A Different Stripe

"A surging novel of torment and desire"

Those of you who have read Paul Theroux's essay on The Widow by Georges Simenon—either as the introduction to the NYRB edition of the book, or when it appeared in the TLS—might have wished that it had come with a visual footnote to this sentence:

[The Widow] was even resurrected as a 1950s pulp fiction paperback with a come-on tag line (“A surging novel of torment and desire”) and a lurid cover: busty peasant girl pouting in a barn, her skirt hiked over her knees, while a hunky guy lurks at the door – price twenty-five cents.

Well, here you have it. And as a bonus, we bring you the back cover's illustrated dramatis personae: "THE PEASANT WOMAN, THE EX-CONVICT, THE TEEN-AGE GIRL" and the plot synopsis that, while not strictly misrepresenting the facts of the book, gets its tone all wrong: "...Tati knew that only the most devious devices could hold a man with fatally twisted emotions"!

The TLS article bore the title "The existential hack"—which doesn't seem to have been snapped up yet as the title of a freelance writer's blog, register it while you can.

The Manhattan Street Corners project

Photograph © Richard Howe

Richard Howe, who came to digital photography fairly late in his career as an artist, has nonetheless  done what no other photographer has had the temerity to do before: photograph each and every of the 10,937 street corners on the island of Manhattan. On his website you can view all of the pictures he took of 10th Avenue from 13th Street to 218th street. But to get a real feel of the project, I recommend having a look at the "101 Street Corners Sampler."

What you might first notice from flipping through these galleries is how comfortingly pedestrian the streets of New York really look: here are old women shopping, bunches of teenagers coming home from school, block after block of undistinguished buildings. There is little Times Square razzle-dazzle in evidence, this is a city of people going about daily life. But then you come across a photograph of something like the vacant building at the corner of  Spring and Mulberry Elizabeth streets that served as a spectacular showcase for graffiti artists and realize that the in New York the mundane is pretty wonderful. As Richard says in his introduction to the project,

Each of Manhattan’s street corners is a life-world of its own, representing the common experience of the daily lives that cross it; taken together, they represent the collective experience of the island’s streets and sidewalks, the larger life-world of Manhattan’s greatest public commons.

The whole collection will be available in 2009 and you can buy individual prints now—in fact, the Library of Congress has four in its permanent collection.

Of all 10,937 photographs available, I chose the one at the top of the post because it makes a nice introduction to NYRB's new  location—that's right, we've just moved to Greenwich Village. We're not actually located in the White Horse Tavern, but we aren't too far away.

Before we packed up the old place, I took a picture of one of my favorite relics of the old, old office. I had a feeling that this desk organizer, which likely dated from the 60s, wouldn't survive the move. It features a sticker that reads (or read) what I'm guessing is "Berrigan for Pope." But which Berrigan? Daniel? Phil? Perhaps a dual papacy?

Knowing a hawk from a handsaw, pt 1

Introducing the re-designed cover of J.A. Baker's The Peregrine. Now featuring 100% more . . . peregrine!

It seems the old cover showed a bird that was nothing like a peregrine. In fact, it was a red-tailed hawk. Pity, because I was fond of that swooping bird. Not so our hawk-eyed readers, one of whom suggested that having a red-tailed hawk on the cover of a book about peregrines was like featuring a dog on the cover of a book about cats.

The print shown on the new cover is by Dame Elisabeth Frink, whose "Birds of Prey Series"—which can be viewed on-line at the Tate's site—has a lovely naive quality.

We nearly made a similar error with the recently released Goshawk by T.H. White. Luckily we were saved by someone infinitely more knowledgeable about such things than anyone on our staff. He suggested a painting by the Swedish artist Bruno Liljefors. And it turned out quite handsome.

Nikki McClure's Midnight Folk

The Midnight Folk, the companion book to John Masefield's Box of Delights, isn't coming out till next September, but—the necessities of publishing being what they are—we already have the cover in house.

Nikki McClure, whose paper-cut illustrations are all done by hand, and who illustrated the cover of the earlier Masefield book (and kept us in line, reminding us that wolves weren't really evil—no red eyes!—and that metallic inks are environmentally unfriendly) has outdone herself here with a suspenseful image of Kay Harker and his rat pal shrinking in a basement corner while the witchy Sylvia Daisy Pouncer and her coven march down the steps.

 

We've been fans of Nikki's ever since noticing her work (including her yearly calendar, which has a cult following & which has been spotted around town at several of our favorite shops) at Buy Olympia.

 

Last year Abrams brought out a book collecting the works in all of the previous years' calendars.

Some of us in the office, though, have been aware of Nikki's work since prep-school days, and  one of us is even the proud owner of an early rare work, Sent Out On The Tracks They Built: Sinophobia in Olympia, 1886, which she collaborated on with Sarah Dougher in a more rocking incarnation.

 

Read and interview with Nikki McClure here.

Big at the AWP, David Jones

One of he most heartening things about staffing the NYRB table in the nosebleed stands of the AWP was the popularity of books that have been, to put it kindly, something less than popular.

