates the sense of an urban wall, and the figure gives us more of the feeling of the struggle being more informal, not the rigid battle lines of conventional warfare.
JBbTC 36: Homage to Catalonia pt.1
Posted December 13, 2010 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
The book to the left is the copy of George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia that I grew up with (I think I first read it early on in high school). My guess is that a lot of people seeing this also read this copy, the U.S. mass market paperback published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich under their Harvest Books imprint. The cover was designed by Ken Braren (likely in the 1960s, though I'm not sure), and is strong and striking, yet oddly soulless and hollow feeling. The yellow pulls you in to the bleeding tip of the bayonet, but the best parts of Orwell's narrative are not about hand to hand combat, but the long boring days of waiting in trenches, or the vibrant culture of liberated Barcelona and political struggles between revolutionaries and the Stalinists.
JBbTC 35: John Heartfield pt.6
Posted December 6, 2010 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
For the final John Heartfield cover installment, I've collected a smattering of covers he's done for a bunch of different publishers. Like I said at the beginning, I think his work for the magazine AIZ is the most well known of his work, so I'm going to skip those publication covers, and a handful of covers he did based on montages from AIZ. To the right is a Heartfield cover most people probably never realized he had designed, Twelve Million Black Voices by Richard Wright, as published in the UK in 1947 by Lindsay Drummond.
JBbTC 34: John Heartfield pt.5
Posted November 29, 2010 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
This week we'll look at some John Heartfield designed covers he did for publishers other than Malik-Verlag. The covers here are from two other Berlin publishing houses: Verlag für Literatur und Politik and Neuer Deutscher Verlag. The image to the left is a cover Heartfield did for Fjodor Gladkow's Zement (Verlag für Literatur und Politik, 1927), and is a testament to his ability to make an effective design with only the simplest elements.
JBbTC 33: John Heartfield pt.4
Posted November 22, 2010 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
Part two of the Heartfield Sinclair covers!
Now we're up to 1928, in which Malik Verlag published three separate Upton Sinclair books: Die Goldne Kette (with a George Grosz drawing laid on top of a grid of images, below left), Jimmie Higgins (nice hand cut lettering, above), and Samuel der Suchende (below right).
JBbTC 32: John Heartfield pt.3
Posted November 15, 2010 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
One of the main authors Malik-Verlag published was Upton Sinclair, and Heartfield designed ALL of Sinclair's covers. This week will do part one of Sinclair, next week the rest. Let's start chronologically: In 1921 Sinclair's 100% was published with a pretty clean and straightforward cover (below left). In 1924 it was reprinted with a new cover design, with the same city street image brought to bleed and a more adventurous and effective type treatment (below right). Then in 1928 a completely different cover was produced with a montage and the nice effect of the leg kicking into the frame. This cover also shows an interesting Malik/Hearfield design device, which is the printing of the edition (in this case 50,000 copies) in handwriting on the cover (above right and below). You can also see the spine peeking out, which consists of a tall pile of thin horizontal lines and the title written horizontally. This was the standard style for many of the Sinclair books. The back cover of this edition (and the 1924 edition) is simply a photo of a Klan meeting.
JBbTC 31: John Heartfield pt.2
Posted November 8, 2010 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
Here's the next batch of Heartsfield's Malik-Verlag covers. The one to the right is a favorite, Franz Carl Weiskopf's Umsteigen ins 21. Jahrhundert: Episoden von einer Reise durch die Sowjetunion. The light on the train is almost otherworldly, and the stencil typography seems to date it as modernist, but is so effective and was so copied by designers in the 70s and 80s that it now reads as timeless.
