During a bit of research for BBCDW I came across this video of Nick Cave reading from his new novel, The Death of Bunny Munro. A funny and mildly disturbing vignette to bring you into the weekend. Enjoy.

p.s. The highlights come at 4:38 and 5:58.

p.p.s. Is it just me being influenced by the title or does Cave look and act like some sort of demented alternate-reality humanoid version of Bugs Bunny?

p.p.p.s. You thought the UK cover was wild. The NZ cover is out of control.

How to fuck up a good title font:

1. Put a cover blurb above the title that uses alliteration. This will be the first thing people see and will immidiately notify them that you do not give a shit how the cover of your book looks.

2. Put your title in with a time-tested reliable font. This will be the second thing that people see and it wil trick them into thinking that you might actually give a shit how your book cover looks.

3. Put in a long-ass subtitle that seems the requisite for most non-fiction books aimed at scarring parents into a fever-frenzy of buying, buying, buying things that might possibly make their manufactured problems disappeared.

4. WE’VE SOLD A SHIT LOAD OF BOOKS! SO IT’S GOT TO BE GOOD! RIGHT?! TEN MILLION PARENTS WHIPPED INTO PANIC-Y CONSUMER MODE CAN’T BE WRONG!

5. By this point it’s clear to the viewer that you do not give one microscopic fecal choliform cell about how your book cover looks, but they are trapped now and must finish viewing. So throw in a cluttered image that bluntly illustrates your point.

6. Fuck, you forgot to put in the author’s name. Just put it over the cluttered image. Wait, you can’t put it there, no one will be able to read it. I know, who gives a shit about the author, but she’ll raise a big stink about it. Just throw it in a gold box or something. That feels like an afterthought though. Probably because it is.

7. Looking a little too uniform? How about throwing all ideas about consistency and cohesiveness out the window by changing all the fonts and making them completely different from one another? Congratulations, you fucked up a perfectly good title font.

How to use a good title font correctly:

1. Get that cover blurb away from the top and make it work within the title itself. What’s that? It’s not the first thing you see? So fucking what. If you need Machiko Kakutani to tell you what books to buy you shouldn’t be trusted with money.

2. Two colors.

3. Hey, look at that, it’s the authors name in a clear and legible place at the bottom. And it’s in the same fucking font as the title. Imagine that.

In more-people-stealing-my-ideas news: the people at Sing Statistics took the idea of publishing stories and illustrations together and took it to dizzying new heights with We Are the Friction. An eyebrow-raisingly impressive list of contributors makes this collection look like a must have for the small-press collector/fiend in your life. The Brits done did it again.

Got read a good submission yesterday from David Peak that got me thinking about horror. He wrote a bit about the video boxes of 80’s horror movies, which no one can deny the awesomeness of. It made me wonder if there were horror novels out there that reflected that era. Because as the above shows, there’s some vanilla bullshit out there right now.

I’m not going to go into how boring and unscary this cover is, or how that cover blurb is borderline embareassing (Most likeable book? Not exactly saying it’s a “triumph of the genre”, more like saying, “I had very little urge to barf.”), let’s just say horror novel covers these days are garbage and move on.

And now for some good old fashioned nostalgia…

Holy shit, did you not just piss yourself a little when you looked at this? Okay, maybe you didn’t cause you’re 26 years old, but imagine looking at this when you were 5 when you actually played on the sidewalk near storm drains and actually made paper boats. Nightmare city.

Yes! Getting a little bit more schlocky now. It seems to me that there was a groundswell in the 80’s design world that just decided to throw subtlety and innuendo completely out the window. And I love them for it.

I guess this would be considered the Penguin Classics version of horror books. The Cthulhu mythos is really interesting but there’s so many better renderings of Lovecraft’s infamous god that this one seems a bit Marvel Comics in comparison.

Why do horror book covers suck so bad right now? I think people are too lazy or apathetic to be scared nowadays and the book covers reflect that. Gimme the old nightmare days. I want to see a new golden age of scary-as-shit horror book covers.

Anybody got any old favorites they want to share?

Who knew combining Gregory Maguire and a shitty tattoo would result in something mildly cool.

So, you think this green movement is the best move society has made since outlawing murder? Think again, says Amy Stewart. In Wicked Plants, Stewart reveals that the leafy green world is filled with trecherous organisms have no interest in producing tasty salad fixins and nourishing oxygen. In fact, they’d like to see you dead. And not just weird Amazonian plants with long scientific names. There’s plants right outside your door that have it in for you.

I would have tightended up the boarder a little bit, but for the most part this cover does a good job presenting the reader with the elegantly deadly subject matter. Well done, nameless Algonquin designer.

Penguin commissioned Ruben Toledo to draw up some covers for some of their classic snooze-fests in celebration of fashion week or some bullshit.

Penguin’s heart is in the right place, trying to spruce up some old dogs with fancy new covers, and the drawings aren’t bad, but good book covers these do not make.

It makes these books look like a Tim Burton picture book adaptation of the classic stories. If you’re going to get some new artists to gussy up some old novels how about doing it with a little bit of balls and/or ovaries?

How about Aurel Schmidt takes on Bukowski:

Or Dante by Neckface.

Or better yet, let Angela Boatwright tackle Emily Bronte.

There. All fixed.

