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Tag: matt taylor

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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Book Covers of Note, March 2019

It’s almost the first day of spring, the snow and ice have just about melted in Toronto (for now!), and everything is still awful, so it must be time for March’s book covers of note! 


Bangkok Wakes to Rain by Pitchaya Sudbanthad; design by Grace Han (Riverhead / February 2019)


The Bird King by G. Willow Wilson; design by Helen Crawford-White (Grove / March 2019)


The Bold World by Jodie Patterson; design by Jaya Miceli (Ballantine / January 2019)


Boşluktakiler by Tom McCarthy; design by David Drummond (Jaguar / February 2019)

This is the Turkish edition of Men in Space by Tom McCarthy. I like how the composition and colour palette echo the cover of the US edition published by Vintage, designed by John Gall:

It also reminds of the golden leaf cover for ‘True Faith’ by New Order designed by Peter Saville.  


The Cook by Maylis de Kerangal; design by Na Kim (Farrar, Straus & Giroux / March 2019)

(I feel like a Freudian could have a field day with this cover.)


Daisy Jones and The Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid; design by Lauren Wakefield (Hutchinson / March 2019)  

The cover of the US edition published by Ballantine (I couldn’t find an image without the book club sticker… sorry), was designed by Caroline Teagle Johnson. The book is getting a lot of buzz so I’ve seen both versions of the cover a lot online. It’s a pretty striking photo. I’m curious about where it came from… 


Follow This Thread by Henry Eliot; design by Elena Giavaldi (Three Rivers Press / March 2019) 


Good Kids, Bad City by Kyle Swenson; design by Henry Sene Yee (Picador / February 2019)


Halibut on the Moon by David Vann; design by Erin Fitzsimmons (Grove / March 2019)


Heroine by Mindy McGinnis; design by Erin Fitzsimmons (Katherine Tegen Books / March 2019)


I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You by David Chariandy; design by Tree Abraham (Bloomsbury / March 2019)


Lanny by Max Porter; design by Jonny Pelham (Faber & Faber / March 2019)


Midnight by Victoria Shorr; design by Sarah-May Wilkinson (Norton / March 2019)

This uses some very fancy metallic stock that you can’t really appreciate from the image.

The type reminded me a little of the cover of a Faber & Faber collection called Sex & Death from a couple of years ago designed by Luke Bird.


The Municipalists by Seth Fried; design by Matt Taylor (Penguin / March 2019)


Rutting Season by Mandeliene Smith; design by Grace Han (Scribner / February 2019)


Unspeakable by Harriet Shawcross; design by Jamie Keenan (Canongate / March 2019)

And sticking with blue-green covers… 


The Wall by John Lanchester; design by Utku Lomlu (Norton / March 2019)

The cover of the UK edition published by Faber & Faber (featured in January’s post) was designed by Alex Kirby:


When Brooklyn was Queer by Hugh Ryan; design by Rob Grom (St. Martin’s Press / March 2019)

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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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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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