Most notably, several people came over to us expressly to get a hold of David Jones's highly-allusive modernist prose-poem memoir of World War I, In Parenthesis.

Jones enlisted in the army at the age of 19

From W.S. Merwin's introduction:

As a “war book” In Parenthesis is incomparable. In his account of those months of stupefying discomfort, fatigue, and constant fear in the half-flooded winter trenches, and then of the mounting terror and chaos of the July assault on Mametz Wood, David Jones made intimate and inimitable use of sensual details of every kind, from sounds, sights, smells, and the racketing and shriek of shrapnel set against the constant roar of artillery, to snatches of songs overheard or remembered, reflections on pools of mud, the odors of winter fields of beets blown up by explosives, the way individual soldiers carried themselves at moments of stress or while waiting. All of these become part of the “nowness” that Jones said was indispensable to the visual arts. The resulting powerful and intense evocation, however, occurs in what seems like a vast echo chamber where the reverberations resound from the remote antiquity of military activities, and of the language and mythology of Britain, from Shakespeare’s Histories, in English, and from the poems, conflicts, and divinities of the more venerable traditions of Wales and the Welsh, and from the legacy, civil, political, and military, of the Roman occupation of the island, some remnant of which Arthur himself had fought to preserve.

Merwin mentions Jones's beliefs about the visual arts because Jones was as much an artist as he was a poet. He drew from an early age and studied under Walter Sickert. But perhaps the most important influence in life as an artist was fellow Catholic-covert Eric Gill. In the 1920s Jones lived with the Gill family, illustrating books and experimenting with different print making styles. He was even engaged to one of Gill's daughters for a time.

The illustration on the cover of In Parenthesis is a detail of a drawing of Jones's that belongs in the collection of the Tate Britain. He was also involved with the design and typesetting of the interior of In Parenthesis, of which the NYRB edition is a facsimile.

Languagehat on David Jones
Modernism's David Jones pages

When is a Book Cover Done? When it Looks Done!

 Here’s a little behind-the-scenes information about an upcoming title of ours, which will be in stores in late January.

The book cover below, with the brown title square, was supposed to be the final cover for our upcoming Poems of the Late Tang, by A.C. Graham. To keep the schedule, we had to use a scan of our own. But then, the actual stock image arrived just in the nick of time.

The brown cover was actually at the printer and in the proofs stage, when the real image arrived, and was noticeably more gold than its predecessor. When we tried the new image with the brown title square, we found that it just made the cover look more brown.

Katy Homans, our classics jacket designer extraordinaire, came to the rescue with a new title square, and now readers everywhere are free to judge this book by its cover.

Departed: R.B. Kitaj

 

We were saddened to hear of the recent death of painter R.B. Kitaj, whose art appears on the cover of two books in the classics series.  Though our dealings with him were indirect, he impressed us as extremely gracious.

Read more at the Yale University Press log and at Comment Is Free.

A lesson in British currency from Uncle

The first US edition of Uncle included this handy explanation of British coins. It features such useful information as "a farthing is so small that it's only used nowadays by the dwarfs." We weren't able to insert it into our edition of Uncle, but I thought I'd share it anyway. If you don't know J.P. Martin's stories about a very rich elephant named Uncle, this will give you a small taste. And, if the illustrations look familiar, it's because they're by Quentin Blake, who illustrated most of Roald Dahl's books. Here he's integrated what looks like direct rubbings of the coins into his pen-and-ink art.

You might notice a few out-of-date features to this page. First, this complicated system of dividing up the pound was abandoned in 1971. Secondly, a pound is no longer worth about three dollars. And someone should tell Uncle's bookkeeper, Old Monkey, that one million pounds is sadly no longer the equivalent of "roughly three million dollars" either.

Here's the whole spread. Click for a larger image of it.

Cover story: The Case of Comrade Tulayev

Recently, someone wrote in asking about the origin of the portrait of Victor Serge on the cover of The Case of Comrade Tulayev. The photo is scratched in  a way that  suggests that some act of erasure was perpetrated on it. Disappointingly, the truth is much more mundane, as Richard Greeman, head of the Victor Serge Foundation explained to us:

Here's the story about the photograph. It belongs to Serge's daughter, Jeannine Vidal-Kibalchich, who was left orphaned in Mexico at the age of eleven when her father died, basically of exhaustion, aged 57. Jeannine told me that one of her children marked it up, but I wonder if she herself might have scribbled on it as a child. The picture itself dates from early 1944. It was taken during one of two expeditions, two pilgrimages really, Serge made with Laurette Séjourné to the tiny village of San Juan de Parangaricutiro where a volcano had erupted. Serge was profoundly affected by this cataclysmic sight as well as by the earthquakes in experienced in Mexico. The original title of TULAYEV was "La Terre commence à trembler."

The same photograph is used to illustrate Eliot Weinberger's review of Susan Sontag's collection of essays At the Same Time. Sontag was a fierce booster of Serge's work; Weinberger calls her introduction to the NYRB Classics edition of Tulayev, "the finest essay in the book."

And for you Serge fans out there, we'll be publishing the first-ever English-language translation of his Unforgiving Years (Les annés sans pardon) this fall.