JBbTC 30: John Heartfield pt.1
Posted November 1, 2010 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
Sometime in the early 1990s I was introduced to the photomontages of John Heartfield. The stark black and white collage work meshed well with my punk aesthetic tastes at the time, and many bits and pieces of Heartfield were showing up on record covers, Discharge's Never Again being one of the most high-profile examples. I didn't know at the time that almost of the collages I had seen were actually parts of covers for the German magazine AIZ. Over the years I picked up a couple books about Heartfield, they were printed in black and white, were in German, and for the most part they focused on his work for AIZ, with a handful of images of other collages, and a couple book covers here and there. It wasn't until relatively recently that I learned that Heartfield designed almost the entire run of covers for a small Left-wing German publishing house named Malik-Verlag. Turns out that Malik-Verlag was actually founded and run by Heartfield's brother Wieland Herzfelde. To the left is the cover for Wieland Herzfelde's Gesellschaft, Künstler und Kommunismus (1921), the image is George Grosz's silhouette.
JBbTC 29: Spanish Civil War Publications
Posted October 25, 2010 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
A couple years back I was checking out a Robert Capa exhibition at the International Center for Photography in NYC and they had a small backroom with an auxiliary exhibition of publications produced in Spain during the Civil War/Revolution in 1936-39. The material was extremely interesting and a great insight into modernist design in Spain, and the amount of resources thrown toward propaganda in a time of scarcity. It was a small portion of a much larger show entitled Revistas y Guerra 1936-39, originating at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Catalunya. There was a very expensive exhibition catalog produced for the original show, but it was shrink-wrapped, and I was afraid to spend the money. I eventually went back and got it, and I was definitely not disappointed! It's almost 400 pages of publication covers and design, some of the most interesting and innovative illustration, montage, and in particular typography. Now, for those that can't find or afford the book, there's a great website that catalogs many of the highlights of the exhibit, check it out HERE. The images in this entry are just a small sampling of what's on the site, which itself is only a small sampling of what is in the print catalog. There is more information about the magazines on the website.
JBbTC 28: Futurist Books pt.2
Posted October 18, 2010 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
Here's part two of the Futurist books. Marinetti's books in particular get more violent and aggressive in this period, with references to bombs, words exploding across the page, etc. There are also two books by Fortunato Depero, who became involved in Futurism around 1914, but became one of it's most acclaimed adherents, developing stage sets, costumes, furniture, toys, and of course books in a Futurist style. The book on the left is one of my favorites: Fortunato Depero, Liriche radiofoniche [Radio opera] (Milano: Morreale, 1934). Titles are very roughly translated in the [brackets].
JBbTC 27: Futurist Books pt.1
Posted October 11, 2010 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
Now lets take a quick stop over in Italy. When I was in Rome a couple years back for an exhibition (at the excellent House of Love and Dissent), I picked up a cool exhibition catalog for a 2006 show called The Book as a Work of Art at the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna in Rome. It contains a great collection of avant-garde books, including 21 Futurist books produced over two decades (1911-1934), many of which I had never seen before. Although way out of my depth in both design and art history knowledge, I wanted to share these Futurist covers. Many Italian Futurists yoked themselves to Fascism after World War I, but I am unsure of exactly who did and didn't outside of Marinetti's enthusiastic support for Mussolini (and Mussolini's general disregard for both the Futurists and art in general). I'm going to (somewhat arbitrarily) split these covers up into early Futurist and post-WWI Futurist. By today's standards, some of them look quite staid, but I believe for the time and the printing method (set type), the tilted lines of type, overprinting, and multiple typefaces were pretty innovative. Enjoy part one!
(ps. It is the insides of some of these books that are truly breathtaking, but as this is a blog about covers, I'll stick to the outsides for now...)
JBbTC 26: Action
Posted October 4, 2010 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
Let's stay in France this week, and check out the covers of Action, the newspaper developed by the Comités d' Action during May 68. The first Comités were developed as organizational bodies by the striking students of the Sorbonne, but the form spread to other universities, high schools, and even a few factories. Action first appeared on May 7th, and was a weekly paper for the first three issues, but then became daily (on weekdays) for the month of June (when a lot of the action of the May protests was peaking), then settled back into a weekly. Although the covers are neither as graphically efficient or visually compelling as the best of the posters of the same period, they are still interesting, with some nice use of illustrations. Action introduced a new generation of illustrators, including Michel Quarez (who did the cars on #30 to the left), Jean-Marc Reiser, and Georges Wolinski.
