Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/11/17/the-magnificent-early-age-of-book-covers.html
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Tonight, I will mostly be having nightmares about Mr Sweet Potatoes.
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I admit that one is not so much “gorgeous” as “fascinatingly unsettling”.
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Impressive old book covers of these sort always seems to me to have ~peaked with the illustrations (particularly for the Dunsany works) of Sidney Sime
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Fuck yeah, I bought a Sime book after obsessively combing though fuckyeahvintageillustration.tumblr.com. His fantasy-scapes are fucking great. Heinrich Lefler, Ivan Bilibin and Kay Nielsen are other faves from the Golden Age.
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I love how the publisher relied on the image, not even putting the book’s title on the cover in some cases.
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Beautiful stuff! I hadn’t seen Sime before, but his stuff is very reminiscent of Aubrey Beardsley. Some like this one seem to go beyond reminiscent though:
That was supposed to insert this:
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Well for hardcovers it traditionally tends to be the spine that has the author’s name and the book title. That’s true even today once you take off the dust jacket of most hardcover books. Nowadays they often don’t put anything at all on the cover.
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About that cover (and what lies beneath)…
1899, The Werner Company, Akron, OH, cover artist unknown. An odd compendium of uncredited, seemingly unrelated folksy stories (including one called “Joe the Chimpanzee”). Kudos to develbow for making this junk shop find. The great thing is that the disgruntled “potato man” on the cover is a complete creation of the cover artist. There’s no anthropomorphized potato to be found in the text. “Mr. Sweet Potatoes”, the main character of the title story, is a human; a Chinese milkman. The cover artist either didn’t know or didn’t care, and instead dreamed up this great character, interpreting the book title as he saw fit. I wish there WAS a story about him! All the illustrations inside are more generic, b&w engraving-type images (by, seemingly, a number of different artists). I’ve rarely seen such a weird disjuncture between a book’s cover and its contents.
Another thing; funny that this book was produced in Akron, OH, the birthplace, 70-odd years later, of those legendary spudboys, Devo. They employed a great deal of anthropotato imagery in their work. What’s with Akron and potato people?
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I’ve always liked the cover design of the first edition of James Joyce’s “Ulysses”, which of course came a little later than the other titles in the article:
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Appropriately, this one is H.E. Roscoe’s “Spectrum Analysis”. (The author is apparently Beatrix Potter’s uncle) Anyone know what that’s the spectrum of?
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A plasma of bunnies?
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I’m getting flashbacks to the Late 20th Century Comicbook “Cover Enhancement” Wars; gate-fold, foil-embossed, die-cut, partially-waxed, holographic, limited-edition.
It looks like a spectral signature of a star, probably the Sun. The colors are nice, but the important parts are the black lines which are absorption bands, where the light at certain frequencies from the star gets absorbed by gasses in its atmosphere, thereby showing the chemical composition of the star.
These pages describe it with some nice pictures:
The book is a series of his lectures on the topic from the 1860s.
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Yes, this is common knowledge, but it pretty clearly isn’t the sun:
The cover doesn’t have any lines in the green/cyan range.
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