Venus febriculosa

I came across the artist Ian Everard whose work, while on the surface perhaps only peripherally related to interests of this blog, really resonated with me.  A painter of found objects, he has created a series of works based upon what might be called “low-brow” book covers, which he reproduces with an extraordinary, almost forensic care so that each dogear, crease and tear of the “original”  is faithfully recreated like the bones of a saint in a replica reliquary.

Everard writes: “It seems to go without saying that no image can be taken at face value, but the process of meticulous copying reveals many layers of unforeseen meaning. Some of my choices, pulp romance novels for instance, might seem to be in bad taste. It is not my aim to satirize bad taste but, rather, to question what it is these artifacts, impeccably designed in their way, truly represent.”

You can view his portfolio here.

 ime was, with most of us, when Christmas Day encircling all our mited world like a magic ring, left nothing out for us to miss or seek; bound together all our home enjoyments, affections, and hopes; grouped everything and every one around the Christmas fire; and made the little picture shining in our bright young eyes, complete.

Time came, perhaps, all so soon, when our thoughts over-leaped that narrow boundary; when there was some one (very dear, we thought then, very beautiful, and absolutely perfect) wanting to the fulness of our happiness; when we were wanting too (or we thought so, which did just as well) at the Christmas hearth by which that some one sat; and when we intertwined with every wreath and garland of our life that some one’s name.

That was the time for the bright visionary Christmases which have long arisen from us to show faintly, after summer rain, in the palest edges of the rainbow! That was the time for the beatified enjoyment of the things that were to be, and never were, and yet the things that were so real in our resolute hope that it would be hard to say, now, what realities achieved since, have been stronger!

What! Did that Christmas never really come when we and the priceless pearl who was our young choice were received, after the happiest of totally impossible marriages, by the two united families previously at daggers–drawn on our account? When brothers and sisters-in-law who had always been rather cool to us before our relationship was effected, perfectly doted on us, and when fathers and mothers overwhelmed us with unlimited incomes? Was that Christmas dinner never really eaten, after which we arose, and generously and eloquently rendered honour to our late rival, present in the company, then and there exchanging friendship and forgiveness, and founding an attachment, not to be surpassed in Greek or Roman story, which subsisted until death? Has that same rival long ceased to care for that same priceless pearl, and married for money, and become usurious? Above all, do we really know, now,
that we should probably have been miserable if we had won and worn the pearl, and that we are better without her?

That Christmas when we had recently achieved so much fame; when we had been carried in triumph somewhere, for doing something great and good; when we had won an honoured and ennobled name, and arrived and were received at home in a shower of tears of joy; is it possible that THAT Christmas has not come yet?

And is our life here, at the best, so constituted that, pausing as we advance at such a noticeable mile-stone in the track as this great birthday, we look back on the things that never were, as naturally and full as gravely as on the things that have been and are gone, or have been and still are? If it be so, and so it seems to be, must we come to the conclusion that life is little better than a dream, and little worth the loves and strivings that we crowd into it?

No! Far be such miscalled philosophy from us, dear Reader, on Christmas Day! Nearer and closer to our hearts be the Christmas spirit, which is the spirit of active usefulness, perseverance, cheerful discharge of duty, kindness and forbearance! It is in the last virtues especially, that we are, or should be, strengthened by the unaccomplished visions of our youth; for, who shall say that they are not our teachers to deal gently even with the impalpable nothings of the earth!

Therefore, as we grow older, let us be more thankful that the circle of our Christmas associations and of the lessons that they bring, expands! Let us welcome every one of them, and summon them to take their places by the Christmas hearth.

