The Book Tower
debut novel coming soon

Two vastly different Penguin covers:

H.G.Wells, The Island of Dr Moreau. Penguin first edition, 1946 (no. 57).

From my phase of collecting Penguin firsts, and I’m sure I also have a copy of The Time Machine somewhere. The white on orange stripe is still instantly recognisable, but does it tell us anything about the book? Admittedly, in my Penguin collecting I cared little for the authors in question and only wanted to fill the gaps in the numbers 1-200.

How many of those early Penguins titles do we recognise today? These are the first ten of their paperbacks published:

1. Ariel by Andre Maurois
2. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
3. Poet’s Pub by Eric Linklater
4. Madame Claire by Susan Ertz
5. The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club by Dorothy L. Sayers
6. The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie
7. Twenty-Five by Beverley Nichols
8. William by E.H.Young
9. Gone to Earth by Mary Webb
10. Carnival by Compton Mackenzie

I can’t name all of the authors or all of the titles, and I must confess I’ve read none of them.

In the 1960s Penguin began to get a little more daring. It was the cover of this book that inspired me to want to read it aged 14. Although the 60s were long gone by then, I still found something adult, daring, even promiscuous in this cover.

Edna O’Brien, Girls in Their Married Bliss. Penguin (1967).

The colourful text is hard to read, but it’s selling the book with:

Tearful Kate bored with her grey husband in their grey stone house is driven to indescretions she can hardly handle without Dava’s help. But Dava has her own hands full with the passions of her rich and vulgar builder…

Hmmm…the Penguin blurb is selling Girls in Their Married Bliss to me all over again…

Comment

Here’s another bookish meme that’s been doing the rounds. I saw it first at Edward Champion’s Return of the Reluctant and at Myrtias.

Look at the list of books below. Bold the ones you’ve read, italicize the ones you want to read, cross out the ones you won’t touch with a 10 foot pole, put a cross (+) in front of the ones on your book shelf, and asterisk (*) the ones you’ve never heard of.

1. + The Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown)
2. + Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
3. + To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
4. Gone With The Wind (Margaret Mitchell)
5. The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (Tolkien)
6. The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (Tolkien)
7. The Lord of the Rings: Two Towers (Tolkien)
8. Anne of Green Gables (L.M. Montgomery)
9. Outlander (Diana Gabaldon)
10. A Fine Balance (Rohinton Mistry)
11. + Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Rowling)
12. Angels and Demons (Dan Brown)
13. + Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Rowling)
14. A Prayer for Owen Meany (John Irving)
15. + Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden) (abandoned)
16. + Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (Rowling)
17. *Fall on Your Knees (Ann-Marie MacDonald)
18. The Stand (Stephen King)
19. + Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Rowling)
20. +Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)
21. The Hobbit (Tolkien)
22. + The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger)
23. Little Women (Louisa May Alcott)
24. + The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold)
25. + Life of Pi (Yann Martel)
26. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
27. Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte)
28. The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (C. S. Lewis)
29. East of Eden (John Steinbeck)
30. Tuesdays with Morrie (Mitch Albom)
31. Dune (Frank Herbert)
32. The Notebook (Nicholas Sparks)
33. *Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand)
34. + 1984 (Orwell)
35. The Mists of Avalon (Marion Zimmer Bradley)
36. The Pillars of the Earth (Ken Follett)
37. The Power of One (Bryce Courtenay)
38. I Know This Much is True (Wally Lamb)
39. The Red Tent (Anita Diamant)
40. The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho)
41. The Clan of the Cave Bear (Jean M. Auel)
42. + The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini) (abandoned, but I’ll try again)
43. Confessions of a Shopaholic (Sophie Kinsella)
44. The Five People You Meet In Heaven (Mitch Albom) (why so much Mitch Alborn?)
45. + Bible
46. + Anna Karenina (Tolstoy)
47. The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas)
48. + Angela’s Ashes (Frank McCourt) (abandoned)
49. +The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck)
50. She’s Come Undone (Wally Lamb)
51. The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)
52. + A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens) (abandoned)
53. Ender’s Game (Orson Scott Card)
54. + Great Expectations (Dickens)
55. + The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald) (abandoned)
56. The Stone Angel (Margaret Laurence)
57. + Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Rowling)
58. The Thorn Birds (Colleen McCullough)
59. + The Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Atwood)
60. + The Time Traveller’s Wife (Audrew Niffenegger)
61. + Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
62. The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand)
63. + War and Peace (Tolstoy) (abandoned)
64. Interview With The Vampire (Anne Rice)
65. Fifth Business (Robertson Davis)
66. One Hundred Years Of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
67. The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants (Ann Brashares)
68. + Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)
69. +Les Miserables (Hugo) (abandoned)
70. The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)
71. + Bridget Jones’ Diary (Fielding)
72. Love in the Time of Cholera (Marquez)
73. Shogun (James Clavell)
74. The English Patient (Michael Ondaatje)
75. The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett)
76. The Summer Tree (Guy Gavriel Kay)
77. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Betty Smith)
78. The World According To Garp (John Irving)
79. The Diviners (Margaret Laurence)
80. Charlotte’s Web (E.B. White)
81. Not Wanted On The Voyage (Timothy Findley)
82. Of Mice And Men (Steinbeck)
83. + Rebecca (Daphne DuMaurier)
84. *Wizard’s First Rule (Terry Goodkind)
85. + Emma (Jane Austen)
86. Watership Down (Richard Adams)
87. + Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
88. The Stone Diaries (Carol Shields)
89. Blindness (Jose Saramago)
90. Kane and Abel (Jeffrey Archer)
91. In The Skin Of A Lion (Ondaatje)
92. + Lord of the Flies (Golding)
93. The Good Earth (Pearl S. Buck)
94. The Secret Life of Bees (Sue Monk Kidd)
95. The Bourne Identity (Robert Ludlum)
96. The Outsiders (S.E. Hinton)
97. *White Oleander (Janet Fitch)
98. A Woman of Substance (Barbara Taylor Bradford)
99. The Celestine Prophecy (James Redfield)
100. +Ulysses (James Joyce) (abandoned)

