BLYTHE HOUSE VISIT
We had an outing to Blythe House this week, the former Post Office Savings Bank. This vast and imposing building is now the repository for the archives of the Science Museum, the V&A, and the British Museum. We were guided on our visit by staff from the Science & Society Picture Library from the Science Museum Group and spent the majority of our time looking at objects in the Wellcome Collection. From pharmacy bottles and apothecary jars, painted masks, drawers of Roman votive penises to medical instruments in prolific quantity, we opened cupboards and drawers and were in awe at the treasures we saw. Wonderful posters of cycling from the 1930s and Soviet space programme provided typographic inspiration.
The building itself was a treat to see and will be recognized by anyone who saw the film Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (2011) and as the setting for our own cover for Ian McEwan’s Sweet Tooth.
We are very grateful to the staff of the Science Museum and Blythe House for their time and great kindness in showing us so much in one morning. It was a truly inspiring visit.
THE HOUR - Sir Bradley Wiggins
‘The hour record is a holy grail for cyclists’ Sir Bradley Wiggins
The UCI hour record, which measures the furthest distance a rider can cycle within an hour, is one of the most prestigious records in cycling with roots dating back to 1893 when it was set by Henri Desgrange, the man who would go on to create and run the Tour de France.
On Sunday July 7th Sir Bradley Wiggins will attempt to set a new world hour record at the London Velodrome, cheered on by thousands of fans and all of us at Vintage Books.
To show our support we’ve made this limited edition poster available to download now.


BOOK OF NUMBERS - Joshua Cohen
The Book of Numbers is a book of ideas fizzing with energy. The novel touches on autobiography, family memoir, phoned-in ghostwriting, geeky tech history, transnational surveillance thriller and sex comedy – it is an epic journey through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first.
The theme of surveillance was the spark of this cover. We had admired the RGB wallpaper work of Carnovsky for a while (a Milan based artist/designer duo comprised of Francesco Rugi and Silvia Quintanilla.) Their RGB work experiments with the interaction between printed light and colours. Images in these colours are overlaid, lines and shapes entwine but when seen under a filter/coloured light one of the three layers is revealed.
The duo were given a large list of subjects from the novel, highlighting the ones that felt particularly important to be included. We then gave Carnosky an unusual circular grid. The idea was that this circle would fold down to wrap around the book as a jacket but when opened out would for an extraordinary poster of the novel.
Below is a brief bit from Carnosky:
‘When we were approached by Vintage to illustrate the cover artwork for Joshua Cohen’s Book of Numbers, we accepted with enthusiasm. Literature has always been one of our passions and we are avid readers. Another aspect that fascinated us is the book’s complexity and the richness of iconographic elements it contains. We have always loved complexity: indeed minimalism is not for us. What we tried to do, and most of all when Vintage allowed us to work in a magnificent round foldout format was exactly this, to try to render the book’s complexity by creating a sort of great celestial map, or zodiac, inhabited by the most diverse objects, animals, characters and deities. A zodiac of the absurd where the most strange and surreal encounters, between a pigeon and Krishna, an old Mac and a monkey or a buffalo and a helicopter, take place, just like in the popular phrase by Comte de Lautréamont ‘As beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table.’
Published by Harvill Secker in June 2015
THE LEGEND OF SLEEPY HOLLOW – Washington Irving
Set in the countryside around Tarrytown, upstate New York around 1790, Washington Irving’s classic tale tells of witchcraft, ghost stories, a village supposedly haunted by a headless horseman, and hapless schoolteacher – Ichabod Crane.
We commissioned Vladimir Zimakov to illustrate our Vintage Classic and he responded with the beautiful artwork above. Check out more of Vladimir’s work at http://www.vladimirzimakov.com/.
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Stories will be published in October 2015.
THE WHITE COMPANY - Arthur Conan Doyle
An epic, compelling, adventure-filled historical novel from the creator of Sherlock Holmes.
The year is 1366 and Europe is embroiled in the Hundred Years War. At the age of twenty, Alleyne – intelligent but naïve – leaves the Catholic abbey where he’s been raised and goes out to see the world. At an inn, he meets a veteran archer who is recruiting for the White Company, a legendary group of battle-hardened mercenaries.
We wanted our cover to represent the glory and adventure that awaits our protagonist as he and the the troops journey towards the Black Prince’s war.
MAKE SOMETHING UP - Chuck Palahniuk
The latest from the creator of Fight Club brings short stories that are funny, caustic, poignant and bizarre. Everything his readers have come to love and expect from Chuck Palahnuk.
The lightning bolt on the cover references the story Zombies.
Where that ‘emergency heart shocker’ the cardiac defribrillator makes
an appearance and acts as a good visual aid when representing the
electric tone of Chuck’s writing.
THE DUST THAT FALLS FROM DREAMS - Louis de Bernières
Just in from the printers, is this sweeping, epic new novel from Louis de Berniéres. The jacket, beautifully illustrated by Nicholas Frith, hints at the magnificent and moving story, with a cast of unforgettable characters.
BLACKASS - A. Igoni Barrett
Furo Wariboko wakes up on the morning of his job interview to discover he has turned into a white man. The world is seemingly his oyster – except for one thing: despite his radical transformation, Furo’s ass remains robustly black…
A bold and striking cover design was required for this funny and provocative, modern satire.
