Pimpin' with my Holmes

There are a TON of Sherlock Holmes books, as a recent trip to Borders revealed to me. The mystery section is a place that doesn't often interest me, because the covers there are so a) boring and b) tiny! There's not much surface to work with on a 3 x 5 postcard-sized paperback, especially when 55% of it (or more) is taken up by the stupid author's name!

What's that, Ms. Clark? Yes, you're right; I am just jealous that I can't bank on the sheer notability of my name. Yes, I am interested to find out about the song that kills people. (Wait, that was a Palahniuk novel. Ooh, I know what to review next time.)

But when mystery is not modern, I think the cover designers have much more room for fun. Let's look at just a few of Doyle's collections, in order of my aesthetic judgment.

Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Scholastic Classics: 2004

Well, okay. What's with the heather gray/marbly writing action around the picture? What is the point of that? It's not like Holmes was known for his penmanship, right? And that Holmes looks downright dopey. It's kind of obvious to dress him up in the costume made famous by the TV show. NEXT!

The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Volume I

The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Volume II

Arthur Conan Doyle
Barnes and Noble Classics: 2003

Ok, now this is how B&N always does their classics, and granted, they're not exactly known for their publishing. But I'm not a big fan of this design set-up, because I like the title to feel like a part of the cover art, instead of *plunk* art goes here, *plunk* title goes here. But, the images here are quite nice. Note the foggy, mysterious London landscapes Holmes stares out into, first alone, then joined by everyone's favorite idiot, Watson. The growth of a hero always includes picking up a sidekick.

The New Annotated Sherlock Homes: The Short Stories

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
W. W. Norton & Company: 2004

Now we're getting somewhere. This is the mack-daddy kind of anthology, though we still get to the old problem of the pipe and deerstalker cap. And what's with the dog? Ultimately, they won me over with the double volumes and the font. Yummy.

Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
Arthur Conan Doyle
Ann Arbor Media Group, LLC: 2007

Love it. Hardcover and boring brown, the way the books in Holmes’ private library might have appeared. Yet the cover art is just darling: like a block print, actually pressed into the cover (I felt it), with a simple image: brick street, dead body, and a mind at work. The perfect beginning for any detective, and any mystery story. So what's the best Sherlock Holmes cover like? Duh. Elementary.

Seeing is believing

"I'm a visual learner." I hear other people say this all the time, and sometimes I say it too; but I don't know if it's really true, since I often catch myself making homophonic errors in typing (which typically just delights me: "ha! I typed 'won' instead of 'one'! My brain is crazy!"). Learning aside, I've got to put visuals up there in my top 3 senses. Well, at least top 5.

This shouldn't count as a book cover judgment, but I'm the Judge, and judges misuse their courts all the time, right? First this country's judges lost the wigs, then the entire US Judicial branch snapped like a twig under the weight of the plump bluebird of corruption. Yes, Book Cover Judge will mix nonsensical metaphors! Order in the court!

So today I feature my latest love story.

The Believer
Published by McSweeney's, March-April 2008
Cover art by Charles Burns

So yes, this is a magazine, not a book. However, it's a $10 magazine, which is more than I can spend on a book anyway. If being the Judge did pay more, the first thing I'd spring for is any one of Burns's horrifyingly delicious-looking graphic novels:

Mmm.

Another reason this post is breaking my judgment rules is that I've read the contents before writing my review. I think I made that decision early on so that the text couldn't taint my perception of the cover art. The joy of Borders has nothing to do with text for me. It's all about the silky surfaces; the enticing colors; the smell of newness, paper, and glue; and the cornacopia of fonts to visually delight me. But, to be fair, I have never read an entire copy of The Believer before. (It's really dense, ok?) And again, power of the Judge, blah blah blah.

Charles Burns always does the art for this magazine. Consistency is important in a magazine; however, most popular publications rely too heavily on their routines:

I think these three poses are recycled month after month. Color of the magazine and content, too. (This is all I can say right now. To comment on even one of the call-outs would take way too much of my limited blogging space.)

Back to Burns. Let me re-paste an image to cleanse our eyeball palattes:

January issue, 2008

Better. Although this is frequently the set-up for the design of this cover (9 squares of alternating headlines and images), Burns is willing to mix it up, particularly if the magazine has a specific theme. The March-April magazine is their film issue, and it seems quite clever to scatter the main players of the mag around a hypnotic vortex of literary/cinematic doom, since this issue (of course) makes frequent mention of both Hitchcock and his Vertigo.

Even without a different or dynamic composition, Burns' portraiture always amazes me. As a graphic artist, he has mysteriously found the line between play and pretention. Familiar faces in this graphic style are eye-catching, as the marketers who employ rotoscoping* for Charles Shwab know well, but this goes beyond the hook, as the pros say. Burns bridges the playfulness of comic strips (well reflecting the winking nature of anything McSweeney's does) with the dramatic, exaggerated chiaroscuro** I associate with block printing and olden-tymey newspapers. White and dark sit right next to each other, comfortably, stubbornly refusing to allow grayscale onto the page. And while The Believer is arguably all about the gray areas, I'd like to think that both the content of the magazine and the cover illustrations are just as much about clarity and truth then the lack thereof. To ignore the desire for the black-and-white answers would make the authors' explorations pointless (though these explorations ironically are the ones muddying the waters), and it would deny our humanity, our fundamental hope for crystal-clear understanding of our world. Burns makes me believe the mag's writers are not pompous academics who use big words to make me feel like I shouldn't have gone to a state school. Nay. They are seekers of truth. And I'm a believer, too.

