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Tag: john le carre

Matt Taylor’s le Carré Illustrations

I’m obviously on a bit of a John le Carré kick at the moment as I am currently reading his latest book Agent Running in the Field1. The cover features art by Matt Taylor who has illustrated a quite number of le Carré covers for Penguin Random House and art director Paul Buckley over years. I’ve shared a few of them here before, but since I posted David Pearson’s recent redesign of the George Smiley novels, I thought it would be nice to pull Matt’s versions together too. I believe Gregg Kulick had a hand in the design and type.  

Matt has also illustrated the covers for le Carré’s non-Smiley novels too. There’s quite a lot of them!

(Matt’s also did an illustration for The Russia House, but only the audio edition of the book appears to be available from Penguin Random House in the US. In the UK, Penguin uses the same illustration for their cover, although the type is in line with their other Modern Classic editions)

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David Pearson’s Penguin John le Carré

It’s been a while since I did a post of David Pearson series design, so I am delighted to share his brilliant new covers for the Penguin UK editions of John le Carré’s George Smiley novels, available this month. The design is a collaboration with Nick Asbury who wrote the copy for the covers (I talked to Nick to ages ago about his Corpoetics book if you’re interested).

The small type is the lovely looking Gill Sans Nova, recently designed by George Ryan for Monotype as a contemporary digital typeface derived from Eric Gill’s original work. The large type is Stephenson Blake Condensed Sans, which is not available digitally and was pieced together from different sources by David himself. I’m sure it was a total pain in the ass to do, but it’s a pleasing contrast and well worth the effort, I think you’ll agree! Jim Stoddart was the clever AD here.

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Writers & Company: John le Carré


CBC Radio’s Writers & Company have broadcast a brand new interview with John le Carré:

 CBC Writers and Company: John le Carre 2013 mp3

Writers & Company

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Something for the Weekend

Making Bird Noises — Dwight Garner profiles novelist John Le Carré, for the New York Times:

In his lesser books, le Carré’s prose can thin out perilously, but at his best, he’s among the finest writers alive. There’s a reason Philip Roth has called “A Perfect Spy,” le Carré’s 1986 autobiographical work of fiction, “the best English novel since the war.” The Times of London ranked him 22nd on a list of the 50 greatest writers since 1945. His books are less about espionage than they are about human frailty and desire; they’re about how we are, all of us, spies of a sort.

See also: Mark Lawson reviews Le Carré’s latest, A Delicate Truth, for The Guardian.

(Pictured above: the cover to the US edition, illustrated by Matt Taylor)

And while we’re at it… James Campbell reviews Kurt Vonnegut: Letters edited by Dan Wakefield, which has just been released in the UK:

[Anatole] Broyard was scarcely wrong to say that Vonnegut’s reputation suffered a blow with each new book; he is a classic example of a writer whose renown endures through the success of a single novel. Yet the tone was ever recognisable, and even lesser-known books – SlapstickDeadeye DickHocus Pocus – sold well. In response to a question from a reader in 1991 about the relationship of his style to “jazz and comedians”, he replied: “I don’t think about it much, but now that you’ve asked, it seems right to say that my writing is of a piece with nightclub exhibitionism … lower class, intuitive, moody, and anxious to hold the attention of a potentially hostile audience.”

New England — Alan Moore talks to Pádraig Ó Méalóid about League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Nemo: Heart of Ice, his unfinished novel Jerusalem, and his Lovecraftian work-in-progress Providence:

with Providence, what I am doing is, I’m looking as much at American society in 1919 as I am looking at Lovecraft, in terms of my research, and I am connecting up Lovecraft’s themes, and Lovecraft’s personality, to a certain degree, with the tensions that were then incredibly evident in American society… It’s starting from – if Lovecraft’s characters, if Lovecraft’s monsters, if Lovecraft’s locales actually existed in A Real World, then what would they really be like, and what would the world be like?

In part two of the interview, Moore discusses his recent film projects and other work.

Who? — Steven Heller talks to Unit Editions Adrian Shaugnessy about Jurriaan Schrofer (1926-90): Restless Typographer at Imprint. It’s a rather short interview, but there are some lovely illustrations!