JBbTC 25: Roman Cieslewicz pt.3
Posted September 27, 2010 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
Here's the final installment (for now), on Polish poster artist and designer Roman Cieslewicz. In 1968 Cieslewicz was invited to design the cover style for a new line of philosophy, history, and politics books edited by Christian Bourgios. He brought his bold graphic style to the "10/18" series, using flat fields of color to render stylized portraits of the authors. The style is reminiscent of both Cuban poster artists working a little earlier in the 1960s, and the Chicano artist Rupert García (who developed his similar style, likely from the same influences, half way across the globe. His covers of Ho Chi Minh and Marx (sorry I wasn't able to track down color images) are particularly resonant with García's work.
JBbTC 24: Roman Cieslewicz pt.2
Posted September 20, 2010 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
Part two on Polish poster artist and designer Roman Cieslewicz. Before leaving for Paris, Cieslewicz was the art director for the Polish cultural magazine Ty i Ja (You and I). He did most (maybe all?) of the covers between 1960 and 1963, then sporadic covers after that into the 1970s. His covers on the early issues are almost all straight photo-montages with humor or a sense of the unreal created by a playful use of size and relation between elements. In the later issues he brings in a lot more illustrative elements, and flat uses of color, making them look for poster-like.
JBbTC 23: Roman Cieslewicz pt.1
Posted September 13, 2010 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
Let's take a quick break from US publications and skip over to Europe. A couple years back I discovered the Polish poster artist and designer Roman Cieslewicz. Although well known within design circles, I think he is pretty obscure to most political artists and poster-makers under 40. He had a huge influence on European design when he moved to Paris in the 1960s, including in his role as designer for the arts magazine Opus International. The covers for the publication are fabulous, and most work as both covers and posters (and I believe many were actually converted to/produced as posters). It is said that Cieslewicz' work was very influential on the artists and designers that took part in the Ateliers Populaire in May 68, and especially on those that would go on to form the political design firm Grapus.
JBbTC 22: Radical America
Posted September 6, 2010 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
Here's another installment of covers of a periodical, this time Radical America, which began as an organ of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in 1967, and then ran into the late 1980s. A couple years back at the Anarchist Bookfair in San Francisco I found a box of old Radical Americas, 5 for $1 or something like that, and pulled out a big stack based on, I admit, the coolest covers, but also interesting content. Turns out that one of my favorite covers (v12n6, Nov/Dec 1978) features an illustration by Nikki Schumann, adapted from a Boycott Grapes poster from the early 70s. On a second look, I realized this was the same artist whose calendars my parents religiously bought every year and hung in a small frame in our kitchen, changing the image out each month!
JBbTC 21: The Drama Review
Posted August 30, 2010 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
Back at the end of June I was in Toronto, strangely at an academic performance art conference to talk about the Spectres of Liberty project, and their was a table for TDR (The Drama Review), one of the longest running and most political drama/culture journals. They had a pile of old back issues really cheap, with great covers. Plus the contents are great too in the early issues, lots of material on The Living Theatre, Bread & Puppet, Futurism, and guerrilla theatre.
JBbTC 20: Westerns
Posted August 23, 2010 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
Now for a slight break from the usual program. When I was out in Wisconsin a couple years back for a wedding we stumbled upon a small town library book sale, and almost all the books were romance novels and westerns, but they were $1 a box! So I scooped up a bunch of really cool looking Western pulp novels. Very questionable politically, but some of these designs are simply awesome. All of them are from Lenox Hill Press, published in the 70s, and no notation of designer or illustrator.
JBbTC 19: B. Traven pt.6
Posted August 16, 2010 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
Ahh, the final installment of the covers of Mr. Berick Traven, or Ret Marut, or Otto Feige, or Hal Croves? No one has yet been able to fully pin down exactly who B. Traven was, and this mystery has led to an ongoing interest in his literary output and politics. There has actually been an outpouring of books about Traven, some of them with pretty handsome covers themselves.