*Rotoscoping, a term that has something to do with cartoony-looking but real-life people, was used in the indie film Chicago Ten, and helps convince people that I am well-informed.

**Chiaroscuro, along with meaning light and dark in a picture, also helps to make me sound like I went to college, even in a sentence that employs the phrase "olden tymey."

Will it float?

Is it just me, or has the conversation climate dramatically shifted towards the topic of submarines? Everyone I know has something to say about this most fallic of transportation methods. Maybe because everyone I know is reading this book:

From the Depths
by Gerry Doyle
McBooks Press, Chicago: 2007

While normally I feel the immediate need to scoff an author who sets his name BIGGER than the title of the book,* this setup does not repulse me. Doyle's name is subtly presented, despite its massive size. The blue-on-blue makes me feel like I'm floating facedown in a swimming pool (as I often find myself), staring down at the unfamiliar, gracefully shifting appearance of my shadow on the surface of the deep...it would be enough to put anyone in a relaxing, oxygen-free sleep. However, the blood-red name of the book keeps us from an untimely slumber. There's the scent of murder mystery in the confined air of this book, and it smells fishy.

The dark, looming, foreshortened submarine shape makes me assume this book centers around a female protagonist stuck on a submarine full of big burly men. (Ok, so I've already read the inside flap. Let's pretend my Freudian analysis is very insightful.) So yeah, plunging ocean depths, sexy murder investigations...you see where I'm going. On the offhand chance this book is NOT sub-porn, I'm sure it's not sub-par, either. I know this because of the EXCELLENT "advance praise" quote chosen for the back cover. There's nothing worse than an overblown list of random nobodies to make a book seem more accomplished. I appreciate the concise remark by Charles Dickenson (I'd believe anyone with a name like that) whose two lines of praise reads sincerely and pointedly to the text.

Though there's only one star on the front, I'd give this cover at least 5 (scale TBD). 5 stars and 26 barnacles.




*Or, barely includes a title at all, MR. KLOSTERMAN:

Shame, shame.

An Absolutely True Post

My first review. Keep in mind that this is highly biased, because I met the author tonight and liked him. Not in that way, though yes, he was cute in that torturedly-awkward-yet-cheekily-deviant-artist kind of way. But it would never work out. He ruins the ends of books. Plus he's a communist. Anyway, on to my review:

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
by Sherman Alexie
Little, Brown and Company: 2007

What a great book cover. Black is very slimming, though this little guy hardly needs it! I appreciate the font choice here: the slightly irregular blockiness lets you know upfront that this is a young adult novel (I had no idea until I got to Borders tonight -- I thought maybe we were going to hear some angry Indian poetry, but no, something different). I remember when I was in fifth, maybe sixth grade -- the years in which you start using sharpies and posterboard for assignments -- and all the girls had, overnight and simultaneously, adopted the universal GIRLY BUBBLE TEXT for gossipy note writing, doodling, science projects, etc. You know what I'm talking about: those perfectly shaped letters with their fat curves and flaring sarifs. Do girls feel the need to adopt shapely letterhead at age 12 in order to reflect their new curvaceous bodies, or is that coincidental? Anyway, though my pubescent development wasn't too sluggish, my ability to write bubbly letters never showed up in my panties. My block letters were just thicker chicken scratches. I was bad at symmetry, too, and so the last half of whatever I was labeling would always smush together. Another girl in my class had a similar problem, though hers was exacerbated by her inability to spell. I remember looking at her poster during some kind of health presentation, and wondering what

NO SOM-

KING

was supposed to mean. Maybe someone should have told her mom "no somking" while she was pregnant with the poor girl!

Anyway, back to Mr. Alexie's cover. I love the toy cowboy and indian. Very reminiscent (for me) of The Indian and the Cupboard. This was one of those childhood books that I never enjoyed reading, yet read 6 or 7 times throughout my "young reader" life. I remember feeling uncomfortable both with the subject matter (toys come to life and practically burn your house down!) and the British colloquisms (my first introduction to "mum"--why can't this kid say things right?). I was fairly intolerant as a child, but I couldn't have been so closedminded, because I read the book so many times. I guess because it was there, and maybe I was sick of Beezus and Ramona.

So yeah, juxtaposition of racially dueling lives and whatnot. What really drives me crazy about this cover is the super-sheen matteness of the black space. Yes, it looks lovely on the shelf, but as soon as I touch it, it starts absorbing every molecule of oil that is typically coating my grubby hands. I'm all about respecting the craftmanship of a well-bound or beautifully illustrated text, but I don't want to feel the need to don white gloves every time I'd like to read my book. Come on, Sherman, it can't be that great.