Caçador e presa: vender para comprar, comprar para vender

[ Este é o segundo de três artigos que publiquei na revista OS MEUS LIVROS em Outubro, Novembro e Dezembro de 2010 sob o tema genérico da “caça aos livros”. Apesar da distância temporal, creio que ainda têm validade, e assim, a pedido de algumas proverbiais “famílias”, aqui estão, com ligeira edição do texto. Ler também o PRIMEIRO e o TERCEIRO textos. ]

Comprar para revender com algum lucro na Internet pode ser um caminho para a criação de uma boa biblioteca. Palavras mágicas: reciclagem, bom senso, sentido de aventura. E Paypal.

Deseja abrir as portas de Sésamo dos livros à venda na Internet e começar a comprar a bom preço algumas daquelas edições que sempre quis ter. Pode achar um paradoxo, mas o primeiro passo nessa odisseia pode não ser na direcção do seu computador, mas na das suas estantes, ou das bancas das feiras do livro que encontra e desdenha pela cidade. Porque não começar por vender alguns dos seus livros, esses mesmos que estava a considerar oferecer a alguém e para os quais já não vai tendo espaço?

Quando comecei a comprar regularmente no ebay, há uns 6 anos, apercebi-me de que era fácil passar para o “outro lado”, tornar-me eu próprio vendedor e – eis o cerne da questão – começar a amortizar os gastos feitos com as compras.
Fiz portanto uma selecção dentre os meus livros que considerava dispensáveis, e procurei alguns que pudessem atrair um público internacional (apesar de o ebay possuir versões alojadas em muitos países, o “site-mãe” ebay.com é o mais frequentado pelos internautas de todo o mundo). Terá sido sorte de principiante mas, no Verão de 2007, consegui vender por mais de 300 dólares um catálogo da Cinemateca Portuguesa sobre Tod Browning, que tinha comprado nos anos 90 por 1.000 Escudos (5 Euros, aproximadamente). O excelente design do livro, o seu tema de “culto” e o facto de ter textos em inglês fez com que uma californiana e um catalão entrassem num frenesi de licitações nas horas finais do leilão. Ganhou Barcelona.

Pouco depois, decidi experimentar as feiras de livro que costumam abrir para escoar fundos de catálogo. Por menos de 5 euros, comprei um livro sobre Oscar Niemeyer (Campo das Letras), que coloquei no ebay em leilão por um preço ligeiramente superior, para assegurar uma margem mínima de lucro. Um comprador espanhol acabou por levá-lo por perto de 20 euros. Algumas vendas como estas asseguraram a compra de alguns livros que procurava.

LEILÕES A PARTIR DE CASA

É, pois, isto que lhe proponho: pense em vender (ser a presa) antes de pensar em comprar (caçar), e crie uma “almofada” amortizadora de futuras compras. O primeiro passo é abrir uma conta no Paypal, uma modalidade de pagamento e armazenamento de crédito online alternativa aos créditos bancários e às custosas transferências de dinheiro. Uma simples balança de cozinha dar-lhe-á o peso aproximado da sua encomenda (acrescente sempre uns gramas prevendo o empacotamento) e uma consulta à calculadora de preços do site dos CTT dar-lhe-á o valor final com precisão.
Agora, no papel de vendedor, pense no que o atrai mais quando procura livros: informação detalhada – quer sobre o conteúdo, o estado físico do livro, valores dos portes de envio e modos de pagamento que aceita – e “alimento” para os olhos, ou seja, uma ou mais fotografias do seu livro (evite o flash se a capa for plastificada, e, se possível, aloje as imagens num servidor que não seja o do ebay: dessa forma poderá colocar uma imagem maior, ou uma composição de várias fotos do seu livro).

Como qualquer leiloeira, o ebay cobra taxas consoante o valor-base de licitação, ou o valor de venda directa, pelo que, se optar pela forma de leilão, comece com um valor baixo, sobretudo se tiver expectativas de muitas visitas e alguns interessados. Note que poderá tentar começar por sites de leilões ou vendas nacionais (o leiloes.net, por exemplo, recentemente aberto, é o “ebay português”, mas há outros como o miau.pt), mas não será tão mais excitante a aventura de apelar a esses milhões de bibliófilos mundo fora?