Welcome, old aspirations, glittering creatures of an ardent fancy, to your shelter underneath the holly! We know you, and have not outlived you yet. Welcome, old projects and old loves, however fleeting, to your nooks among the steadier lights that burn around us. Welcome, all that was ever real to our hearts; and for the earnestness that made you real, thanks to Heaven! Do we build no Christmas castles in the clouds now? Let our thoughts, fluttering like butterflies among these flowers of children, bear witness! Before this boy, there stretches out a Future, brighter than we ever looked on in our old romantic time, but bright with honour and with truth. Around this little head on which the sunny curls lie heaped, the graces sport, as prettily, as airily, as when there was no scythe within the reach of Time to shear away the curls of our first-love. Upon another girl’s face near it–placider but smiling bright–a quiet and contented little face, we see Home fairly written. Shining from the word, as rays shine from a star, we see how, when our graves are old, other hopes than ours are young, other hearts than ours are moved; how other ways are smoothed; how other happiness blooms, ripens, and decays–no, not decays, for other homes and other bands of children, not yet in being nor for ages yet to be, arise, and bloom and ripen to the end of all!

Welcome, everything! Welcome, alike what has been, and what never was, and what we hope may be, to your shelter underneath the holly, to your places round the Christmas fire, where what is sits open-hearted! In yonder shadow, do we see obtruding furtively upon the blaze, an enemy’s face? By Christmas Day we do forgive him! If the injury he has done us may admit of such companionship, let him come here and take his place. If otherwise, unhappily, let him go hence, assured that we will never injure nor accuse him.

On this day we shut out Nothing!

“Pause,” says a low voice. “Nothing? Think!”

“On Christmas Day, we will shut out from our fireside, Nothing.”

“Not the shadow of a vast City where the withered leaves are lying deep?” the voice replies. “Not the shadow that darkens the whole globe? Not the shadow of the City of the Dead?”

Not even that. Of all days in the year, we will turn our faces towards that City upon Christmas Day, and from its silent hosts bring those we loved, among us. City of the Dead, in the blessed name wherein we are gathered together at this time, and in the Presence that is here among us according to the promise, we will receive, and not dismiss, thy people who are dear to us!

Yes. We can look upon these children angels that alight, so solemnly, so beautifully among the living children by the fire, and can bear to think how they departed from us. Entertaining angels unawares, as the Patriarchs did, the playful children are unconscious of their guests; but we can see them–can see a radiant arm around one favourite neck, as if there were a tempting of that child away. Among the celestial figures there is one, a poor misshapen boy on earth, of a glorious beauty now, of whom his dying mother said it grieved her much to leave him here, alone, for so many years as it was likely would elapse before he came to her– being such a little child. But he went quickly, and was laid upon her breast, and in her hand she leads him.

There was a gallant boy, who fell, far away, upon a burning sand beneath a burning sun, and said, “Tell them at home, with my last love, how much I could have wished to kiss them once, but that I died contented and had done my duty!” Or there was another, over whom they read the words, “Therefore we commit his body to the deep,” and so consigned him to the lonely ocean and sailed on. Or there was another, who lay down to his rest in the dark shadow of great forests, and, on earth, awoke no more. O shall they not, from sand and sea and forest, be brought home at such a time!

There was a dear girl–almost a woman–never to be one–who made a mourning Christmas in a house of joy, and went her trackless way to the silent City. Do we recollect her, worn out, faintly whispering what could not be heard, and falling into that last sleep for weariness? O look upon her now! O look upon her beauty, her serenity, her changeless youth, her happiness! The daughter of Jairus was recalled to life, to die; but she, more blest, has heard the same voice, saying unto her, “Arise for ever!”

We had a friend who was our friend from early days, with whom we often pictured the changes that were to come upon our lives, and merrily imagined how we would speak, and walk, and think, and talk, when we came to be old. His destined habitation in the City of the Dead received him in his prime. Shall he be shut out from our Christmas remembrance? Would his love have so excluded us? Lost friend, lost child, lost parent, sister, brother, husband, wife, we will not so discard you! You shall hold your cherished places in our Christmas hearts, and by our Christmas fires; and in the season of immortal hope, and on the birthday of immortal mercy, we will shut out Nothing!

