Who was Silvio?

Back in the 1970s and early 1980s, when New York City had several excellent Spanish-language bookstores, the numerous volumes of Losada's Biblioteca clásica y contemporánea were a mainstay of their shelves. The paper and typography may not have been the greatest but they were relatively inexpensive and had simply but attractively designed covers (which, unfortunately, were easily soiled). Most of not all of the cover illustrations in the series, and all of the ones shown here, were by the prolific, but surprisingly elusive, Silvio Baldessari. (The top image, also by Baldessari, is from Losada's Novelistas de nuestra época series.) I only own a few of the books at this point so these images are mostly pilfered from the web.


Oddly, there is little information on the web about Silvio Baldessari. The best source I have found so far is from the blog Los parrafistas:

Silvio Baldessari is probably the most prolific book illustrator in the history of Argentina. Working always in a Picasso-Pop-Expresionist style that is so readily recognizable (his real signature, more so than the miniscule one that almost always appears at the bottom of his work), he designed each and every one of the covers of Losada's "Biblioteca Clásica y Contemporánea" y "Novelistas de nuestra época," as well as illustrating countless covers for the publishing house Paidós, above all in the collection "Letras Argentinas," and, it is said, served as the art director and designer for various Latin American publishers. But here's the point: I said "it is said" because, believe it or not, I couldn't find ONE single bibliographical reference on this artist on the ENTIRE internet. How is this possible? Not only that, but all the illustrations that I could find of this artist were put up by internet sellers, that is to say, no one has ever taken the trouble to scan an image of the artist, but only of the book.

I would like to talk more about this illustrator, but, as I said, I couldn't find a single line about his life, except that he was born in 1916, that he managed, at least in my case, to compel me to buy the book, regardless of its quality, and that he designed (this is mostly a conjecture based on my own experience than a non-existent statistical confirmation) hundreds and hundreds of book covers...

Baldessari appears to have published at least one book of his own illustrations, entitled Sinblabla or Sinblablá:


No doubt there's more information out there, somewhere, on this productive and talented artist, whose work would have been so familiar to generations of readers throughout Latin America and beyond.

Thanks to Berliac of Los parrafistas for permission to include two images and a translation of portions of his original post.

Cortázar: Hopscotch (Signet)

This Signet edition of Julio Cortázar's most famous novel was the first American paperback publication, issued in December 1967. I don't know if the cover art depicts an actual George Segal sculpture or just a deliberate rip-off of his style; in any case the book credits neither the designer nor the artist. It's a fairly generic piece of art; perhaps the salient point was that the woman is naked and lying in bed, as the publishers were eager to punch up the erotic angle of the book, which is prounounced "an underground classic" on the cover. The words above the title read LIFE | LOVE | SEX, which I suppose is one way of summing up what Rayuela is about. Just in case anyone missed the point it's spelled out again on the bottom of the back cover: “Hopscotch / a game of / LIFE, LOVE, SEX.”

The blurbs are pretty hilarious: Harvey L. Johnson of the Houston Post promises “Sexual bouts, drunken orgies … escapes into hallucinations and trances, emphasis on sex, unmindful frankness … shocking and sordid … crude or amusing … Hopscotch will not soon be forgotten,” while the Baltimore Sun simply promises that it “leaves you limp.”

Cortázar apparently first saw the cover by accident in June 1968, in an unlikely part of the world:

And since we're on the subject, in Tehran (of all places) my wife came across, by pure chance, in a supermarket, Hopscotch in the paperback edition. She bought it and gave it to me as gift. I stood aghast to read the bit about LOVE/SEX: by the author of Blow-Up, etc. Eventually I realized that all pocket-books are the same, and that on the other hand the edition was a good one and didn't, I think, have any major errors. But that naked couple (made out of clay, no less) depressed me quite a bit. It's unbelievable how "mass-market" editions can debase a work that tries to aim much higher. Every day I hate consumer societies more (which is why in Argentina they catalog me as a dangerous Red, and from that point of view they're right, what the hell).

(From a letter to Gregory Rabassa, in Cartas 2 (2000 edition); translation mine.)

Eventually this edition was superseded by Bard's, which had a much better cover. In addition to Hopscotch, the New American Library (of which Signet was an imprint) apparently also bought the paperback rights to The Winners at the same time, but I've found no evidence that a Signet edition of that novel was ever issued.

Update: Below is the Plume edition (another NAL imprint) from 1971, which I haven't seen before. I can't say I care much for it.

Aventura

At first sight these selections from the Aventura series ("the Vintage Library of Contemporary World Literature") may just seem like particularly nice examples of 1980s paperback cover designs. They certainly were that -- the designer was Keith Sheridan, with various artists supplying the artwork -- but there's a bit more than that going on here.


