Laila Lalami

John Mullan writes about the history of book covers, what they communicate, and how they are designed.

A revolution in publishing, especially of fiction, was heralded by the launching of Penguin Books by Allen Lane in 1935. Penguin expanded the market by producing cheap (though usually high-minded) books and relied on a distinctiveness of design to establish its series’ identity. The first 10 titles sold at sixpence at a time when the cheapest hardbacks cost five times more. The products were simply colour coded: orange for fiction, blue for biography, green for crime. By today’s standards, the early covers were positively austere. Only slowly were a few cautious engravings introduced to illustrate the covers, though Penguin’s American subsidiary was much less restrained. In America, even highbrow paperbacks were designed to be sold in drugstores and airport bookstalls.

If you’re a designer, you might like to check out the Guardian’s book cover competition. They’re looking for new book covers for The Sheltering Sky, The Master and Margarita, The Go-Between, and Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Old Hag offers her thoughts on Kill Bill. Me, I’m still trying to figure out the bleeped name, the three flashing red dots, and how “entropy” can be used to talk about muscle paralysis.

Salam Pax’s cousin thinks that Bush is in for another term.

Arthur Conan Doyle’s daughter is selling six of his manuscripts at Christie’s this week, and the lot includes a novel that draws on one of Conan Doyle’s marriage and a memoir about the Boer war.

The Washington Post has a transcript of a chat with a candid Charles Baxter:

When I first wrote “Saul and Patsy Are Getting Comfortable in Michigan” in 1983 I ended the story with an automobile accident. (It was an amateurish way to end a story–you can’t end a short story with an accident because it never looks accidental; it looks arranged by the writer.) A month or so after the story appeared, a large woman at a Detroit literary soir?e came up to me, grabbed my lapel, and started shaking me. “You have your nerve,” she said, “killing off that nice couple like that.” I said, “They’re not dead!” I suppose she had intimidated me and caused me to see the error of my ways.

Here’s an excerpt from Diane Middlebrook’s book on Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, Portrait of a Marriage.

BusyBusyBusy has the shorter Tom Friedman (“I trusted Bush to remodel my world and all I got was this lousy perpetual war”) and the shorter Fareed Zakaria (“What Friedman said, and I’m not sorry either.”)

The Guardian has an interview with Booker winner DBC Pierre.

from Sam Smith’s article in the October issue of Harper’s:

We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories. And we found more weapons as time went on. I never believed that we’d just tumble over weapons of mass destruction in that country. But for those who said we hadn’t found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they were wrong, we found them. We knew where they were.

Read: The Revision Thing: A history of the Iraq war, told entirely in lies.

The NBAs have been announced. With the added coverage, expect fresh indignation at the medal Stephen King is getting. Actually, check out Moby’s letters section for an ongoing series of rants on that very subject. Here’s a brief overview of the nominees’ works.

He could ski backwards, navigate a midget submarine, and undertake the riskiest parachute jumps.

But that’s pretty much all that Retired Royal Navy Lieutenant Commander Patrick Dalzel-Job, the inspiration for Ian Fleming’s character, had in common with James Bond. Dalzel-Job died yesterday in Scotland.

Don’t hate me, I didn’t vote for him.