The winter sun goes down over town and village; on the sea it makes a rosy path, as if the Sacred tread were fresh upon the water. A few more moments, and it sinks, and night comes on, and lights begin to sparkle in the prospect. On the hill-side beyond the shapelessly-diffused town, and in the quiet keeping of the trees that gird the village-steeple, remembrances are cut in stone, planted in common flowers, growing in grass, entwined with lowly brambles around many a mound of earth. In town and village, there are doors and windows closed against the weather, there are flaming logs heaped high, there are joyful faces, there is healthy music of voices. Be all ungentleness and harm excluded from the temples of the Household Gods, but be those remembrances admitted with tender encouragement! They are of the time and all its comforting and peaceful reassurances; and of the history that re-united even upon earth the living and the dead; and of the broad beneficence and goodness that too many men have tried to tear to narrow shreds.

We’re starting a new book cover contest.

After deliberations that included among others Joyce’s Ulysses, Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, Eliot’s The Wasteland, Bataille’s The Story of the Eye and of course Nabokov’s The Original of Laura, we chose semiotician Umberto Eco’s 1980 postmodern novel The Name of the Rose. Hopefully this will prove rich soil for some wonderful and interesting covers. We received 155 submissions for our Lolita cover contest and we’re hoping to double that number so help get the word out. This time there will be only one submission per entrant.

The prize will be $1000 US.

The deadline is Friday, February 26, 2010.

You can find all of the rules here.

Always great to hear from book designer John Gall, especially when it pertains to Nabokov. Here he’s enlisted a bunch of colleagues to create “book covers” of VN’s works using specimen boxes. And pretty interesting specimens these are. No Lolita, although it’s probably just as well (two more are also missing).

Link here.

Well, perhaps not exactly hot off the presses, but at least several hours before it officially hits the newsstands, I have a copy of the December 2009 Playboy, in which the first 5000 words of Vladimir Nabokov’s unfinished novel The Original of Laura is excerpted. On the cover of the “Gala Christmas Issue” the heading “World Exclusive/Vladimir Nabokov/The Original of Laura” jostles for space with “Sasha Grey Unleashes her Inner Lolita.” And there it begins, on page 44, takes a break on page 48, and wraps up on 164. There are reproductions of note cards #7 and #8, the contents of a few short letters from Nabokov to Hugh Hefner, an explanatory piece on the trajectory of the novel from its genesis to its publication, and an excerpt from the 1964 Playboy Interview conducted, I believe, by Alvin Toffler (by the way, the written piece that accompanies the Sasha Grey pictorial, concentrating on the Kubrick film, was penned by none other than Roger Ebert and is worth a read if you haven’t read it all before.).

And what to make of it, having hurriedly run through it a few times? Let me just say this: it could, really could, really really could, win first prize in a Vladimir Nabokov writing contest (more Ada than Lolita). Brief synopses of sad lives and tragic deaths comically presented (suicide, homicide, traffic accident); an elderly unattractive pedophile named Hubert H. Hubert(!); a few twelve year-old girls (of course), one living (Flora) one dead (Daisy); Flora’s eyelashes. Assorted naughtiness.

In other words, worth a read.

By the way, the August 1976 cover shown was inspired by an illustration by Mr. Nabokov that he included in his December 28, 1968 letter to Mr. Hefner. See the bunny?

Full text of excerpt here.

As sly as any work by Nabokov, Leo Lionni’s Parallel Botany from 1977 is a fantastic  exploration of “parallel plants” the study of which T.J. Nelson, in his review of the book, states “has often been under appreciated and ignored by other biologists, almost, one might say, a backwater in which progress has been slow and difficult. There are, of course, many reasons for this; but chiefly, the principal difficulty with studying parallel plants is their lack of a basic property possessed by the vast majority of other, non-parallel plants, namely the property of `existence‘.”