Any finally…

Still my favourite thing on the internet this week:

Phillip Marsden’s one-page comic strip ‘Hipster Hairdo’ for Off Life #4 (PDF).

 

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More Matt Taylor le Carré

Under Paul Buckley’s art direction at Penguin US, UK-based illustrator Matt Taylor has produced two more stunning John le Carré covers. The type and design is by Gregg Kulick.

You can see the previous covers in the series here, and, according to Matt, there are a couple more on the way. Happy day.

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Monday Miscellany

It is all hands to the pump at The Optimist HQ right now (meetings, deadlines, house maintenance, and vomit-propelled kids), but apologies for the missing links on Friday. Here’s a very quick Monday round-up to make up for it:

Designer Stuart Bache talks to Faceout Books about his John Le Carré covers.

I also talked to Stuart about his designs here.

Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows, chooses five books on the impact of the information age at The Browser.

The Writer’s Job — Tim Parks on writing as a career choice:

Creative writing schools are frequently blamed for a growing standardization and flattening in contemporary narrative. This is unfair. It is the anxiety of the writers about being excluded from their chosen career, together with a shared belief that we know what literature is and can learn how to produce it that encourages people to write similar books. Nobody is actually expecting anything very new. Just new versions of the old. Again and again when reading for review, or doing jury service perhaps for a prize, I come across carefully written novels that “do literature” as it is known. Literary fiction has become a genre like any other, with a certain trajectory, a predictable pay off, and a fairly limited and well-charted body of liberal Western wisdom to purvey. Much rarer is the sort of book… where the writer appears, amazingly, to be working directly from experience and imagination, drawing on his knowledge of past literature only in so far as it offers tools for having life happen on the page.

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Midweek Miscellany

Book Sniffing — Six writers on their book collecting habits, including Gary Shteyngart:

I’m big on sniffing books. The old Soviet ones really have this strong smell, reminding me, for some reason, of tomato soup in a cheap Soviet cafeteria.

Fear of a Blank Canvas — Book designer Chip Kidd interviewed at Azure Magazine:

If I’m designing a book for myself, that’s a very different thing than if I’m designing a book for Murakami – he’s ultimately the boss. For 1Q84, what I’m really trying to do, as pretentious as it sounds, is to create a work of art that services a greater work of art. It’s him. It’s not about me. But at the same time, I want to make something great for him. If I’m designing something for myself, it can be liberating and potentially stifling at the same time. It’s the literary equivalent of being given a blank canvas. And I’m not a great blank canvas kind of guy. I want the canvas filled in, in terms of content, by Murakami, and then I can make it look like something.

See also: Book designers Lauren Duffy, Kimberly Glyder, Henry Sene Yee and David Drummond on the ins-outs of book design at The Book Deal.

The Incommunicability of Difference — David Bellos discusses translation and his new book Is That A Fish In Your Ear? on Talk of the Nation:

For translation to exist, you have to accept the fact that languages are all different and they don’t describe the world in quite the same way. You also have to accept that languages are all the same in that anything you can say in one language can be said in any other. And it seems to me [that the] tension between the incommunicability of difference and … the sharing of a common set of messages and meanings is … human. I mean, we all live in that state, that I am not like you. My experience is not directly commensurable with yours, and yet, for us to get on and to be human and to be in a society, we have to also make the assumption that in another dimension, we’re all the same. We have the same needs, the same fears, the same desires.”

And finally…

James Parker on George Smiley, John le Carré’s literary spy, and why he is the antithesis of James Bond at The Atlantic:

Bureaucratically dowdy, rarely spotted in the field, a dull fucker by both instinct and training, Smiley drops no one-liners, romances no tarot-card readers, roars no speedboats through the Bayou… When John le Carré dies, there will be no pseudo–le Carrés, rotating the clichés of Smileydom through their potboilers. Not only is le Carré more or less inimitable—less imitable, certainly, than Ian Fleming, whose style was essentially that of a school bully with a typewriter—but Smiley himself is too elusive a creature to be captured by any pen other than that of his creator.

