Sex Before the Sexual Revolution

Simon Callow explores life behind closed doors before the pill.

'The book is superb on courtship and premarital sex, which was of course haunted by the universal dread of unmarried pregnancy, and on the elaborate structures and codes of behaviour that governed such matters. Equally absorbing are the criteria for attractiveness. Despite the development through the 1930s of a new body consciousness and a more sexualised public aesthetic, neither beauty nor handsomeness were much cited as reasons for attractiveness: good skin, a fine head of hair, cleanliness, smart clothes were the main draws – that and a sense of essential benevolence in a potential partner. Many of the interviewees had never seen their spouses' naked bodies.'

- Simon Callow, The Guardian

Read the rest of the review here.

Extreme Book Covers

Setting fire to fields, tangling with tarantulas: it's all in a day's work for a book jacket designer.

I used to think book jacket designers were sensitive, aesthetic types whose idea of sustained physical effort was flicking through the pages of Creative Review with one hand while lifting an espresso to their lips with the other. But I appear to have got things totally wrong.

I recently stumbled over this blog on the Random House website, which reveals that, in fact, today's book jacket creators are an adrenaline-seeking bunch likely to be as au fait with dangerous implements as they are with an Apple Mac.

That zig-zaggy line on the front of Nick Harkaway's The Gone-Away World, which makes the book look as though it has been rudely torn in half (echoing the motif of the Jorgland Pipe in the novel)? No, not created with a few clicks on Photoshop, but by hacking apart a copy of Mark Twain's diaries with a Stanley knife. Older books have better quality paper so tear better, apparently. Who knew?

The broken violin image for Richard Montanari's forthcoming serial killer thriller The Echo Man? The team took a blowtorch to it. "The blowtorch is the secret weapon in design," say the Windmill designers, sounding like some kind of book-world Heston Blumenthals. "This broken violin instantly looks more sinister once it's been burnt."

And there's more. Deputy art director Glenn O'Neill tells me that the original jacket concept for Robert Harris's Cicero novel, Lustrum, was to feature an image of a raging fire. Not content with plucking any old flame image from a picture library, however, the team set a field in Gloucestershire on fire. (No, it wasn't arson – they had the farm owner's permission). "We created a big bonfire from old crates and torched it," says Glenn. "It was pretty epic. But in the end we went for something a bit more literary – we're still trying to find a book to put the [original] image on."

For the new Kathy Reichs novel, Spider Bones, the jacket clearly needed to feature some spiders and – um – some bones. The bones were straightforward – ordered from America (apparently the place to go if you want to pick some up yourselves) but the team also decided to obtain live-and-kicking spiders from tarantula specialists Simply Spiders (and whoever guessed that was a gap in the market?)

The company originally delivered some "false black widows", presumably less lethal than the real thing. Simply Spiders sent them live through the post, in little film canisters, with flies tucked inside like a packed lunch. "They told us they had the right temperament for a photoshoot and would just sit back and pose, but actually they shot across the studio floor," says Glenn. In the end a more amenable specimen was chosen for a few close-ups – and no spiders were harmed in the making of this cover, Glenn assures me.
So there you go. The spirit of adventure is alive and well among publishers' designers, who will go to any length to get the right jacket image. The look of a book is "all in the execution", Glenn explains. I'm worried that could mean the guillotine.

- Benedicte Page, The Guardian

Win some pretty stuff!

Angie from Lucky Pony is giving away some need-to-have-now trinkets for Christmas, one of which Pulp Books has sponsored.

Go visit! Maybe you'll win and make us proud.

Notable Crime Books of 2010

Choosing books for picky friends can be humbling. There’s always one smarty-pants who has read not only the gift book but everything else in the author’s oeuvre. Another recipient refuses to consider any story about “some stupid girl.” And how about that ingrate who scorns the genre altogether, claiming to have developed more mature tastes? I’m speaking, of course, about buying books for children. Picking crime novels for grown-ups is a breeze. 

- Marilyn Stasio, New York Times. Illustration by Christoph Niewmann.

Read the rest of the article here.

Vote for Paige Nick's charity blogging and the Bookery could win R20K.

Don't think, just do it!

Vote here.

The Bookery strive to help children get books.

“We want stocked, serviced libraries in every single school in South Africa.” These are the words of Richard Conyngham, the co-ordinator of The Bookery.
Interviewed on the premises of The Bookery, Conyngham, a former UCT student who has also completed an MA at Cambridge, stresses what he means by stocked and serviced libraries.

“We mean that libraries should be stocked with a minimum of three books per learner per school. By serviced we mean that the libraries must be co-ordinated by a trained librarian.”
The Bookery is one branch of Equal Education’s campaign for school libraries. Equal Education (EE), which was founded in 2008, is an organization which strives for quality and equilay in the South African education system.

- Creative Cape Town

Read more about the Bookery here.

Books of the year

Jonathan Franzen's family epic, a new collection from Seamus Heaney, Philip Larkin's love letters, a memoir centred on tiny Japanese sculptures ... which books most excited our writers this year?

Julian Barnes
Unfit for life, unsure of love, unschooled in sex, but good at washing up: Philip Larkin, in Letters to Monica (Faber), lays out his all-too-self-aware catalogue of reasons for being uncheerful. The reader is made slightly cheerful by the thought of not having had Larkin's life, but very cheerful that poems of such truth, wit and beauty emerged from it.
If Larkin represents native genius in its costive English form, Stephen Sondheim represents the fecund American version: Finishing the Hat (Virgin Books) is not just a book of lyrics (with cut and variant versions) but an exuberance of memories, principles, anecdotes, criticism and self-criticism.
Edmund de Waal's The Hare with Amber Eyes (Chatto & Windus) unexpectedly combines a micro craft-form with macro history to great effect.

William Boyd
Stephen Sondheim, who has just turned 80, is the unrivalled genius in the world of musical theatre with five or six masterworks that have redefined the form. A superb, generous melodist and a lyricist up there with Cole Porter and Noël Coward, Sondheim has now given us Finishing the Hat. His detailed commentary on his wonderful songs is honest, shrewd and fascinating. The ideal fix for Sondheim addicts.
Poetry addicts, meanwhile, should swiftly acquire Oliver Reynolds's latest collection, Hodge (Areté Books) – poems of beautiful precision that reveal their secrets slowly. And Samko Tále's Cemetery Book (Garnett Press) by the Slovak writer Daniela Kapitánová offers us, in a superb translation by Julia Sherwood, one of the strangest and most compelling voices I have come across in years. Muriel Spark meets Russell Hoban. An astonishing, dark and scabrous novel.


- The Guardian. Illustration by Kate Slater.

Read the rest here.

Stray Cat Blues

He’s been a global avatar of wish fulfillment for over four decades and managed to eke more waking hours out of a 24-hour day than perhaps any other creature alive (thanks, Merck cocaine and amphetamines!). As Keith puts it: “For many years I slept, on average, twice a week. This means that I have been conscious for at least three lifetimes.”

You better believe it. This cat put the joie in joie de vivre. As the legendary guitarist for the Rolling Stones, Keith Richards has done more, been more and seen more than you or I will ever dream of, and reading his autobiography, “Life,” should awaken (if you have a pulse and an I.Q. north of 100) a little bit of the rock star in you. 

 - Liz Phair, The New York Times

Read the rest here.

LIFE

by Keith Richards with James Fox

Read an excerpt here.