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Judging by the artwork from Mexican Novelas, pulp novels that Latin America eats up like literary junk food, these stories are as terrifying as they are hilarious. Full of masked wrestlers, shadowy demonic forces, Frankenbirds and Yetis, these stories would make a person suffering from paranoid schizophrenia feel sane in comparison.
The only thing you’re missing out on by not being able to read these stories for yourself is the story behind each panel, so head to the i09 link below and read the clever descriptions Cyriaque Lamar has come up for them all, or make some up for yourself and write your own SuperNovela.
Sam Kean wrote a book about the periodic table of elements called The Disappearing Spoon. When the Chinese edition came out, he was surprised by the cover art, which included some element icons that were sexually suggestive and others that didn’t make any sense whatsoever. Only a portion of the cover is shown here. He contacted the jacket designer, Bianco Tsai, who explained the thinking behind her choices for the illustration.
In the end, Tsai said, “I have to built a bridge to connect our culture to your book!” I still think her cover looks sharp, and if Tsai says that it bridges my book to Chinese culture, I believe her. If so, though, it’s a one-way bridge. Trying to decipher the cover still leads to an uncanny feeling for me. Something I’d labored over for years, and written and rewritten until I’d practically memorized it, had became alien. It’s what those poor characters in neurologist Oliver Sacks’ books must feel like when they suddenly have a stroke or something and can’t recognize their own faces in the mirror. It was yet another reminder that although the periodic table is universal, people’s reactions to it are anything but.
Read the reasons behind the element icons and see if they make sense to you, at Slate. Link -via Buzzfeed
Creative partners Oli Beale and Alex Holder posed to recreate several Mills & Boon romance novel covers in photographs. See the rest at their site. Link -via Metafilter
(Image credit: Oli Kellett)
The blog Women Running from Houses is subtitled “judging books by their covers”. Not having read many Gothic romance novels, I had no idea that a woman running away from a house was such a common theme for a book cover! Spectergirl collects such novels, and while admitting that she hasn’t read them all (and probably never will), she is a fan of vintage cover illustration. Link -via Metafilter
In the 1970s, cheap sonosheets (phonograph records printed on thin, flexible sheets of vinyl) became quite the rage in Japan. Like all fads, these recordings have largely disappeared – but you can still gawk at the fantastic cover art over at Pink Tentacle:
Widely available from a variety of publishers, the most popular sonosheets featured theme music from TV anime, manga and tokusatsu, and they often came packaged inside booklets featuring colorful artwork. The sonosheet boom was short-lived, though — many companies went under as the market became flooded in the 1970s, and the phenomenon all but disappeared by the 1980s. Here is a small sample of the vast array of sonosheet cover art from that era.
