Vintage Raymond Chandler

And thoughts on old book covers

After years of rummaging through stoop giveaway boxes and inhaling an ungodly amount of dust in used bookshops, my quest to own every single volume in the original Vintage Contemporaries series of books is nearly complete. I got to go in on my personal obsession with those covers a few years back, and last week, Dan Kois got to do the same at The New Yorker. Now that I’m nearly at the end of a quest that has taken me two decades to complete, I need a new collecting mountain to conquer.

“To be sure, most book covers are not works of art,” David J. Alworth and Peter Mendelsun note in The Look of the Book: Jackets, Covers, and Art at the Edges of Literature. “Nearly all book covers, however, are mixed-media productions that combine verbal and visual elements.” My feeling has always been that Vintage Contemporaries did strive to present little works of art on the covers of books like Bright Lights, Big City or Taking Care by Joy Williams. My latest obsession, the Vintage Crime series that was also published by Vintage not long after the Contemporaries series started hitting the shelves at B. Dalton (RIP) or Kroch's and Brentano's (RIP), feels a little more like what Alworth and Mendelsun talked about. Less art, more mixed-media. Instead of individual artists creating surreal work for covers of books by writers like Don DeLillo or Ann Beattie, you got a somewhat cleaner, more contemporary (ironic) look for the reissues of books by James M. Cain or Dashiell Hammett designed by Keith Sheridan Associates with an accompanying photo or sometimes artwork. I’m especially a fan of the art by Nikolai Punin.

I’ve been trying to find more of Punin’s work, but Google only brings up results for the Russian art scholar Nikolay Punin. I’m pretty sure they aren’t the same person, but trying to figure that out only adds an extra layer of enjoyment to reading a mystery novel.