Current reading. (Like you were really interested.)

Recently:

Reviving Ophelia by Mary Pipher. (Research.)

The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kaddath by H.P. Lovecraft. (The old Ballantine Adult Fantasy edition from 1970 – and it’s the first time I’ve read it!)

The End of Mr. Y by Scarlett Thomas.

Gothic! (YA short-story collections; more research and a MAJOR slog.)

The Writer’s Tale by Russell T. Davies. The Doctor Who writing process, by a genius who’s not afraid to burn his bridges.

Currently:

Ophelia Speaks by Sara Schandler. (More research.)

Vampire Academy by Richelle Mead. (Yet more research.)

About Writing by Samuel R. Delany. (Chip’s astounding knowledge, erudition, and writing chops have always been a source of profound irritation for me.)

The Jewish War by Josephus. Found my father’s copy of this old Penguin – printed in Isreal! – last June in NYC. You can only read a few pages at a time. Dense, but chock full of violence, treachery, depravity, and other Roman goodness, written by one of the most fascinating characters in literature – a Jewish historian and commander of the Jewish army in Galilee who became a Roman citizen; upholder of Jewish tradition to the Romans, Roman apologist to the Jews, and a guy for whom the phrase “You can’t please everybody” apparently held no terror. I am reading his famous account preparatory to reading Lion Feuchtwanger’s novel Josephus.

A bucketload of plays by my friend Rob Shearman.

The first draft of Audry’s novel.

Next from the stack:

Blood Promise by Richelle Mead. (That I might better understand what flips Audry out.)

The Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers. (Penguin Read Red, loaded with win!)

Raise High the Roofbeams, Carpenter & Seymour by J.D. Salinger. (Can’t believe I never read this one.)

Magic for Beginners by Kelly Link.

Ridiculous! The Theatrical Life and Times of Charles Ludlam by David Kaufman.

…unless I change my mind and grab something else instead.

The dumbest thing we've done this week.

The other day we were out and about in London. We got caught up in the midst of the Palace Horse Guard for the second day in a row...


...And encountered the gayest cab in all of London.


We soon found ourselves on the fringe of the West End...and street after street of little antiquarian bookshops.




Hey, look! They have Tintin! And P.G. Wodehouse!




Evidently Daleks are bibliophiles. (This is an original 1960's prop.)


At last we could restrain ourselves no longer. Despite the fact that we're travelling with two heavy suitcases that are already overweight, we bought books. Loads and loads of lovely books. We discovered some fascinating fantasy/historical novels we'd never heard of before, and I discovered a new line from Penguin called Read Red. It's a series of classic adventure stories (Treasure Island, the Sherlock Holmes books, Verne, Burroughs, The 39 Steps, etc.) with fantastic retro Boy's-Own-Adventure style covers that look old but are in fact new designs. Well, you know about me and Penguins; I wound of getting every book in this series I could find -- even though I had older copies of several of them.

As soon as we got back to the room, Audry took pictures of our booty. (As always, click on each photo for a better view.)


The 5 books on the upper right are Penguin Read Reds. Check out the cover of Tarzan -- it's freaking awesome!


More Read Reds. And I've been meaning to read "Gone With the Wind" for years, so naturally I had to fly to England to buy a copy.


Audry got that fantastic retro-Penguin pencil set in the middle. To its left is an old school Penguin-themed notebook she got to use them with.


Needless to say we are REALLY looking forward to lugging these things back to the States.

Penguins

My belated discovery that H.P. Lovecraft has joined the ranks of the immortals in the Penguin Classics series got me thinking about Penguin books in general, and this book in particular:


I've always been fond of a well-designed book (I'm particularly partial to almost any hardbound from Knopf in the 70's, and similarly vintaged Vintage paperbacks), but there is only one publishing company whose total output would be worthy of an in-depth design survey. It's hard to think of any other publisher with as distinctive a line-look as Penguin. They pretty much own the color orange, and a half-dozen or so sans-serif typefaces as well.

I've always been partial to the English Library series, with their orange spines, their Helvetica logotype, and their beautiful cover illustrations (always a piece of art from the era in which the book was written, usually from a picture library called Snark International). Given a choice at the bookstore between a Signet, Bantam or Penguin edition of the same title, I usually reached for the Penguin. If I look over my bookshelf (which basically involves rotating my chair 180 degrees from my desk), I can't help but thinking there's a lot of orange there. (And some black too, for the translated editions.)