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Midweek Miscellany

Creative Review takes  a look at the cover designs for the books shortlisted for the Booker Prize, including this beauty by the mighty Jon Gray for Jamrach’s Menagerie by Carol Birch.

Let’s Get Critical — Long-form cultural criticism, essays and reviews, curated by architecture and design critic Alexandra Lange.

Never Fashionable, Always in Style — Costume designer Jacqueline Durran on tailored suits worn by the spies in the film adaptation of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, for The Guardian:

“I thought that lots of these middle-aged men had bought suits 10 or 15 years ago and stuck with them,” she says. “I would look at a character and try to work out where they had bought their suit.”

She decided that everything in the film could have been bought from shops within half a mile of Piccadilly in London: “Things from Savile Row, Jermyn Street, Fortnum & Mason, Burlington Arcade – one of those upper-middle-class shops that are never fashionable but always do a certain kind of clothing.”

(Related: The real-life spies of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy)

Also in The Guardian… Michael Prodger reviews Nikolaus Pevsner: The Life by Susie Harries:

Whereas art history in Germany was a creditable discipline of long standing, in England it was a new subject – class-ridden, based on connoisseurship and, he thought, “at its worst, an activity a bit like stamp collecting”. It was this fustian world that Pevsner and other émigrés such as Ernst Gombrich, Rudolf Wittkower and Edgar Wind were to transform.

Pevsner had a hard time fitting in, not least because he was a modernist, something the British found temperamentally uncongenial. For Pevsner, though, it represented an antidote to art for art’s sake and he saw it as an appropriate expression of the spirit of the age. Art, he believed, should be functional and of service, and architecture was the most important of the arts because it was the most closely connected with human life.

And finally…

Pathos and Pantomime — Peter Ackroyd choose five books about London:

London has always had the reputation of being a city of contrast, where pathos and pantomime meet. That is true in the work of Charles Dickens and Charlie Chaplin, for example. And it is certainly true in the work of [William] Blake. So you can see patterns of the London imagination at work. It is a world of theatre. The grand theatre of the human spirit which London most readily represents, and there is scenic detail and movement and passion and the action of crowds. It is quite different from other cities.

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Le Carré | Matt Taylor

Not long ago, I posted Stuart Bache’s wonderfully cinematic John le Carré covers for Sceptre in the UK. Now (as mentioned earlier today) John le Carré’s American publisher Penguin have reissued new editions of his books with amazing illustrations by Brighton-based illustrator Matt Taylor and design by Gregg Kulick and Paul Buckley. Mr Buckley art directed series.

Special thanks to Paul Buckley and Andrew Lau at Penguin US for providing the cover images, and to James at Caustic Cover Critic for bringing them to my attention.

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Midweek Miscellany

Comic Unease — Cartoonist Emily Carroll talks about comics, fairy tales, dreams, and her story His Face All Red with The Comics Journal:

I think a lot of fairy tales have that sort of unease built into them, just because they introduce so many elements that they never explain, and use fairy tale logic—the kind that isn’t really logic at all, but has that matter-of-fact feel to it anyway—and the reader just has to roll with it.

Dark Matter — Author Lev Grossman on fan fiction for Time Magazine:

Fan fiction is what literature might look like if it were reinvented from scratch after a nuclear apocalypse by a band of brilliant pop-culture junkies trapped in a sealed bunker. They don’t do it for money. That’s not what it’s about. The writers write it and put it up online just for the satisfaction. They’re fans, but they’re not silent, couchbound consumers of media. The culture talks to them, and they talk back to the culture in its own language. Right now fan fiction is still the cultural equivalent of dark matter: it’s largely invisible to the mainstream, but at the same time, it’s unbelievably massive.

Grossman’s new novel The Magician King (the sequel to his 2009 novel The Magicians) is published next month.

Dysfunctional Spies — Author John Le Carré reflects on his time in MI6:

The creation of George Smiley, the retired spy recalled to hunt for… a high-ranking mole in Tinker, Tailor, was extremely personal. I borrowed elements of people I admired and invested them in this mythical character. I’m such a fluent, specious person now, but I was an extremely awkward fellow in those days. I also gave Smiley my social ineptitude, my lack of self-respect and my fumblings in love.