I’d love to know where this list originally came from. Why include all of the Harry Potter books, two Dan Browns and two Ondaatjes? Maybe I’m just cross because I haven’t been able to put many titles in bold although Austen, Atwood and Robertson Davies are authors who have crossed my radar.

Comments [4]

This is the first in an occasional series. I’ve been sorting through some old books recently and have rediscovered what are, in my opinion, some examples of classic and memorable cover designs.

The Tenant by Roland Topor. W.H.Allen London (1966). Jacket design by Ron Clark.

Topor’s novel tells the story of a man called Trelkovsky, who rents a flat in Paris. He slowly goes mad, haunted by the previous tenant of his rooms who jumped to their death from the window, and by the fellow lodgers in his apartment block, who he is convinced are out to get him. My first exposure to The Tenant was via Roman Polanski’s 1976 film. It’s weird, disturbing, has some very dark humour that you’d expect from Polanski and, in my opinion, is something of a forgotten classic. No doubt I bought the novel on the strength of the film, wanting to endure Trelkovsky’s torment first hand.

I love this cover because the artwork conveys to me exactly Trelkovsky’s despair. You can also see the hint of the beckoning open window behind him. It also hints at exactly what this book is about; if my short synopsis has put you off, the cover of the book undoubtedly will also.

I’ve owned a copy of this for so long that I can’t remember where it came from. Stamped on the inside back cover is City of London Wood St. Police Library. Pencilled on the inside front cover is 20p, although I’ve just seen a copy of this for sale on Amazon for $30. It’s the British first edition, although my copy is a little worse for wear.

Often I forget what my books look like; trapped for years in a bookcase they only make their spines visible. I’ve moved house many times in the past 20 years; the cover of The Tenant revealing itself in snatches as it is packed into a box where I’ve often wondered if, unlike Trelkovsky, I was making the right move.

Comment

In a couple of his recent posts, Simon over at Inside Books has started me thinking about the books I studied whilst at school. Were they good choices? Did I benefit from them?