JBbTC 18: B. Traven pt.5
Posted August 9, 2010 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
For part 5 of the B. Traven covers, I'm going to focus on a number of his lesser known novels (He wrote five or six outside of the Treasure of Sierra Madre, the Death Ship, and the six Jungle novels, and after 1940 he almost exclusively wrote short stories, which will be the focus of next weeks final Traven post).
The Cotton Pickers was Traven's first published novel. It was actually titled Der Wobbly (the Wobbly, after the nickname for members of the IWW) by the initial publisher, but all other editions are titled The Cotton Pickers, and it appears that is the title Traven intended. The above is is the book jacket for an early hardback, possibly the first American edition.
JBbTC 17: B. Traven pt.4
Posted August 2, 2010 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
Recapping last week: In the decade from 1931 to 1940, B. Traven published a series of six books known as his Jungle Novels: Government (1931), The Carreta (aka The Cart) (1931), March to the Monteria (aka March To Caobaland) (1933), Trozas (1936), The Rebellion of the Hanged (1936), and A General from the Jungle (1940). The Jungle novels are a series of interconnected stories about the struggles of the Indigenous in Chiapas at the end of the 19th Century, and how their rebellion starts the Mexican Revolution. This week let's take a look at the second three novels, which includes my favorite, The Rebellion of the Hanged:
JBbTC 16: B. Traven pt.3
Posted July 26, 2010 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
In the decade from 1931 to 1940, B. Traven published a series of six books known as his Jungle Novels: Government (1931), The Carreta (aka The Cart) (1931), March to the Monteria (aka March To Caobaland) (1933), Trozas (1936), The Rebellion of the Hanged (1936), and A General from the Jungle (1940). The Jungle novels are a series of interconnected stories about the struggles of the Indigenous in Chiapas at the end of the 19th Century, and how their rebellion starts the Mexican Revolution. This week let's take a look at the first three novels:
JBbTC 15: B. Traven pt.2
Posted July 19, 2010 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
Next up in the B. Traven book cover-athon is The Death Ship. My favorite Traven novel (well, maybe a tie with The Rebellion of the Hanged), The Death Ship is a great story of a sailor on a ship write after WWI, just as the borders of the modern nation states across the world are being fully codified, leaving him and the rest of the crew a ship without a country, and thus invisible and impossible to the modern world. This book had had some great covers. I was only able to track down eleven, but I've seen some others I hope to still find and put up here sometime in the future. The cover to the left is one of the best, carrying an illustration by Seymour Chwast.
JBbTC 14: B. Traven pt.1
Posted July 12, 2010 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
This week we take a trip a little bit beyond the limits of my friends' and my book collections. This is the first in a series of posts collecting the book covers of the mysterious author known as B. Traven. Between my personal collection, a selection of friends bookshelves, the Kate Sharpley Library, and some serious internet hunting, I've gathered over 90 different covers for about a dozen Traven novels. Traven is most well known for his successful novel The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, which was made into an even more successful film in 1948 starring Humphrey Bogart.
The interesting thing for me is that Traven was also an anarchist and anti-capitalist, and because of the success of Treasure, as well as The Death Ship and his series of Jungle novels (all of which I'll be featuring in coming weeks), he is probably one of the most published and translated anarchist writers ever. Few other than popular fiction authors get such a diverse collection of covers, and Traven and his politics have had hundreds of covers over the 80 plus years his books have been in print. Today we'll start from the beginning, here's sixteen covers from The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.
JBbTC 13: New World Paperbacks pt.2
Posted July 5, 2010 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
Here's part two of the New World Paperbacks series. I've only got a dozen different books on my shelf, but if anyone else out there has some more cool NWP covers, send them my way! At the heart of this post are four covers of Kwame Nkrumah books. The illustration and color choice on Dark Days in Ghana is fabulous, and the simplicity of Challenge of the Congo is great. I used to have a fifth Nkrumah book too, but I must of lent it out and never gotten it back! And finally a couple classics, Marx and Foner.
