Wimsey covers: Whose Body?

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    Let's look at a Lord Peter Wimsey book. Specifically the cover art.

    The thing about old and enduring series is that over 70-80ish years of reprints in various countries, they'll usually accumulate themselves some artwork. Usually the cover artwork reflects the time period of its creation and printing and the approach to the attached genre taken by the public and publishers at the time and so on. This is definitely so with the Lord Peter books. One can browse eBay for quick examples of LPW covers, and one finds everything from the corny to the bizarre and the surrealist, including straightforward objects-from-the-book covers, painful and amusing "the artist has no idea what the characters look like" covers, vague yet lovely covers with photographs depicting rich British people in nice '30s clothes, covers which offer tiny, tantalizing drawings of Harriet Vane buried in the rest of what's going on, naked almost-first-editions, cheesy text-only pocket editions, and once in a while, my absolute favorite: the unspeakably hilarious edition of Busman's Honeymoon wherein the cover shows the murderer fixing up the murder weapon with a diabolical leer on his face.

    There are even a few rather pretty covers.

    Also, I just like talking about Lord Peter Wimsey books. I'm going to do that now.

    Whose Body? (1923)

    This one must be a fairly straightforward job, I think. The premise of a random dead body in a bath is so charming that artwork depicting it fronts most every edition. Let's look at those, and a few exceptions.

    (each block of text will describe the picture preceding it; Blogspot's caption system can get unwieldy.)

    There you have it. Pince-nez, bath, text. I'd like to see a corpse on this cover, but it's quite serviceable.

    I don't know anything about these uncolorful, Elizabeth George'd editions beyond their covers, but their covers are lovely. This one is deeply noncommittal, as they tend to be, but I like the cold color and I'm a huge sucker for top hats.

    I don't mind the dinky look of this book; I don't even mind its topmost blue going badly with the zombie/pea-soup green they chose for the bulk of it. I mind this cover because it creeps me the fuck out. The pince-nez are nicely distracting and "pop" well, but then we get to the dead, staring eyes and furrowed brow and it's like, holy shit, Edward Everett Horton became a librarian and then died and came back to life and he's really fucking angry and he's gonna come for me in the night, somebody fucking save me.

     You know what? This was the first LPW book cover I ever saw. I was at the library with my mom and I was bored and browsing through the audiobooks and I saw this - and mind you, I'd never read any LPW books before - and I actually remember thinking, I bet the main character guy really doesn't look anything like that at all.

   All right, well, that's just, like, Cary Grant.

    I like the piano but the pince-nez is kinda awkward and inappropriate. I wish it was Lord Peter's monocle instead.

    I can't find a better picture of this but it looks fuckin' rad so I'm posting it anyway.

    AW YEAH CUBISM

    This cover just...kills me. I'm dead, man. Dead. Look at his hair. Look at that zombie climbing out of the bath. Kill me now.

    LATER UPDATE (3/10/11):
    I found a pile of random stuff!

 

 Also this, which is German and kinda gross.