O Level Texts

From memory, these are the texts forced onto me aged 14-16:

• Travesties by Tom Stoppard
• The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde
• Gullivers Travels by Jonathan Swift
• The poetry of Edward Thomas
• The Nun’s Priest’s Tale by Chaucer
• The Taming of the Shrew by Shakespeare

Stoppard is always a syllabus favourite, from this level right up until graduate. It’s his cleverness that excites the exam question setter. Tricks with words and plot, time and memory, Travesites – in its archness – tied in neatly with Wilde as a man with a failing memory (who once acted in a production of Earnest ) finds his reality slipping in and out of Wilde’s drama. Clever stuff. More than two decades on, Tom Stoppard still continues to irritate me.

I really enjoyed Shakepeare because you can discuss him endlessly but he’s not obviously trying to be clever. It’s achievable to argue from both sides of an argument because his plays are so rich.

A Level Texts

Aged 16-17, although bearing in mind I made my own choice to stay on at school:

• Hamlet and Measure for Measure by Shakespeare
• The Spire by William Golding
• Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
• The White Devil by John Webster
• The Millers Tale by Chaucer
• Professional Foul by Tom Stoppard
• Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy

More Stoppard. Why not Pinter, Orton or even Arnold Wesker?

Shakespeare and Beckett had the most effect on me here. Shakespeare for the same reasons as above. Beckett was just strange, none of us had ever encountered anything like this before. I’ve realised since that – oddly – the closest thing to it we did know was Shakespeare. Scenes from The Tempest are very pre-Beckett Beckett, although we didn’t know that at the time. Anyway, we were excited by Waiting for Godot. The humour, depth and, as I’ve said, strangeness of the play.

Golding – again a favourite of question setters. The Spire provided perfect examples of symbolism that you could discuss until you’re blue in the face. Unfortunately it’s a boring novel.

Chaucer? Well, you just get used to him. When I returned to my books as a mature student years later he was there waiting for me. As were Shakespeare, Hardy and Beckett. And – dammit – Stoppard.

Comment

Very slowly, I’m getting ready for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. It’s taking me a while to get enthusiastic, but I’m sure I’ll be jumping around in my wizard’s hat in time for July 21st.

I saw something in the paper this weekend about William Hill’s odds for the book’s grand finale. It’s no secret that Harry meets his maker in Rowling’s final instalment of the series. I can’t find the paper now; I’ve either put it with the recycling or my wife has it by the bed upstairs. I daren’t wake her by rustling around up there. But I’m interested, do many people really bother betting on a Harry Potter book? After much frantic searching I’ve found what I believe to be the odds on who kills Harry:

• 2/1 Lord Voldemort
• 5/2 Professor Snape
• 6/1 Draco Malfroy
• 6/1 Ron Weasley
• 6/1 Harry Potter

And the less likely:

• 12/1 Neville Longbottom
• 14/1 Lucius Malfroy
• 14/1 Hermione Granger
• 20/1 Proffessor Slughorn
• 25/1 Hagrid
• 25/1 Cornelius Fudge
• 33/1 Arthur Weasley
• 33/1 Dawlish
• 40/1 Professor McGonagall
• 50/1 Lupin
• 50/1 Mr Filch
• 50/1 Dobby
• 100/1 Ginny Weasley
• 100/1 Tonks
• 100/1 Fred/George Weasly
• 100/1 Uncle Vernon
• Other On Request

The desperate:

If Harry Potter survives all bets will be void and stake money will be returned -You cannot lose!
Other Potty Potter Punts Hills Have Accepted:

• Ron and Hermione To Marry with Harry As Best Man-8/1
• Ron and Hermione to have a child 16/1 ….called Harry 25/1
• Ron to cause the demise of Draco Malfroy in a duel-20/1
• Harry Potter to catch the snitch in a Quidditch world cup-33/1

Has the world gone crazy? Why not just make up the most far fetched scenario you can think of? There’s no mention of Dumbledore or Sirius Black coming back from the dead although, as my two favourite characters from the series, I’d love to see them again.

Interesting that William Hill will return your money if Harry survives, which – in a way – is a sort of tribute to Rowling. The fact that he will die, and it’s such a certainty that William Hill are betting on it, isn’t what’s exciting or interesting. It’s how.

To be perfectly honest, I am a big fan. I always find one or two fantastic sequences in a Harry Potter book. At least. In the last instalment, I remember Harry and Dumbledore’s journeys back into the early days of Voldemort particularly effective. And that other journey across the lake…

Talking about it though, I’m getting excited again. Where’s my cape and wand..?

Comments [3]