Nice Jacket: The Ginger Man

Dell's second Laurel printing from March 1974 of J.P. Donleavy's 1955 novel The Ginger Man - Art/Design Uncredited


I like to call this one Still Life with Debauchery. While it's no Cézanne, this cover does a good job of capturing some of the spirit of the novel with a few well-chosen objects photographed in a bare studio. The discarded clothing suggests sex. The whiskey suggests, well, whiskey. The old wrought iron chairs hint at domesticity and give the piece its structure. Sure, you could buy all this junk at a thrift shop for $20 (other than the whiskey of course) and take a snapshot, but the cover is still miles ahead of the pastel illustration montages on most literary paperbacks from the 70s. The typeface is spare and unobtrusive, almost an afterthought.

The cover below, from Oympia Press, is a mid-century abstraction of the shattered nerves of the novel's namesake drunk.


Berkeley went with psychedelic sex for their cover.

I think the ginger man looks best in tweed.

Here's an interview with J.P. Donleavy from the Paris Review's recently opened Art of Fiction archives.

Nice Jacket: The Lime Twig

New Directions paperbacks have fascinated me as objects since I first saw an old copy of Lawrence Ferlinghetti's Coney Island of the Mind on a bookshelf in a friend's attic on College Hill when I was a teenager. They've always struck me as the literary equivalent of a punk rock zine, with their black and white covers like photocopied collages cut from magazines by a kid in his basement.

The cover art for New Directions's 1961 edition of John Hawkes's The Lime Twig shows a fever dream, the blurred faces of a street crowd with only a woman's face in focus, her eyes and mouth in shadow like a skull or specter. The severe title helps enforce this uncompromising vision and prepare the reader for a serious bit of post-modernist horror.


The back cover, as with most New Directions paperbacks, includes a nice black and white author photo. Hawkes is shown in a woodland setting smoking a pipe. You can see a white mark on his wrist where his watch has blocked the sun. Writer's tan! The back is also jammed with text, not only a synopsis of the novel, but also quotes from Flannery O'Connor and William Kennedy. The whole layout looks more like a press release than a retail copy of a book. The spine is just as austere.

As is common with books of the period, the design and cover art are uncredited.

It looks like New Directions has added color to their covers. I still prefer the old DIY look.

Nice Jacket: The Demolished Man

In order to widen the scope of The Bent Spine, I've decided to introduce a few new features. The first, which you're reading, is called Nice Jacket and will be dedicated to the incidental art of book covers. I'm no art historian or critic, and I know even less about design, but I know what strikes me as an interesting visual accompaniment to a book. Nice Jacket will always be brief. I don't want to bore you with theory (and to tell you the truth, I don't know much art theory). While I won't limit this discussion to genre books, I'm starting with one of my favorite sci-fi covers.

The cover art and book design for Signet's fifth printing of Alfred Bester's 1951 novel The Demolished Man are both uncredited. While the design is not revolutionary, it is certainly evocative of a certain clean, bold layout that was abandoned with the cartoon Frank Frazzeta covers of the 60s. The clean sans-serif title on the left and the bold text of the author's last name on the right leave room for a great bit of cover art below.

Unintentionally phallic, the art shows a towering collage of details from the book. From the gun at the bottom of the painting, to the silhouetted figure above, the tape reels flanking the figures head, the bifurcation of the two-headed brain, and some great red-and-green lasers shooting from the oracles' eyes, the artist has given us a psychedelic fantasy that has a strange visual appeal. It's not sophisticated, but it is pretty fun.

I like the back cover as well.