In the General Introduction we find this:

“These organisms,” writes Franco Russoli, “whose physical being is sometimes flabby and sometimes porous, at other times osseous but fragile, breaking open to display huge colonies of seeds or bulbs which grow and ferment in the blind hope of some vital metamorphosis, that seem to struggle against a soft but impenetrable skin – these abnormal creatures with pointed or horny protuberances, or petticoats, skirts and fringes of fibrils and pistils, articulations that are sometimes mucous and sometimes cartilaginous, might well belong to one of the great families of jungle flora, ambiguous, savage, and fascinating in their monstrous way. But they do not belong to any species in nature, nor would the most expert grafting ever succeed in bringing them into existence.”

And off we go into this rollicking adventure of a book which is as much an anthropological study of primitive cultures and their mythologies as a biological treatise; The Golden Bough, The Power of Myth and Species Plantarum all rolled into one.

I’ve always admired the austere covers of New Directions books.  Often little more than a single black and white photograph and a bit of black text against a white background, they appeared rudimentary in design but were nearly always engaging. Of the many designers over the years I know of perhaps a half dozen: Alvin Lustig, who was responsible for the early color covers; Andy Warhol; Gertude Huston, the art director at New Directions who was married to founder and publisher James Laughlin; Stefan Salter, Roloff Beny, Rudolph de Harak.

One of my favorites also happens to be one of my favorite books. Second Skin by John Hawkes is a harrowing, hallucinatory read, and as often as I read it I am never confident that I’ve really grasped what transpires. The cover, of a similar quality, was designed by Jean Krulis and Gertude Awe, about whom I’ve unearthed little information beyond the fact that they designed a number of covers for New Directions, including Adventures in the Skin Trade by Dylan Thomas. Krulis, it appears, graduated from Cooper Union in 1957. Aside from that, the internet is silent. Somewhere I am sure there is a marvellous resource that lists all of the New Directions designers and their covers.

Lyuba Haleva, the winner of the Lolita Cover Contest graduated with a degree in Book & Graphic Design from the National Academy of Art in Sofia, Bulgaria and now works as a freelance graphic designer in Sofia (I’ve included a sample of her work).

I asked her to speak a bit about her entry and she eloquently responded:

“Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita is masterpiece of human frailty and inspiration. In my design I attempted to convey the duality of Humbert’s image of perfection. The reality and idealization of his obsession form a pair of wings which take the imagination to soaring heights and abysmal lows. Desire, intellect, sexuality and innocence mix to create an intoxicating cocktail. Love, even in its unorthodox form has the power to elevate and enlighten us.”

Thank you for that, Lyuba! And again, congratulations.

The Lolita Cover Contest has ended and I want to express my heartfelt thanks to everyone who took the plunge and participated. Your efforts made it so intriguing! In all, 105 entrants from 34 countries submitted a total of 155 entries (multiple entries being allowed). After the US and the UK, Poland and India had the most submissions with five each.

This was an extremely difficult exercise. There were interesting submissions on many different levels and it was quite wonderful to simultaneously review them all. In retrospect, however, I would not have limited the contest to one winner. I realized perhaps too late the inevitable arbitrary nature of this exercise and, forced to choose between conceptually different entries of equal merit, I developed my own rules in order to decide between them. My personal bias leans towards simple, elegant, graphically strong designs and typeface is important but remember that I am not a graphic designer.

In judging the submissions I tended to avoid lingerie, lollipops, roses, hearts, lipstick prints, butterflies, heart shaped sunglasses, and overtly sexual poses (as well as the unexpected recurring themes of swings and Rorschach blots) which by now have been indelibly linked to the cultural concept “Lolita” if not the novel itself. It’s important to keep in mind that the novel may be considered a love story, but it’s not Lolita who is in love.  And, of course, well beyond that one can explore the brutality and humor of the novel, the beauty of the prose and the cleverness of the wordplay. This is a tall order for a book cover, and of necessity draconian choices must be made.

I was able to narrow my selection to fifteen or so covers, from which I chose four that were conceptually quite different but all excellent.  Keep in mind that any of these could have been first place covers.

The first prize goes to Lyuba Haleva of Bulgaria for her wonderfully lyrical submission.