TODA A INFORMAÇÃO É VÁLIDA

O ebay permite um contacto directo com vendedores ocasionais, ou livreiros fora da base de dados da Amazon, que poderá prolongar-se e tornar-se um prazer continuado. Um dos vendedores que mais me fascinaram até agora é a Idea Books, uma livraria mantida por Angela Hill e David Owen em Londres, e que se especializa em livros de fotografia, catálogos de arte e no que de mais excitante se possa encontrar relacionado com a cultura popular e visual do século XX desde os anos de 1950. A forma simples, directa mas cativante como eles fotografam e descrevem os seus livros é um prazer para o comprador ou o curioso e um modelo para o vendedor, sem esquecer que é, também, uma fonte de cultura: tenho aprendido imenso com esta pequena loja. Lembre-se que um vendedor cativante costuma estar também disponível, mediante negociação, a conseguir-lhe o valor de portes mais em conta, algo que é de suma importância e que é também, diga-se, comum aos bons vendedores na rede da Amazon.

Uma pesquisa de livros no ebay, aleatória ou orientada, pode também dar-lhe indicações sobre a variação de preços de um determinado título, ou sobre a sua raridade. E descobrir tesouros, inalcançáveis, é certo, mas atrás dos quais há histórias fascinantes, como o exemplar de The Atrocity Exhibition, de J.G. Ballard, que um livreiro de São Francisco vende por 11.400 dólares, um dos raros no mercado e sobrevivente da destruição dessa edição de 1970 pelo seu editor, Nelson Doubleday, após ter descoberto entre os seus contos um que tinha por título “Why I want to fuck Ronald Reagan”…

E pense, caro leitor, que a ubíqua crise que o obriga a contar o dinheiro disponível para a compra adiada “daquele” livro especial, ou até a considerar seriamente estas sugestões de se tornar vendedor ocasional para poder amortizar os custos da “caça”, pode, por portas e travessas, vir em seu socorro no momento da compra. Ainda durante os últimos anos do governo de George W. Bush, as bibliotecas americanas sofreram cortes brutais nos seus orçamentos de gestão, o que as obrigou a, literalmente, despejar quilos de livros das suas prateleiras. Entram em cena recolectores de livros como a Goodwill Books, que os armazenam e vendem por preços simbólicos, que podem chegar a 1 cêntimo de dólar, com valores de portes muito baixos também. O resultado das vendas reverte em benefício de pessoas carenciadas, atingidas pela mesma crise que levou esses livros quase ao lixo.

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The once New Worlds of Charles Platt

Charles Platt at 22, in August of 1967, on a balcony outside a house in Notting Hill (archives of Charles Platt)

Born in 1945, Charles Platt was at the right place (his home town London) and certainly at the right time (the mid-Sixties) to be a part of the ebullient graphic and editorial scene that became a staple of that city’s cultural (and countercultural) life in those years. He did so by crossing paths with Michael Moorcock, then the new (and also very young) editor of the almost defunct British SF magazine New Worlds, a chance encounter that happened just as Moorcock was finally able to revamp and restyle the magazine into an exciting forum that mixed edgy SF (the crème de la crème of the British “New Wave” of speculative fiction), essays on contemporary art (some of the best essays on the British Pop Art scene would be published there) and cutting edge scientific research, all presented in a graphic package that, although following a rigid layout grid (thus appearing in a suitable “conservative” form for its readers), allowed free experimentation and testing of the limits of what a SF magazine was expected to be (as J.G. Ballard would later admit, New Worlds actually ceased to be a SF magazine altogether). Although never assuming the “weight” of those titles, Platt was the de facto art director and main graphic designer of New Worlds from 1967 to 1971, when this adventurous phase in the life of the magazine ended (he would later return to layout a handful of issues in the late 1970s, the very last ones). He’s had a versatile career since then, as an author and communications and technology expert (writing for Wired magazine in the 1990s and, more recently, for the website BoingBoing), but it was Michael Moorcock, in the interview he gave me last year, that shed some light on the importance of Platt’s graphic work at New Worlds in that period. So here is Platt himself giving his account of that work. (Pedro Marques)

Spread for Kazoo by James Salis (NW #174, August 1967, with collage by Vivienne Young)

1.  When did you come across NEW WORLDS (NW) and when did you begin your collaboration with it? What attracted you to it?
I bought copies of the magazine from British news stands occasionally in the early 1960s, from the age of 15 or so. At that time it was edited by John Carnell, and I was not impressed by it, because it seemed like a weak imitation of American science fiction magazines. However, New Worlds, Science Fantasy, and Science Fiction Adventures were the only British magazines at that time (all from the same editor and publisher), so I started submitting short stories to Carnell, all unsuccessfully. When I moved to London I discovered that Michael Moorcock had taken over as editor, with bold plans to create a synthesis between science fiction and modern literature. His plans were very exciting to me, and he happened to live a few blocks from me in London. He started publishing my stories, and I started making small suggestions regarding typefaces in the book-sized format that the magazine had at that time. From there it was a natural progression for me to design the large-size version of the magazine. I was 21 or 22, had no formal design training, but it never occurred to me that I couldn’t do it.