The Penguin Design book is a fascinating read if, like me, you're into such things as the Corvenus family of typefaces and horizontal tripartite cover grids, but I was disappointed to find virtually nothing on the English Library series in the entire book. Those beloved orange spines which have graced the shelves of every house I have lived in for the past 38 years -- who designed them? What were the production standards? And what the heck was Snark International, anyway?

Fortunately, I was able to find this terrific article online by Googling (ta-da!) "Snark International." Turns out the Classics look was the work of Germano Facetti, who was Penguin's art director from 1960 through 1972, and who had founded (ta-da!) Snark International a few years before joining Penguin. A touch of nepotism in the constant usage of his former company's product? Maybe. But in odd moments I still reach for an orange spine just for the pleasure of seeing one of those great paintings or sketches from the Snark library. (And often wind up just rereading the whole book.)

A small sampling of Facetti's masterpieces:

A Link to the Past

Holy Schnitzel! Somewhere out there, there's a geek after my own heart who's a Germano Facetti fan!



You can see more of his Penguin Classic videogame covers here.

Classics

So I have been re-reading H.P. Lovecraft, mainly because I haven't read him lately, but also because I felt it was time to upgrade my tattered old Lancer paperback collections from the 60's with the spiffy collections from Penguin that feature copious annotation by HPL expert S.T. Joshi. So eager was I to jump into the lair of the Elder Gods that I only just now noticed two little words on the cover that I find absolutely astonishing: "Penguin" and "Classics."

Sweet fancy Moses, the world has turned! Was there ever more of an outsider than Lovecraft? Yet this writer of cheapjack pulp horror, whose work was so obscure that his friends had to create their own publishing house to keep it in print after his death, has been placed -- by the editors at Penguin, at least -- on the same shelf as Dickens, the Brontes, Thackeray, Austen, Twain, and Ben Jonson! There couldn't be a greater recognition of his work if Kazuo Ishiguro were to take a stab at writing a Cthulhu Mythos story. Not bad for a guy who never saw any of his work professionally published in book form while he was alive.

(I realize this mainstreaming of genre fiction has been going on for a while -- probably since the 90's, when Vintage Books started publishing guys like Alfred Bester and Phil Dick. But it hadn't really penetrated my thick, defensive skull until I looked at that Lovecraft cover.)

In my subsequent lonely wanderings on the Internet in search of Lovecraftiana, I came across a website called The Modern Word, which may be the most brilliant literary website or the most pretentious, I haven't quite sorted it out yet. It contains a section on "experimental writers," and there to my delight I found listed not just the usual suspects, like Barthelme, Borges, Becket, Pynchon and Robbe-Grillet, but also a host of friends and idols: Chip Delany, Mervyn Peake, Mike Moorcock, J.G. Ballard and, of course, Lovecraft. Not all of them considered "experimental" writers by the cognoscenti, but they all should be. (And frankly, Sturgeon, Ellison, Tom Disch, and quite a few others belong on the list.)

Is this proof that the phantasmagoric (by which I mean fantasy, horror, and -- don't hit me -- SF) has become the dominant literature of the past hundred years? Some of the most mainstream of writers have tried their hand at it -- Updike, Phillip Roth, even J.D. Salinger stuck his toe in the pool of the fantastic, so to speak. The past century has seen such tectonic shifts in technology and culture -- a million eruptions of information, the destruction of cultural space, the rise of hyperlogic. Who else can vanquish the tyranny of the rational and speak of the true human condition, other than crypto-surrealists like Lovecraft, Tolkein, Asimov, Stanislaw Lem, Lord Dunsany, James Blish, Roger Zelazny, Angela Carter, Alfred Bester and Phil Dick? Or for that matter, Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, Len Wein, Alan Moore or Wendy and Richard Pini? And if you were to stand up and shout that J.G. Ballard's "The Atrocity Exhibition" was the greatest book of the past 50 years, well, I for one would stand beside you and help you duck the brickbats.

So does Lovecraft deserve to be placed in the same league as George Elliot or Thomas Hardy, as Penguin's designation suggests? In my mind, he has always been there.

Oh, Howard Phillips, you outcast, you leper, you proud and self-designated amateur, you whom Edmund Wilson called "a hack," if you could have just a glimpse of what you have wrought with your provincialism, your xenophobia, and your horror of miscegenation. If you had known that one day your work would have sold in the millions, that your name would be as synonymous as Poe's with a specific brand of existential horror, that children would play with stuffed Cthulhus, would it have fractured your mind? Or has the world itself succumbed to the madness which devoured so many of your narrators?