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.
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