Postcards: Transparent Things Fawcett Crest 1972 paperback cover, by Ted CoConis

This paperback cover for Fawcett Crest's 1972 edition of Transparent Things features a Ted CoConis illustration. (CoConis also did a terrific one for 1970 Fawcett Crest Ada: I'll post that one in a bit -- it was in the old Fulmerford site. (That cover has since been used, Coconis's web site informs us, for a CD cover: Year Long Disaster.) More on CoConis and Nabokov in Paul Maliszewski's "Paperback Nabokov," available in McSweeney's Issue 4.)

Laughter in the Dark cover


I'm thrilled to bits with the specimen-case Vintage reissues: they're elegant, they're lovely, and they're lepidopterally-minded without hitting your head over with it with a whole bunch of butterflies. I don't think there's getting away from the motif, at any rate, and besides John Gall did a terrific job of using it to generate a coherent, immediately identifiable set. (I'm way indebted to Gerard Genette in my dissertation, so the moment I hear "covers" I immediately think of his Paratexts.)

I'll be reposting a couple of less coherent, less immediately identifiable covers from a section of the site that was shunted over into Tripod ages ago. Since then, there's been a bunch of folk who've done a far more impressive job of collecting Nabokov covers. My own little collection, Postcards, is still around, but it's way smaller and way less comprehensive than A Nabokov Coverage and Zimmer's Covering Lolita: both are impressive, the former particularly for its extensive dedication to international editions.