What do you think of when you think of the word scouring? I imagine myself on a horse drawn covered wagon with fifteen mustangs pulling me, galloping wildly, leather straps and buckles jostling and snapping and clanging, each horses eyes open frighteningly wide showing the little sliver of white, saliva ribboning from their mouths, my one hand on the reins, the other shielding the sun from my eyes, looking out across the desert landscape rapidly coming towards me then disappearing, wind thundering in my ears, hollering through a dry and cracked throat at the horses, “H-yaw! H-yaw!“, looking for someone. A fugitive, a doctor, a law man. Someone who holds my life and the lives of others in their hands.

I learned a couple years ago during a game of Scatagories that it really means “to rub hard especially with a rough material for cleansing.”

It also means “to suffer from diarrhea or dysentery” but that’s not really the point. I was scouring the internet this morning, in only one sense of the word, looking for a good book cover for this weeks BBCDW and basically getting a little depressed at the amount of bullshit out there. Then, in my darkest hour, this little diamond popped out of the rough.

Johannes Cabal the Necromancer turns the Faust legend on it’s ear as a man who’s sold his soul to learn the secrets of raising the dead now tries to win it back from the Devil by getting 100 people to commit their souls to be damned. Sounds like it might run the risk of either being some lame-ass genre bullshit or it could be really awesome.

The woodcut skeleton dude, the black and white with a splash of blood red, it all evokes a healthy dose of deliciously evil fun. Well done, nameless Double Day designer.

I pulled all the old books out of storage to find a few gems:

Ugh. Kinda gross. Anyway I thought I’d take this opportunity to dig through muck and find a few modern classics that I never completed. Let the failure begin!

Drop City by T.C. Boyle

Man, I must not have gotten far in this one cause save for a small fold on the upper right corner my copy of this book looks like it came right off the shelf of the book store. I’d always heard Boyle was supposed to be one of the funniest writers of his generation. I guess that’s what motivated me to pick up Drop City in the first place. When I think of funny I don’t think of spending a few dozen pages setting the scene of the novel: a group of 1970’s hippies on a commune setting out to colonize Alaska. That, and I think around the time I picked up this book I had jsut finished reading an issue of Vice that was devoted to destroying the baby boomer generation, so I was all, “fuck these self-diluted people.”

Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

I think I picked this one up cause it seemed like a good book to have under your belt to talk about with girls. I’d say the same about 100 Years of Solitude, which I enjoyed the shit out of. I thought to myself, “For some reason babes love the fiery latin rhythms that GGM is capable of throwing, so why not familiarize yourself? You might learn something.” Turns out the only thing I learned was that unrequited love has never been so boring. Thing about Marquez is he’s real hit and miss. 100 Years of Solitude may be one of the best books I’ve ever read, but Love and Other Demons? Holy shit, what a stink pile.

Humboldt’s Gift by Saul Bellow

I’ve no excuse for not finishing this one other than being downright lazy. It had everything going for it: set in Chicago (a town I was in love with at the time), a narritorial voice that gripped you like an old friend putting his arm around you and walking you to the bar to buy you a drink, and Saul Bellow, master storyteller. I need to read this one. I will read this one. Lemme just check out these lolcats first. Goddamn internet.

Even though they failed to contact the expert on the subject, an interesting round-up/discussion/highlight on the subject of book cover designs over at The Rumpus pointed me in the direction of Julie Orringer’s collection

I like photos that tell stories. Ones that perfectly freeze a moment in time when things are about about to change. Or ones that at least capture a certain mood. Accomplish that and you’re a good photographer. Throw that photo on the cover of a book and you should win awards. Or at least a blog post.

A couple of covers jumped out at me this week so instead of stockpiling the blog entries I’m passing the info-tainment onto you!

Methland by Nick Reding is a dissection of the image of small town America as the wholesome, honest,  backbone of the country and the reality of the situation: a slow decomposition over the past three decades from that brawny image to a struggling community deteriorating due to transitioning agriculture business and little-to-no employment. All of which has left our much-revered small town America vunerable to a cancer called methamphetamine.

I’m usually not a fan of gritty, textured fonts. Most of the time it’s overkill, like trying to hard to convey a seedy world. Most of the time a gaunt, liberally spaced font could get the job done with a little more subtlety. But for some reason it works on this cover. Perhaps because that’s just what you expect to see when you think about meth. And you can never go wrong using a big juicy photo. In this instance, the sun setting on our pre-concieved notions of what small town America means.

And on the flip side we have The Science of Fear by Daniel Gardner. Ever wonder if the next plane you’re getting on will get hijacked by a terrorist? If that person that sneezed in the elevator was infected with swine flu? If Kim Jong Il is mere moments away from pressing “the button”? Daniel Gardner doesn’t. Instead he wonders why we have these irrational fears. What causes us to make snap judgments that more or less do nothing but cause us more pain and suffering than before we even heard about theses percieved threats? Gardner supposes that it has to do with the way our hunter-gatherer brains react to threats to our well being and how we can learn to overcome these false worries and lead a braver life.

The road-cone orange and the simple, tiny iconography do a good job of approaching these subjects of fear with a pair of tweezers and a mganifying glass. As if they are nothing to be afraid of, but something to put under a microscope. Not only an enticing cover, but also adiquately suggestive of the material and an excellent execution of the thesis of the book. Well done, nameless Penguin designer.