Published by Chatto & Windus in July 2015.
NOTHING BUT GRASS - Will Cohu
When Norman Tanner kills his workmate with a spade on a cold
February morning, he thinks he’s got away with murder.
But Norman doesn’t know about the workmate’s girlfriend, or the child
that will come back to haunt him; and how he is caught up in a story
that stretches back over a century.
Set in a small Lincolnshire village, this is a gripping tale of interwoven lives and layers of history that come back to bite.
We wanted the jacket to be beautiful yet slightly sinister, alluding to the dark secrets that lie under the surface. The cover was brought to life by illustrator Joe Mclaren
Published by Chatto & Windus in June 2016
BERNARD HINAULT - William Fotheringham
‘As long as I breathe, I attack’ Bernard ‘the badger’ Hinault
Bernard Hinault was the dominant force in cycling for almost a decade, winning five Tours de France and taking part in the controversial 1986 Tour, where his apparent attempts to undermine his teammate, Greg LeMond, resulted in one of the greatest races of all time.
In William Fotheringham’s new book he shows that while France may one day find a new champion, there will never be another Bernard Hinault.
Bernard Hinault and the Fall and Rise of French Cycling is published today by Yellow Jersey Press.
SCHLUMP - Hans Herbert Grimm
Schlump an anti-war novel published anonymously in 1928, which was banned by the Nazis. The story depicts the First World War from Schlump’s perspective.
The cover needed to convey that the novel is brutal, funny and charming with a great sense of the era. Research for the project, threw up A Specimen Book of Pattern Papers designed for and in use at the Curwen Press with designs by Enid Marx, Paul Nash, Eric Ravilious and Edward Bawden. The patterns used for endpapers are very geometric, and the ink has a beautiful hand-printed quality, especially where colours overlap. This inspired the commission of lino-cut artist Clare Curtis for the cover and endpapers. Her brief was to produce a similarly geometric pattern, where Schlump would be the lone soldier that breaks free from the regimented German troops.
Published by Vintage Classics in May
KEEPING AN EYE OPEN Julian Barnes
‘Flaubert believed that it was impossible to explain one art form in terms of another, and that great paintings required no words of explanation. Braque thought the ideal state would be reached when we said nothing at all in front of a painting. But we are very far from reaching that state. We remain incorrigibly verbal creatures who love to explain things, to form opinions, to argue… It is a rare picture which stuns, or argues, us into silence. And if one does, it is only a short time before we want to explain and understand the very silence into which we have been plunged.’
Fully illustrated in colour throughout, Keeping an Eye Open contains Barnes’ essays on Géricault, Delacroix, Courbet, Manet, Fantin-Latour, Cézanne, Degas, Redon, Bonnard, Vuillard, Vallotton, Braque, Magritte, Oldenburg, Howard Hodgkin and Lucian Freud.
Published by Jonathan Cape on 7 May
IN THE LAND OF PUNCTUATION - Christian Morgenstern
This unique, beautifully illustrated and screenprinted handmade book is all about language, design and politics.
It was purchased by us from an independent publisher Tara books who are based in Chennai India and specialise in the local and sustainable production of books. Handmade titles such as this book are printed and bound in Taras in-house fairtrade print shop called AMM Screens whose motto is ‘nothing is impossible’.
For 16 years, Tara books have often collaborated with illustrator Rathna Ramanathan. Ramanathan has taken this book written by German author Christian Morgenstern and alongside Sirish Rao, the duo have translated it into a highly visual, typographical version.
Rathna Ramanathan comments that:
‘Influences have been, amongst other things, the structures and
rigour of letterpress and metal type, Russian posters of the 1920s and
1930s, the work of Werkman and modernists such as Weingart.
The look right now is flat and graphic – but this is the artwork. I envision the printed version as having uneven texture. Also, as with letterpress, if the black is printed first and the red after, then both layers should be visible’
It’s refreshing to see such an organic and hands on approach to the art of book making.
A GENERAL THEORY OF OBLIVION - José Eduardo Agualusa
On the eve of Angolan independence, Ludo bricks herself into her apartment, where she will remain for the next thirty years.
The outside world slowly seeps into Ludo’s life through snippets on the radio, voices from next door, glimpses of a man fleeing his pursuers and a note attached to a bird’s foot. Until one day she meets Sabalu, a young boy from the street who climbs up to her terrace.
The author tackles the country’s difficult, fractured history with a playfulness and warmth, and we aimed to capture this on the jacket by cutting and splicing together images of Angola’s vibrant architecture to create a colourful, wild patchwork.
Published by Harvill Secker in June 2015
Death and Mr Pickwick - Stephen Jarvis
Who conceived The Pickwick Papers?
Stephen Jarvis’s enthralling first novel traces the genesis, and subsequent history of Charles Dickens’ much-loved book. He offers a damning indictment of how an ambitious young writer expropriated another man’s ideas and then engaged in an elaborate cover-up of the true origin of the The Pickwick Papers.
Pickwick himself, of course, needed to be central to the cover but the design required a device that suggested there was more to the tale. The ink spatter offers this tension - is it the ink of the artist or the writer? Is Pickwick a creation of the artist Robert Seymour or a young journalist using the pen-name Boz?
Death and Mr Pickwick is published in May by Jonathan Cape.
