Covers Unbound

Jules Verne was one of the nineteenth-century's most popular and bestselling authors. Pierre-Jules Hetzel, Verne's publisher and collaborator, put out his books in various formats. First the stories were serialised in Hetzel's own biweekly Magasin d'Éducation et de récréation (‘Magazine of Education and Recreation’), with accompanying illustrations by the staff artists of Hetzel's company: Édouard Riou (1833-1900), Henri de Montaut (1825-1890), Léon Benett (1839-1916) and Alphonse de Neuville (1835–1885). After this Hetzel, issued one-volume editions in small-format octodecimo (that is: 4 x 6.5 inches) in plain binding and without illustrations. Finally he put out the much more expensive deluxe ‘Cartonnages Dorés et Colorés’ (‘gilded and coloured bindings’) editions. These had ornate gilded covers, included all interior illustrations, and were issued in large format octavo (6 x 9 inches). They were usually published in December for the Christmas and New Year market...

 The premise of Sladek’s satirical SF novel is the ability to record an entire human personality onto reel-to-reel tape, afterwards being able to upload that personality into a new body. The tape is a fleshy pink colour, and it takes four reels to capture a whole person. This is the titular effect, named after the two inventors of the technology, although the jokey double-entendre by which Sladek insinuates ‘mother-fucker’ onto the cover is of a piece with the book itself: less a narrative than a joke, a black-comic satirical voyage through a variously horrible USA, structured as a game of musical chairs. Because the consciousness belonging to the body into which the new consciousness is to be uploaded must in turn be uploaded into a new body, the consciousness of which must be uploaded into another, and so on. The novel satirises 1970s politics—Sladek posits the absurdity of movie-actor Ronald Reagan becoming President, eleven years before that actually happened—society, religion,...

  Before there was cover art there were frontispieces. The actual cover of a book would be plain, either boards or more expensive bindings in leather; but a woodcut or engraving would occupy a whole page opposite the title page—usually to the left as the book is opened (that is: occupying the verso of the previous page, with the title printed on the recto of the next) although sometimes these positions are switched. The word derives etymologically from the Latin frons, ‘forehead’, as if the first illustration of a book is in a sense its brow—in fact the term ‘frontispiece’ was originally applied to architectural embellishment: a pediment or gable over a doorway that included bas-relief design or sculptural addition was in a clearer sense the ‘forehead’ of the building. By the nineteenth-century the word had migrated to books. Here is the frontispiece to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein , the novel Brian Aldiss claims as the first properly science-fictional book. The first edition of ...

  We think of Pulp cover art as concatenations of bright hues: scarlets and purples, green-skinned aliens and yellow skies. And many Pulp covers are indeed styled that way: eye-grabbing riots of composition and colour, coal-tar dyes, expressive, quasi-fauvist colouration. But not all. Here is the cover of the January 1933 Amazing Stories .  The imagee is by Albert Sigmund, sometimes known as Albert Sigmond: a German-born jeweller and artist who had emigrated to New York after the First World War. It's as striking for its restraint in colour, cool shades of blue, as for the bold diagonals of its composition. The rocket ship, tailless, piscine-shaped, its twenty-two square portholes arranged neatly down its fuselage like buttons, flies past two featureless planets. It is superposed upon the larger of the two, yet seems to be passing behind the semi-transparent globe of the other. The curve of the magazine’s name, like a tsuba on a sword, balances the composition: if the spaceshi...