Because I came from a dysfunctional background, I made home the most dangerous place for Smiley. Home is where he lets himself in cautiously. Home is where he sees the shadow of his adulterous wife in the window and wonders who she’s with.

Pictured above is Matt Taylor’s incredible illustration for a new Penguin US edition of Le Carré’s novel Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy — more of that wonderful stuff to come — and a new film adaptation of the book, starring Gary Oldman as Smiley, is being released later this year:

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Something for the Weekend

An interview with Toronto based lettering designer Ian Brignell at The Case and Point:

I’m influenced by just about everything, but I especially like the work that was done on packages from the 19th and early 20th century. I also enjoy amateur hand-lettered signs, since they often contain very quirky and original details that I would never think of. I have to mention that during college I saw a book with some examples of Herb Lubalin’s lettering work, and this was one of the moments that really made me want to pursue lettering for a living.

All Things Considered — An interview with Nate Burgos about his Rare Book Feast video project:

I enjoy writing about anyone and anything which interest me on my design-related blog, an all-people-and-things-considered destination. Then there’s tweeting, lots of it. Twitter is newsprint. Designer Lorraine Wild said, “You have to be interested in culture to design for it.”

Dull But DurableThe Guardian‘s Justin McGuirk on Soviet design and a new book on the subject called Made in Russia by Michael Idov:

There were some genuinely classic designs… The Lomo camera, with its super-saturated film, is still hugely popular in an otherwise digital world. The avos shopping bag, essentially a string vest with handles, was ubiquitous and remains far preferable to plastic bags, just as the collapsible portable cup is preferable to millions of plastic and polystyrene ones. The ribbed drinking glass, meanwhile, and the Saturna and Raketa vacuum cleaners, simply lasted for ever. We may mock Soviet design, but there are lessons to heed from it. Durability, for one. In our disposable culture, rapid replacement cycles have almost inured us to the idea that nothing lasts. Such is the price, apparently, of free enterprise and consumer choice.

Secretly Young — John le Carré’s keynote speech at the Think German Conference earlier this month (via Bookslut):

I was young when I started writing about George Smiley — twenty-eight — and Smiley was already old, a proxy father. But Smiley’s journey through the novel, despite his age, is the journey of a young man’s self-discovery. Underneath his inconspicuous exterior, he is a sensitive man still growing up, still looking for answers, and for the experience that delivers them.

In short: he is secretly young.

And Smiley’s private journey — from this first novel, right through to his last — for me at least, with the advantage of hindsight and no longer the responsibility of writing about him — is a single Bildungsroman that leads him through disappointments, mistaken loves, failures and occasional successes, to some kind of ultimate maturity: that is to say, to the point when he discovers that the object of his life’s search is neither the absolute enemy of his imagination, nor the absolute answer to his quest.

See also: Tom McCarthy, talks about his novels Remainder and C, and his life in Prague and Berlin before becoming a published writer, at The Days of Yore:

Your book is being held up as, you know, avant-garde, or as an anti-novel, or as anti-realist… None of these seem quite right. My understanding of the avant-garde is as a historical thing, it had a moment and it has an implication for now, but it’s almost like saying, “Are you leading the French revolution?” “No!” [Laughs.] If you pay too much attention, then when you sit down to write you’ve been primed to think: “Okay, so I’m being avant-garde; how do I be avant-garde?”

I don’t know exactly where I’m going next, but I don’t think it’ll be anything that blatantly looks either avant-garde or not avant-garde or realist or not realist.

And finally, seeing as it’s Friday…

A Pixaresque animated homage to the late Dave Stevens to mark the 20th anniversary of the film adaptation of his comic The Rocketeer:

(via Robot 6)

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Le Carré | Stuart Bache

I’m a big fan John Le Carré’s spy stories, so I was really pleased to see these wonderfully stark redesigns for Sceptre by British designer Stuart Bache, who I interviewed last year about his cover designs for the Canongate editions of Gil Scott-Heron.

You can see all 14 covers in the series here.

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