revisionary
by uzwi
The second part of John Coulhart’s look at the packaging of Viriconium is now up at {feuilleton}. Go there & enjoy John’s gorgeous intelligent choices, then come back here & say what you like best. I could eat them all with a mug of tea, but I’m telling you now that for me it has to be Detail from the Red Flow, by Clive Hicks-Jenkins. Along with the simple design qualities of the faux-Penguin cover, it seems to have everything I asked for yesterday. I spent much of my time until the late 80s in rage & misery at how deliberately Viriconium seemed to be mispackaged, as if the text were being punished for going against the grain. John’s articles have reminded me how unpleasant that felt (I think the low point was the Timescape package, including the retitle, for In Viriconium) but also to what degree, given the improved covers of recent years, I’ve become reconciled to all of it. He also shows what possibilities might open up as f/sf covering policies broaden.
the m john harrison blog 
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As you say, all very fine choices. The Jantar Mantar photo in particular is a very arresting image. I love Ian Miller’s stuff but I feel that using one of his images for the cover moves Viriconium back into its history rather than forwards into a broader reading public.
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Well for me its ‘Red Flow’ with the horse and ‘Man in a Crowd’ which looks to contain all the poetry of a typical Viriconium event/moment…I know what you mean regarding covers though… I have a couple of old versions of the Pastel City. I agree with your views. This could be a new and welcome departure…
Oh, oh, oh, some lovely stuff here.
Love Red Flow but it echoes Guernica a little too clearly for me, and that crowds out the otherness of Viriconium too much to my mind.
I also love Ian’s Beetle Helm (black on gold version).
But in the end it has to be The Friends Gather. So powerful. So wonderfully strange. And yes, dark.
Ditto on the Ian Miller, despite the acknowledging the reasons for the appreciation of his work yesterday; the Clarke sort of takes you out of the folk-ish frying pan into the steampunk fire. I think either Detail picture would be a strong choice (but also like the idea of Ernst, not least on account of this post in February: https://ambientehotel.wordpress.com/2012/02/23/whatever-dances-inside-us/)
Blimey, Clive Hicks-Jenkins is here! Had never come across your art before Mr Hicks-Jenkins. It is stunning.
Only my teachers used to call me Mr Hicks-Jenkins, and usually with disapproval. Please call me Clive. And thank you, Simon. I’m enormously obliged to John Coulhart for having selected my work for inclusion, and also for making such elegant covers from the drawings.
Clive, so nice to see you here. Could you leave us a direct link to some more of your work with the Mari ?
Zali: the Jantar Mantar is quite disturbingly Viriconium. Mike M: I would take L’Ange du Foyer any day–I mean, rob it from a gallery & keep it in my attic. It sums up everything. Simon: I would be hard put, in the end, to choose between Clive’s paintings (I especially like that recent Penguin Classics typeface too).
UZWI, here’s the link:
http://clivehicksjenkins.wordpress.com/category/mari-lwyd/
You’ll have to scroll through a couple of personal posts to get to the meat and potatoes, but most of the series is there.
Thanks Clive. The photos, & the history of your relationship with the Mari, are as powerful & affecting as the pictures themselves.
Well, first a disclaimer: I haven’t read the Viriconium sequence. I am here because I recently discovered Light and Nova Swing, and loved them with a passion. As a result, I have ordered Viriconium, but with slight trepidation, as I have previously failed to enjoy (here comes the heresy) both Peake and Moorcock. But from a purely design point of view, I must say that all of those ‘new’ covers are very nice indeed. Then again, the 70s versions tweaked my SF nostalgia nerve in an amusingly enjoyable way, too.
Clive,
Very much enjoyed the story behind the link also. I shall be losing some hours with your pictures and your blog.
Love it when a new door opens.
Hi Mike Mooney. I’m delighted you got on so well with Light & Nova Swing; I hope you’ll like Empty Space as much, & that you can find something to enjoy in Viriconium too. Really, Moorcock & Peake are, like Vance, a bit of an obvious canard; they’re the easy assumption. By the end–& it has to be read to the end–Viriconium bears no relationship to anything but itself. That was the point of writing for all those years: to make the stuff its own best lens.
