It’s always a treat to find other people have picked up my work, liked it and told the world about it. Last week BuzzFeed ran an article entitled ‘32 Dorm Room Posters That Won’t Make You Feel Like A Living Cliché’, and my Smiths ‘The Queen Is Dead’ print was in with a bullet at no. 31:
Today Domestic Sluttery have mentioned my Stone Roses print in their article ‘Spine Thrillers: Beautiful Things for Bookworms’:
Consider my cockles well and truly warmed.
The Stone Roses blog ‘Spiral Through Another Day’ has posted a nice mention of my new Roses print here.
There’s something about ornate 1870s-1910s book covers that’s just too… ornate. Too much going on, as if they’re trying to go one better than the (usually mountain of) words within. But I saw this one in Waterstones on Gower Street this lunchtime and was quite impressed. It’s relatively restrained… relatively.
The front cover of this book was punchy enough to get me to pick it up, but the back cover was slam-bang crazy enough to get me to buy it. Those large letters TBE, the strange geometric ribbon at the bottom, the publisher’s logo top right… it’s barely holding itself together.
I don’t think this cover has enough visual metaphors for its subject matter. Oh no, wait, it does.
This 1979 Penguin is m-e-s-s-e-d u-p. The green background to the Penguin logo on the front, with CRIME in all caps just below it, and the blue Pelican spine. Little wonder then the man in the rather disturbing cover photo is having some almighty kind of brainwrong.
This Pelican (A227, first published 1950, this reprint 1961) is semi-weird. But the back is stranger (in a very quiet sort of way):
What’s with the big ‘Published by Penguin Books’ thing? Crazy year, 1961.