2. Did you have any artistic or technical background in graphic communications prior to your work at NW? Being London then (mid to late 1960s) a fervent and creative scene in the editorial market, attracting talent from Europe and America, what were your main influences in publishing design (book and cover design) or specifically editorial and magazine design?
I was studying at the London College of Printing, for a degree in printing management, which I found utterly uninteresting. But it did teach me the basics of offset lithography; the practical limitations involved. I had always enjoyed drawing cartoons, and was a halfway good artist, but never thought of myself as a designer. My influences back then were the posters for rock bands that you could see all over London, and later the San Francisco “hippie lettering” on rock posters. I did become actively interested in typography, after I started designing the magazine, and tried without success to become really good at hand-lettered fonts. Mostly I went to the Letraset catalogue, always looking for new fonts. All the display type (with the exception of a bit of hand lettering) was done in Letraset, the British dry-transfer system that was an imitation of the American Presstype. You scribbled over some lettering on a plastic sheet, and the letter transferred itself into art board. Maintaining alignment and letter spacing was extremely difficult.

“I did all the typesetting on an IBM Composer, a glorified typewriter”: Charles Platt work desk, circa 1969 (archives of Charles Platt)

At that time Letraset also sold various tinted, translucent sheets which could emulate the effects of overprinting one color with another. Since we could only afford two colors for the cover, I became interested in the possibilities. Traditionally we had used black plus one color, but with two colors such as red and green, the overprinted area was such a dark brown, it was almost black, and this way, we could have the illusion of three colors. We couldn’t afford proofs, so I just prepared two separate pieces of art, with hand-drawn register marks, specified a Pantone color for each, sent them to the printer, and hoped for the best.

The counterculture magazine Oz was appearing around this time, and used a lot of really extreme color overprinting effects, like Wired magazine in the 1990s. Red text overprinting solid blue backgrounds; that kind of thing. I found this amusing, but not relevant. We wanted our readers to be able to read the text without undue strain. And we couldn’t afford color for the interior pages anyway.

3. In 1967, NW reshaped itself radically into a “glossy”, avant-garde magazine, and this transformation was parallel to your becoming its principal designer or art director. In what way did you work with Michael Moorcock (NW’s editor) in giving it this new radical look? How much of an input were you allowed to give initially?
Mike had a private inner vision of what he wanted. He was not very good at communicating this (or, I was not very good at understanding it), so for the first of the large-size issues, I showed him a succession of sample covers. He kept saying, “That’s ALMOST what I have in mind”. Eventually I said I didn’t think I could do any better, so we settled for the final rough that I showed him. From that point on, I received no supervision at all. Absolutely none. This was one of Mike’s great strengths: he had the courage to let people express themselves. When I was writing for Wired in the early 1990s, they had the same kind of courage and faith in their writers. Excessive editorial interference is usually a sign of insecurity.

4. What were the magazines you had in mind when designing NW? Or was it “terra incognita” from the start?
Other than the influences I have mentioned above, I can’t recall anything that I looked at for inspiration. No other magazines were publishing a similar kind of content, so they seemed irrelevant.

Spread for The Inconstant Alpha by Christopher Evans (NW #176, October 1967)

5. Eduardo Paolozzi seems to have been a pivotal figure in this reshaping of NW as well, being a close friend of both Ballard and Moorcock and a founding member of the Independent Group (and a seminal Pop artist). How did you work with him? And were you influenced by his work in any way?
I never met Paolozzi, but he did allow me to recut one of his collages to create one of our covers. Amazing, really. I just chopped it up with a utility knife.

Spreads for Language Mechanisms by Christopher Finch (NW #174, August 1967)

6. In the interview he gave me last year, Moorcock told me your work at NW had a big impact in such paperback imprints such as Panther (who published your Garbage World). In my view, Panther had some very striking, beautiful covers in their SF series in the late 1960s. Did you do any design for Panther or other SF paperback publishers?
I was not a designer! It never occurred to me to seek work professionally. I just designed New Worlds because no one else in our circle had any idea how to do it. I have often thought that Mike could have advertised for design students, who would have worked as cheaply as I did, but I think he preferred to deal with people who understood what the magazine was about. We did do one issue which was guest-designed by a college instructor who got his students to do some of the art, but in many ways we didn’t like the result. It was more professional, but it looked too much like a “normal” magazine. We wanted something which was more like a “nouveau book”. It had to have a booklike, literary quality, because the text was so important. That was why there was a slight formality about it. Only two types of pages, really: two-column, for fiction, and three-column, for features. That formality was helpful, I think. Of course it would have been difficult to do anything else. The printer did all the typesetting for us (small typesetting machines were unknown until very near the end of the magazine’s lifetime in its large-format incarnation) so we just received these long paper galleys, which we snipped into sections and glued onto layout sheets. I say “we” because after a while I was assisted by Nigel Francis, an old school friend.

