from MISSING MYSTERIES

The Scarlet Herring
Alphonse Allais
Hell Map Back edition (1921)
Subgenre: Wiggy Dog

A “wiggy dog” mystery, The Scarlet Herring was written in 1884
and published posthumously in America during the Genre
Famine of ‘21.

The Scarlet Herring has no plot per se, while the story revolves
around a fishwife found bludgeoned in Hester Prynne’s slop
sink. Inspector Luc Filet is assigned to investigate, but gets lost
on his way to the crime scene and winds up investigating a case
next door. Allais sprinkles false clues and bogus confessions
throughout the narrative, so it’s virtually impossible for anyone
to solve. Adding insult to injury, chapters appear out of
sequence, and each begins with a facetious aside, e.g.,
“The butler often contemplated killing her, yet was hunting for seaweed
at the time of the murder. Alas, good kelp is hard to find.”
An adorable map1 of the Prynne estate adorns the back



When unemployed cartographer Earl Benders first proposed the idea of putting
maps on paperback mysteries, he was rudely rejected by budget-conscious
publishers. Bennett Cerf reportedly told him, “We’ve already got shit art on the
front, we don’t need more crap on the back.” However one enlightened publisher—
Hell—saw the potential for luring illiterate readers and, in 1921, launched
the series known as “Map Backs.” The Scarlet Herring by Alphonse Allais was
the first to appear.



Dust jacket of the hardbound
edition published by
Alfred E. Knopf of The Collected
Works of Alphonse Allais:
Vol. I. The Scarlet Herring
(1920). It features an excerpt
from the novel on the back.

from MISSING MYSTERIES: A PICTORIAL HISTORY OF NONEXISTENT MYSTERIES (1840-2013) by Derek Pell

Click here for more

Cover Dust & Mummy Lust

I did not design this one, but wish I had.

Not sure how I missed seeing this back in 65 (when I was squatting  in Gotham), but it’s a beaut. Hey, Bob. how come I’m always the last to know? (No relation.)

The book was published in the UK by Cape and the crack jacket design is by Jan Pienkowski--a Polish-born British author of children's books.

I wonder if this cover would make it past the committee today.  What with all the bloodshed in the streets of Cairo.

Which reminds me, it’s time for all of Albert Cossery’s  novels to be brought back in print and given shiny new faces.

Hey, New Directions, I’m available.

More Cover Stories

Readers of this blog (yes, I mean both of you) undoubtedly know that I love book covers. I also love designing them. And I devote a fair amount of time creating covers for Black Scat Books. That’s about twenty covers, I think. I also design for other publishers. For example, I did quite a few for Paul Rosheim’s press, Obscure Publications, with my favorite being for Terry Southern’s PURITAN PORN.

_{A simple design that gets right to the point, so to speak.}
And speaking of simplicity, my cover for Erik Belgum’s COLLECTED STORT SHORIES is truly minimalist.


My cover for the forthcoming issue of FICTION INTERNATIONAL is another personal favorite. I’ve done a bunch of FI covers over the years, and one with a Beuyscout motif turned out to be one of their biggest sellers. Of course that may have been due to that issue’s contributors. Here’s an advance peek at #46.



Took my first crack at designing uniform covers for a trilogy of novels by Yuriy Tarnawsky for JEF Books..

I just completed the design for a reissue of Harold Jaffe’s PARIS 60. The book is loosely based on Baudelaire’s PARIS SPLEEN, so it seemed appropriate to use the poet’s eye.



This is one of the very few covers I’ve done in black and white.
It has the feel of the old New Directions paperbacks I was reared on, like this edition of Rimbaud’s ILLUMINATIONS.



My aesthetic usually tends toward retro and, thus, my designs rarely go out of fashion.