Although arguably anachronistic in its imagery and typeface, the use of Lolita (and Annabel?) as Humbert’s wings perfectly communicate the novel’s poetry and Humbert’s high-minded yet deluded pursuit of fantasy and art.  Since I felt this was a crucial component of the novel it ultimately edged out others that leaned towards a darker reading.  

As runners up I chose covers by  Aleksander Bak of Poland, Derek McCalla of the United States, and Egor Krasnoperov of Russia (click on each cover for a larger image).

This reductive exercise by Aleksander Bak is sad, lurid, even funny. The lone unmoored pink scrunchy manages to be a potent symbol: surrounded by black, it’s s a memento mori representing Humbert’s loss of Lolita and the tragedy of the novel in general. Inevitably, of course, it’s also a stand in for an orifice (you decide whose and which one). The tension between the base and the sublime is wonderful and the composition is wonderful.  

Derek McCalla’s image is shocking, almost radical. I see it as a witness to Humbert’s destruction of Lolita’s childhood through narcissistic acts of manipulation. In many ways it’s a grim book (let’s not forget that practically everyone dies). Interestingly, Chris Pritchett, McCalla’s instructor at Virginia Tech used this contest as an exercise for his screenprinting class which is offered through the university’s architecture department and populated by first-year though fifth-year architecture students. I asked Pritchett why he had chosen to use this as an assignment: 

 ”I felt this was a good project for architecture students because as a graphic exercise they are forced to convey a wide range of emotion through one image.”

Egor Krasnoperov cleverly and humorously gives us a triple-entendre, at least the way I see this. First of course, there is the lollipop theme, present in all its banality, but rendered here beautifully and naively; then the circle that censors Lolita’s crotch, and, finally, the hypnotic vortex into which Humbert has fallen and which, quite literally, centers on Lolita’s sexuality. Pretty wonderful for such a minimal image.

John Gall, vice president and art director at Vintage/Anchor Books and designer of the latest cover of Lolita (see samples of his work here), kindly agreed to review the submissions and picked his own top choices. His favorite is by Suzene Ang of Singapore:

 ”It takes a second before you see what is going on. It’s abstract enough to keep it metaphorical, yet literal enough to imply a sense of story. I love the tease of having the type run up the leg. Elegant, with a sense of humor.”

He also liked the Aleksander Bak cover that was one of my top choices:

“For second place I like the simplicity of the hair scrunchy design. Nice double entendre. I worry though, that it might be too much of a contemporary reference.”

Gall made a point a few times of stressing the difficulty of the task:

“This is a tough assignment. So many clichéd images to either avoid or make new. Not an easy task.  I teach a cover design class and wouldn’t give this as an assignment in a million years!”       

I also asked Barbara Bloom to weigh in, an artist whose Nabokov-themed work has involved the use of existing Lolita book covers in addition to designing her own, not only for Lolita, but also much of the Nabokov ouevre :

“As a matter of principle, I rejected all of the: (sucking) lollypop remakes, lurid images of young girls, underwear, heart shaped anythings. I have chosen a few covers not so much for their style of rendering, or excellence in typographic or design strategies. These are covers that seem to have a more complex and psychological reading of the text.”

She selected as her favorite an entry by Lucie Lebaz of the UK (in fact she liked three by Lebaz):

“Like that they form ONE body together. And LOVE the pink triangle.”

Above is Bloom’s own cover. Susan Tallman, in her essay in the artist’s monograph, writes:

“Most remarkable, however, is the absurdly apropos silhouette BB found for the cover of Lolita: the pompous (and paunchy) Nabokovian male at the lectern, the saucy stance of the little girl (the word ‘minx’ seems almost unavoidable) who thrusts her hip at his tendentious fingers. One does wonder what other purpose the image could ever have served.”

Addendum: Bloom also listed Aleksander Bak’s scrunchy cover among her favorites. Since we all liked his fantastic cover he will be awarded a special prize.

You can find all of the entries here: Lolita Submissions

 And a list of all entrants including state and country: Entrants List

Now, shall we make this an annual contest? Let me know…

The contest will end at 11:59pm Friday October 2.