Monday 5 December 2011

Matt Taylor's Le Carre's Update (plus Pelham and Wolpe for walls)

In May I raved about Matt Taylor's wonderful John Le Carre covers for Penguin US. He's produced one more, for January's republication of the classic The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.



And here's the un-texted illustration.


Also! Heroes of this blog David Pelham and Berthold Wolpe have some of their celebrated cover designs for Penguin and Faber respectively available as fancy art prints here. If you have any wall space not obscured by jammed bookshelves, how about filling it with some book covers?

Here are the designs: Wolpe's famous text-based covers for Faber, and Pelham's famous A Clockwork Orange and J. G. Ballard covers.










2 comments:

matthew. said...

It's unfair that the publisher slaps "A George Smiley novel" on the cover in order to capitalize on the upcoming film, when Smiley is the most secondary of characters in the novel. However, I love LeCarre and these reissues are gorgeous. Too bad in Canada we have the neon coloured spines with the black and white photos for covers.

JRSM said...

It does seem a bit cheeky. I really like the way Smiley almost vanishes in some of "his" books.

In Australia we have the UK Penguin Modern Classics versions, which are actually nice in an appropriately gloomy, subdued way, but when you compare them to the Taylor covers, they're totally eclipsed.