Once in a while Mike [Moorcock] mentions that the old issues of New Worlds have attracted some praise for design. For many years, I simply didn’t believe him. I was so embarrassed by my own limitations and, well, amateurishness. But now I think I see that there is a naive quality to them which is interesting.

7. How did you see the overall look of SF publishing in the UK and America back then? There seems to have been a short period of very good imagery, shown on the covers of Panther, Penguin, Doubleday (even the London Science Fiction Book Club, with Terry James’ covers), and then, after 1971, a sudden collapse. Do you agree with this or have a different view on it?
I’m sorry but I don’t really remember those British book covers. I always liked the garish, trashy look of American science fiction covers.

8. What were NW’s connections with the busy London underground (or alternative) press scene? Moorcock told me you collaborated with Barney Bubbles on Frendz, and, of course, he and Mal Dean had published the Jerry Cornelius comic strip in It Internacional Times. How and where did NW placed itself in that complex arena?
I didn’t deal with the Frendz people at all. I didn’t have time. I had to earn at least 50% of my living wage outside of New Worlds, because Mike could not afford to pay me enough to live on. I was commissioning art and photographs (which often didn’t turn up in the form I expected, and required additional work). I was putting together a 64-page magazine with no help at all, initially, and we were always short of visual material. I was doing Letraset headings, and of course the cover. It was a full-time occupation. We had a very clear division of labor: Mike and his fellow writers dealt with anything to do with content. I did the visuals. Often I didn’t even have time to read the magazine!

Spreads for The Summer Cannibals by J.G. Ballard (NW #186, January 1969)

9. Much has been written, especially since his death, on the visual side of J.G. Ballard’s career. His collages for Ambit and New Worlds and his passionate defense of Surrealism stand as evidences of his visual flair and culture. How was it to work with him on NW?
I loved Ballard’s work, and Ballard was delighted with some of the visuals I provided for his stories. He would telephone me in a state of excitement, which was very pleasing, because I admired him so much. I shared his obsession with surrealist painting. But I didn’t work with him; I just did whatever I wanted, and he got to see the result when it was printed. The only person who saw it before it was printed was Mike. I used to show him the layout pages before they went to the printer.

The issue of NW that Ballard liked best was #186, because I illustrated his story The Summer Cannibals in a way that he thought was very appropriate. A lot of small pictures, emulating the way his story was in small sections. He said he wished we could publish all his stories like that. So did I! But it was an incredible amount of work, finding material that was appropriate. No internet back then. No stock photos. Just clipping pictures out of car catalogues and magazines. Easy to see why he liked this presentation. In his view of the world (and probably mine too), the media landscape creates an equivalence between the curve of a thigh and the contour of automobile sheet metal, and a car crash becomes a perverse erotic event. I understood his vision very well, and I had a unique advantage in that my father was a director of a British automobile manufacturer. This made it easy for me to obtain photographs of automobile crash testing, AND American car catalogues. Perfect! Throw in some sinuous shapes of freeway interchanges, a nude model, and closeups of an eyelid and a pair of lips (all stolen from published sources without shame) and there you had it.

The issue I was most pleased with was #216, when I went back to England in 1979 and did one for old time’s sake, financing it by selling off a lot of old back issues that we had accumulated. I did all the typesetting on an IBM Composer, a glorified typewriter.

But, there was a problem. Back in the 1969/70 I had done the typesetting myself, of the last few issues, but for NW #216, when I told our printer that I wanted to do this, he said he wouldn’t be able to print it, because I was not a member of a union. “If I print nonunion typesetting, my paper suppliers will cut me off,” he said. Amazing! I couldn’t afford to pay for union typesetting, but very fortunately there was a friendly “socialist collective” typesetter in the neighborhood, run by a bunch of amiable lesbians. They said I could do the typesetting, and so long as they approved of it, they would pretend they had done it, and would put their name on it.