JBbTC 12: New World Paperbacks pt.1
Posted June 28, 2010 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
The next couple weeks entries will be focused on the covers of New World Paperbacks, which was an imprint of the Communist Party, USA's main publishing house International Publishers. I know that New World was started in the early 1960s in order to make inexpensive copies of Marxist "classics" (i.e. Marx, Engels, Lenin, etc.) available to a wide audience. It seems that by the early 1970s, it had become the place where the CP published what it perceived of as "popular" titles, including those about race and gender in the US and national liberation struggles abroad. Many of the covers are surprisingly hip for the Communist Party, riffing off of both historical context of the book and relatively current design trends at the time (psychedelia, deco, etc.). For example, the cover "A Dangerous Scot" uses a type treatment that dates it to an early 20th century americana, but the design element floating in the center of the page is so odd that it makes the whole thing seem contemporary. Maybe not surprisingly for the CP, none of the books I have attribute a designer for the cover, or a printer for the book—yet most subject the reader to a turgid intro by CP leader Gus Hall, which clearly lets us know which part of the labor process of book production is most important! It appears as if many of the New World titles are still available from International Publishers, but New World itself doesn't have a website or any unique identity, and appears to have been absorbed by the larger publishing identity sometime in the 1980s. Enjoy the covers!
JBbTC 11: Dea Trier Mørch's Den Indre By
Posted June 21, 2010 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
This week I'm just going to focus on one book, and actually open the cover! For years I've been giving various versions of a talk and slideshow about political printmaking, and I've often shown a slide of an anti-Vietnam War poster image by a Danish artist named Dea Trier Mørch. I didn't know anything about her, nor had I seen any other work by her, but this particular poster was great. Back in 2007, Icky and I took a trip to Europe, and I gave my political printmaking talk at YNKB in Copenhagen, and when that particular slide came up, everyone was like, "Hey, that's Dea Trier Mørch!," and they knew all about her. Turns out she was part of a Danish Marxist print collective in the 1970s called Røde Mor (Red Mother), that produced a ton of prints, including posters for the free town of Christiania, and had a very popular rock band. While in Copenhagen Icky and I scoured the bookshelves of all the used bookstores looking for things by Mørch and Røde Mor, and I came across a number of novels that she had written and/or illustrated. This week's book is Den Indre By (The Inner City), and hopefully after looking at this post you'll also see how awesome Mørch is...
JBbTC 10: Portuguese Modernism
Posted June 14, 2010 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
I found this nice little collection of Portuguese modernist book covers in a friends academic office. They are from the 30s-60s. They designs are all hand painted, with the type treatment hand painted on most of them as well, don't see that much anymore! The Pasternak cover is a bit of a snoozer, but the Amado covers are great with their overlapping colors, line styles, and handmade type.
JBbTC 9: Anarchist Books from Norway
Posted June 7, 2010 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
A quick-y this week, here are three covers of Norwegian-published anarchist titles I found in the shelves at my friend Bergsveinn's house in Bergen. The Kropotkin book is hilarious, with psychedelic Kropotkin both holding up a portrait of himself and having an image of himself holding up a portrait of himself flowing out of his forehead! Genius. I apologize for the blur, they were taken in poor light with a crap camera.
JBbTC 8: Cienfuegos Press pt.3
Posted May 31, 2010 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
Here's the last installment of the Cienfuegos/Costantini covers. Bits and pieces. This Tifft cover is one of the best in my opinion, the graphic is crisp and commanding, and the type treatment is clean and stays out of the way. (Too bad the book itself is almost unreadable!). Also here is one of Costantini's first covers for Cienfuegos, for Alexander Berkman's Russian Tragedy. Great book and stunning cover, the corpse of a Kronstadt soldier says it all. The Wilhelmshaven Revolt is another cover attributed to Jean Pierre Ducret, but has many of the hallmarks of Costantini, including the thick black outlines, folds in the clothing, and extra detail in the faces.
