Just a quick post here in response to a couple of things. First, I was sad to learn that Ronald Searle had died. For a look at his excellent and wide array of book cover designs, please see here, with follow-ups here and here.






Then there was the 100th anniversary of the birth of Charles Addams, which Google celebrated on the search home page, and which sent a startling number of visitors to this collection of his book covers.





I'll be raising a glass to the memory of these two great, bleak, scabrous cartoonists.

I love the artwork of Ronald Searle, and to see why, have a look at this big post from 2008, full of his many, many book covers. Here are three covers that I didn't know of, though, tracked down by the Perpetua Ronald Searle Tribute blog. In keeping with other recent posts here, they're for the Editions Folio imprint of French publisher Gallimard, and were done in the 1970s.

In the comments to this post, talented designer Ingrid Paulson says "I think you've stumbled on a cover meme. Sometimes I'll talk with other book designers in Canada and we'll look back on a season's worth of jackets and say, 'Well, that was a blue season,' or, 'Look at the number of cut-off heads.' Different publishers (even different genres), same visual conclusion. A cover meme. With the internet, I think cover memes are going international."

Cover memes is such a useful phrase for describing this weird confluence of images, where a number of books designed by different people all end up using similar images on their covers (as distinct from when they all use exactly the same image on their covers) that I'm going to steal it, use it, and probably beat it to death.

Here's another: poor, blameless chihuahuas being used to symbolise vacuous wealth, celebrity and mindless label-shopping, presumably thanks to a certain bizarrely famous media whore and socialite.




And in an addendum to my various Ronald Searle posts, its worth noting that new editions of his four books with Geoffrey Willans are coming out in October.






Here are what I believe to be the first edition covers.






UPDATE: By purest chance, I see that BibliOdyssey is showing pages from Searle's Winespeak.

Just a quick one here, as life away from the internet is using up all of my energy at the moment. I've been trying to get hold of a copy of the newish NYRB edition of Angus Wilson's Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, which uses a Sir John Tenniel illustration of the White Knight from Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There.



However, my usual enablers have been unable to get me a copy of this version, so I was happy to come across an old Penguin edition, with a cover by old favourite Ronald Searle.



Searle also did another Wilson cover I'd not seen before...



..and I also found two more of his Penguin designs I missed in the research for my earlier big Searle post.

Ronald Searle is one of the great cartoonists of the Twentieth Century, with a scabrous, dark style that must have been sharpened by his experiences as a prisoner of the Japanese during World War Two. Fortunately, he is still alive and still cartooning today.

One of my favourites from his work is Slightly Foxed - but still desirable, a book of cartoons which take the piss from various antiquarian book-dealing terms. Here's the cover, and a few badly-photographed pages from within (I apologise for the quality of these, but it's a huge book and won't fit on my scanner0.





Dented at head


Evidence of some insect damage


Foxed throughout

Of course, Searle is most famous for his St Trinian's cartoons,about the girls' school full of psychopaths, which have been collected, re-collected and reprinted in numerous volumes throughout the years. (Many of these, and of the other following images, have been taken from the excellent Perpetua Ronald Searle Tribute blog).









He is also one of the two masterminds behind the Molesworth books. If you don't know of these incessantly quotable parodies of English "public school" life, you need to seek them out.








This is just the tip of the iceberg, of course. Here are a selection of his other covers, both for his own books and for books he did with others.






























I'm not quite sure how that last book came about--two less likely collaborators are hard to imagine. Though if your stock in trade is drawing hideous grotesques, spending time with Jeffrey Archer would at least give you some material.

As I say, though, pop over to Perpetua to see much more: magazine covers, advertising art, sketches, and more.