The Friends Gather. Fantastic.
These are all brilliant choices, the Hicks-Jenkins particularly striking. But if I could have my druthers, I’d go for a simple black-and-white photograph of a mirror in the toilet of a café in Halifax.
Hi Timothy J Jarvis: I think this suggestion, like Jayaprakash’s, “I’ve always thought Viriconium should somehow have a funhouse mirror you can hold up to your own city, but with the caption ‘This is not Viriconium either’,” should go in a separate category.
The Friends Gather seems to be gathering friends here.
Lovely Clivean covers! Very dramatic. Being a fan of Clive on jackets, I can always be counted on to like those, though it is somehow hard to accept that his big Mari Lwyd pieces could be reduced in scale. I also like what Clive calls the “poisonously elegant gold and black” jackets.
Hi uzwi, I see what you mean, and I guess the sequence needs something less portentous – a visual analogue of its hollowing out of genre tropes. Maybe this is why the Ernst image – which perhaps has a wry engagement with pulpy illustration – works, where, say, a Bacon wouldn’t. John Coulthart’s own proposal, the tarot cards, would also do this powerfully, I think.
What are your favourite of the existing covers of your books?
I’d go with either of Clive’s pieces, or the Ernst; they’re all gorgeous.
Timothy: I only meant that yours & Jayaprakash’s are concepts that play to the book in words rather than as visuals.
Among my own favourites are: Chris Yates’ cover for my first novel, The Committed Men (Hutchinson, 1971), Ian Miller’s cover for The Ice Monkey (Unwin paperbacks, 1988), Dave McKean’s fabulous image for The Course of the Heart (Gollancz, 1992), Gary Day-Ellison, Signs of Life (Gollancz, 1997), Travel Arrangements (Flamingo paperback, 2001), David Lloyd’s powerful imagery for Things That Never Happen & The Course of the Heart (Night Shade, 2003, 2004), & the covers of the Bantam Spectra editions of Light & Nova Swing. Travel Arrangements & The Course of the Heart have generated some excellent Spanish language covers too.
But my all time favourite is still Miller’s Viriconium for Unwin paperback, 1988.
Just spent a very enjoyable 45 minutes reading both articles…the Chris Foss comment brought back vivid but long forgotten memories of reading SF in my childhood in the 70s and many times finishing the book and thinking “That spaceship on the cover wasn’t in the story! There weren’t ANY spaceships in the story!”
That Dave McKean cover is extraordinary – like a rebus, plays to the book both in words and as visuals. Perhaps the covers that try to render scenes from the books fail not just because they don’t reflect the complex and polymorphous contents, but also because the artists make the mistake of thinking the prose gestures at some ‘real’, where in fact it stays text, wounds us as language, not symbol? My interpretation may be totally off the mark, but what I take from The Course of the Heart is the idea you can’t make a world from words, and that, even if you could, it wouldn’t offer any consolation.
My favorites are the black on gold background ‘Beetle Helm’ with the ‘Hive Assault’ detail a very close second.
The Jantar Maipur photo leaves me with an impression of a nonfiction book despite its dystopian feel. If it were offset or hued to make it seem more surreal, it would easily be my favorite.
Realized something when designing We Did Porn (they had to listen to me, it was in my contract) basically, we expect good books to have boring covers. Paradise Lost? Complete Shakespeare? These covers will suck. Curse of the Martian Blood Fiend ? That cover will be amazing.
The best actual image is the first Ian Miller one. Hands fucking down. But it’s too good. If the publisher is trying too hard to do a cover we suspect the book can’t hold its own. Especially if it’s anywhere near the SF shelf.
The Max Ernst one is probably the best bet then, with Jantar Mantar a runner up. Yes, good, but lazy enough as choices that they suggest the book is so well known to everyone but the reader that it sells itself.
I think the metallic ink covers are a bad job, putting it in the Fashionable Lit Goth territory that will be old hat very soon if it isn’t already.
All of them are great, but The Man in the Crowd and Clive’s drawings are my favorites.