These books were published during the waning years of the Cold War, when much of Europe and Latin America languished under one variety or another of tyranny, and six of the seven writers represented here are from countries in which it would have been risky or impossible to write and publish freely at the time they were written. (Timothy Mo, born in British-ruled Hong Kong, is the exception.) These images are not a completely representative sampling -- the Aventura list also included authors from Italy, France, Japan, and elsewhere -- nor were all of the books political in nature, but on the whole the titles reflect the values of the Western intelligentsia at a time when its political position was defined largely in opposition to Communism on the one hand and right-wing military dictatorships on the other. (Another notable example, from a few years earlier, was Mark Strand and Charles Simic's anthology Another Republic: Seventeen European and Latin American Writers.



There are still many places where writers are censored or persecuted for their work or their opinions, but the end of the Cold War has shifted the terrain and on the whole appears to have pushed literature to the sidelines. The day when writers could seem emblematic figures in a global struggle for democracy appears to be over, at least for now. How many times in the last decade has the New York Times Book Review -- or for that matter the New York Review of Books or the Nation -- reviewed a novel by a current political exile?




Most of the Aventura titles were reprints of books that had been published earlier in hardcover. One Day of Life, an exception, was a paperback original. Some of my copies have French flaps and others don't; I suspect this feature was abandoned to cut costs. The Aventura imprint seems to have been allowed to lapse at some point in the '80s. Here's the most complete list of titles I've been able to find:

Vassily Aksyonov, The Island of Crimea
Manlio Argueta, One Day of Life
Thomas Bernhard, Correction
Julio Cortázar, We Love Glenda So Much and A Change of Light
Maria Dermoût, The Ten Thousand Things
José Donoso, A House in the Country
Ariel Dorfman, Widows
Fumiko Enchi, Masks
Shusaku Endo, The Samurai
Jiří Gruša, The Questionnaire
Jamaica Kincaid, At the Bottom of the River
Tadeusz Konwicki, A Minor Apocalypse
Camara Laye, The Guardian of the Word
Earl Lovelace, The Wine of Astonshment
Timothy Mo, Sour Sweet
Elsa Morante, History: A Novel
Goffredo Parise, Solitudes
Manuel Puig, Blood of Requited Love
Darcy Ribeiro, Maíra
Samana Rushdie, Shame
Wole Soyinka, Aké: The Years of Childhood
Michel Tournier, The Four Wise Men

I read and enjoyed five of the books pictured, though the only one I've ever returned to is the Cortázar. I bogged down halfway through Widows (the briefest of the bunch) and I'm not sure I ever really started A Minor Apocalypse.

Update: here are two more cover scans:

Conrad at Anchor

Joseph Conrad: These handsome uniform editions of Joseph Conrad with introductions by Morton Dauwen Zabel were published by Anchor Books in the early '60s, when that imprint, which under the leadership of Jason Epstein had pioneered the trade paperback format, was a legitimate competitor of Vintage and Penguin as a publisher of serious literature and non-fiction in paperback. The cover designs were by Diana Klemin, the art director for Anchor's parent company, Doubleday. The use of photographs rather than art works in several of these titles was, I think, a little unusual at the time.



In addition to these six there were two listed as being in preparation that apparently were never issued, at least in the same form: Tales of Conflict and Falk, and Other Tales of the Sea; Zabel's death in 1964 may have prompted their cancellation. Anchor published a number of other Conrad titles with different cover treatments as well, some of them featuring art work by Edward Gorey. Doubleday's association with the Polish-born Conrad was already at least a half-century old at the time. At some point in the cascading consolidation of the book industry the connection lapsed, although a number of Conrad titles remain available from Doubleday's sister imprints under the Random House umbrella.

Nobel Prize Pulp

Some souvenirs from the days before paperback publishing became entirely respectable.


The above cover may be the only time the French novelist Roger Martin du Gard, probably best known in the US (if at all) for his long friendship with Gide, was ever compared to Grace Metalious. I don't know what marketing genius back in 1955 thought you could sell minor Martin du Gard in American drugstores, but probably the cover was the real selling point. This edition did go through at least two printings, so maybe they were onto something after all.


I went through an intense Martin du Gard phase in my youth and actually looked all over for The Postman, which at the time was out of print. I finally tracked down a copy in French (the original title is Vieille France) and worked my way through it, dictionary in hand, which if nothing else says something for my attention span back then. I only vaguely remember it now; I suspect it was actually quite tame. I bought the copy shown above much later for old time's sake.



I've never read either of the two Faulkners shown here. I love the quotation at the top of the back cover of Pylon, which makes you think the book is about giant rats or something along those lines. The Signet edition is from 1951. The blonde man on the cover looks a little like Paul Bowles, and the man slouching in the chair has Robert Mitchum eyes. Probably a coincidence.

The 1947 edition of Sanctuary below is relatively dignified -- it is a Penguin after all.



All of the above imprints -- Berkley, Signet, and Penguin -- are now part of the same corporation.