J.G. Ballard, David Pelham, and the Glory Days of Collaborative Art in Book Publishing

This is a bit old of a posting, but I'm reposting a link to it nevertheless. I found it at one of my favorite sites, Ballardian.com. This site is great to dig around in if you're a fan of Ballard's work. Not just because there are tons of great essays on his work itself, but because it features a lot of great pictorials of art that's been inspired by his writing. (Too many to post links to even all my favorites, dig around and you'll see.)

I'm reposting a link to this story about his collaboration with early publisher David Pelham for Penguin because it's a kind of testament to this. Pelham only plays somewhat into the the essay itself, which delves somewhat deeper into the visual aspects of Ballard's work and its influences. But the part about Pelham alone is interesting. I'll quote, since it's near the bottom:

"For Ballard the images of surrealism[...]informed one aspect of his fiction but they were not its raison d’etre[...]to capture this required something other than reproductions of surrealist paintings on the covers of his books. This was the challenge facing David Pelham, the art director at Penguin Books from 1968 to 1979, when, in 1974, four of the five Ballard titles in Penguin’s back catalogue came up for reprint. Pelham was responsible for numerous covers at any one time and would often commission other designers and illustrators to produce the artwork, but the Ballard covers he designed himself."

The essay describes that Pelham's friendship with Ballard was one reason he chose to design them, but the fact that he came up with these designs, which have become icons in their own right, says something about worthy about the spirit of collaboration in earlier book packaging. Ballard's style is, as the writer points out, intensely visual; this is one of the reasons why Ballard-inspired visual art is nearly ubiquitous and almost an art subculture in its own right. (And so often so, so good.) But it's rare now, even with bestselling books, that you see that kind of iconic cover art.

(You will, though, read stories like Alec Soth's recent blog about a book publisher who, when turned down by Soth to use a much-redesigned version of one of his photos for a cover, went ahead and used the redesigned version anyway. Is that forced collaboration?)

The more important message is how Ballard's writing style has influenced so many other forms of visual work. Book covers may become irrelevant with the advent of Kindle, much like how Peter Saville declared, a few years ago, that album covers are dead. But I don't think that the actual "spirit of collaboration" is going anywhere, and if anything is just getting more interesting, since there are more mediums to work with it in.

So if a bit sad that we don't get as iconic packaging with contemporary writers we like (not that there are not good book covers--Joseph Sullivan had a cool blog on the NYTimes site about this which is now sadly defunct), the digital plus is that now sites like Ballardian.com are able to post scans of the originals online, for those of us who don't have actual copies. So we can print out hi-res posters instead, and stick them on our wall, along with our old Factory records.