JBbTC 7: Cienfuegos Press pt.2
Posted May 24, 2010 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
Here's the second installment of Flavio Costantini covers for Cienfuegos Press. The five this week are a series of covers he did, each designed with the letter A (for Anarchy) as a central element. The first cover, Sabate, uses the A almost as an afterthought, and each cover further develops the idea, up through The End of Anarchism, which is simply genius in my opinion, with the A towering over the question mark, framing the setting sun.
JBbTC 6: Cienfuegos Press pt.1
Posted May 17, 2010 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
For years I've been a fan of the look and feel of the Cienfuegos Press books published by Stuart Christie in the UK in the late 1970s-early 1980s. I stumbled on a used copy of the Cienfuegos Anarchist Review #4 in a small bookshop in Washington DC back in 1993, and with its full color Flavio Costantini cover illustration I was hooked. I've since hunted down copies of most of the Cienfuegos publications. I'll start with the Costantini covers, and move on to the other books later on.
Here are the three Cienfuegos Anarchist Review's with Costantini covers, and you can see how issue #2 has just a simple spot illustration, but the full covers of #4 & #5 are dedicated to full color paintings of anarchist history. The cover of The Anarchists in London is quite nice with a simple dark brown monotone version of a painting and the title offset in red. The printing on The International Revolutionary Solidarity Movement cover is nice as well, with the black outline image of Bakunin sitting on top of the red newspaper headlines, maximizing the two color cover.
JBbTC 5: Hebrew
Posted May 10, 2010 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
Here's a nice clutch of book covers from Hebrew volumes. Even though I took Hebrew school for a couple years, I mostly read comic books, so I have no idea what these say. Please excuse anything politically offensive! (Oh, and excuse the blur on some of them, the photos were taken on a friends iphone...)
JBbTC 4: Liberation Support Movement pt.3
Posted May 3, 2010 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
Part 3 (and final part for now) of the covers of the Liberation Support Movement. This Sowing the First Harvest cover is quite nice, a striking block print (attributed to Yukari Ochiai) is printed in dark brown ink on a light yellow cover, with the simple sans serif orange type pulling it together.
JBbTC 3: Liberation Support Movement pt.2
Posted April 26, 2010 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
Part two of the covers from the LSM Information Network, some of these are less graphically powerful than last weeks, but there are still a couple gems:
JBbTC 2: Liberation Support Movement pt.1
Posted April 19, 2010 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
This week I want to share part one of a collection of book and pamphlet covers from the Liberation Support Movement (LSM), an organization that primarily did solidarity work with African national liberation movements in the 1970s. Detailed information about LSM is pretty sparce, but it appears they were founded by Don Barnett in the early 1970s, originating in Richmond, British Columbia, Canada. At some point in the mid to late 70s LSM moved to Oakland, CA, likely after Barnett's death in 1975. I believe their primary activity was direct financial and material support of liberation movements, but they also had a propaganda wing. Most of the pamphlets and books were published under the "LSM Information Center" imprint, and are either first person accounts of liberation struggles or analysis, largely written by the leadership of those struggles, or Barnett himself.
JBbTC 1: Novosti Press Agency
Posted April 12, 2010 by jmacphee in Judging Books by Their Covers
I've been really digging designing book covers of late, which has made me look much closer at all the other covers I come across and already have on my shelf. I'm going to try to start doing this weekly blog column (blogumn? is that a term?) sharing cool book covers I find.
For this first installment, I want to share three great covers from a series late-Soviet political books I picked up some years back in Chicago. They are aesthetically amazing, pulling together clean and crisp replicas of different moments of modernist design. And politically, like most late-Soviet material, very strange. It appears that they were produced in 1971 and 72 by the Novosti Press Agency Publishing House in Moscow, primarily to attack Chinese communism, but they are in English, and the text is so dull that they are practically unreadable. I pity the poor Communist Party member that had to read these back in the day. There's definitely no attribution or clue who the designer(s) is, but they were quite graphicly cheeky, with the "white wedge" of reaction cutting through (or infecting?) the red and black circles of Anarchism/Trotskyism/Maoism, and the "falling" Chinese architectural forms of the Peking Divisionists!