Okay, great–but the trouble began when I showed them the finished pages. I wanted to include a facsimile page from Norman Spinrad’s book A World Between, which I thought was a very embarrassing novel. The page described a militant feminist giving in to her irrepressible desire to supply oral sex to a man. I thought there was no need to write a negative review of the book; the page spoke for itself. But the lesbian typesetters were horrified. I argued that I was mocking the excerpt from Spinrad’s novel. They said no one would know that unless I made it clearer. I refused to compromise. In the end I said, “Fine, I will just leave that page blank.” Indeed, page 41 is blank.

NW #216 actually received some news-stand distribution, as I recall. R. G. Meadley, who used to illustrate the magazine, saw the issue on sale and actually bought a copy. He said my style was so distinctive, he knew immediately that I had designed the cover, even though we hadn’t seen each other for 9 years.

“Moorcock had conceived the idea of ‘news reports from imaginary futures’. I took this a step further and mixed genuine news in with the fiction”: cover and spreads from NW #216 (1979)

I also guest-edited and guest-designed an issue of Interzone, in 1995. By then the whole thing could be done on a Mac. I chose to use Adobe Illustrator to create every page–text and graphics–because Illustrator allowed such freedom with text. I could use trapezoidal text areas, for instance, which were not possible with Quark or PageMaker (Indesign did not yet exist). Also I could draw my own display type in Illustrator and then distort the letters right there on the page with all the other elements. That issue of Interzone was what I would have liked to do with New Worlds if I had had the resources.

Once in a while Mike mentions that the old issues of New Worlds have attracted some praise for design. For many years, I simply didn’t believe him. I was so embarrassed by my own limitations and, well, amateurishness. But now I think I see that there is a naive quality to them which is interesting. Properly trained people can never do naive art, and therefore find it fascinating. Maybe magazine design is the same!

10. You seemed to use collages a lot, even in essays like “Fun Palace – Not a Freekout” in NW #180, March 1968. Would you say the collage technique (out of necessity or otherwise) could define visually the magazine more than, say, classic illustration or photography? In a recent essay Rob Latham proposed that being William Burroughs such a strong influence on Moorcock and Ballard, this “cut-up”, sort of random collage of visual debris aesthetic was a major characteristic of NW. Would you agree to that? Was there such a thing as a “visual” New Wave aesthetic?
I think it was a matter of expediency. We could make collages from found materials, instead of trying to find good original work. Also collages were sort of fashionable at that time. I don’t think we were aware of the surrealist collages, at that time.

Maybe there is a shred of truth in this, but mainly it was desperation. We were so clueless in those days. We had no idea how to find illustrators. When I did my Interzone guest issue, I went to the local art school, put a notice on their bulletin board, and received a lot of submissions. For some reason we never thought of doing anything like that for New Worlds. We just waited for people to show up. Gabi Nasemann showed up with a big portfolio of pre-existing pictures, and we bought them all and then applied them to stories whenever they seemed remotely suitable. I don’t think we ever commissioned her to do any work. Why not? I have no idea. Roy Cornwall likewise turned up and showed us his portfolio. We used some pictures from it. I later asked him to take specific photographs, but that never worked out very well; he didn’t have the surreal/strange/unexpected quality that we liked. Mal Dean somehow impressed Mike, and Mike gave him numerous commissions, which Mal did mainly for money (2 pounds 10 shillings per picture!). Mal’s work got sloppier as time went by. So, our illustrations were very hit-and-miss.

11. There was a change in the masthead from 1967 to 1968, with a bolder Helvetica in just one line of text. Was the masthead also your work?
Mike wrote it, I designed it. I don’t remember the details.

12. NW had some very striking covers: yours for issue 193, Stephen Dwoskin’s two covers, Gabi Nasemann’s, Andrew Lanyon’s, etc. How did you choose the covers, and, generally, how did you work with all these people (including Vivienne Young, Pam Zoline, Mal Dean, etc, all of them quite young, I imagine)?
Gabi’s pictures were all pre-existing. We would leaf through the stack that she contributed, and say–how about this one? Vivienne Young would draw whatever we asked, but the results were unpredictable and, I thought, disappointing. She was very flirtatious, and all of us wanted to get sexually or romantically involved with her, which may have played a part in her continued appearances in the magazine. Pam Zoline drew whatever she wanted to draw, and we loved her work so much, we were just happy to have it. Looking back, I could have been much more organized, resourceful, and diligent about finding art. But there was never enough time for that kind of thing.

Platt’s (with Christopher Finch) “scandalous” cover for NW #178 (December 1967).

13. Could you pick 5 covers out of the SF book cover portfolio of the past 50 years that definitely would make it into your personal canon of perfect SF covers? And, finally, what do you think defines a good SF cover?
For me, science fiction was defined by Kelly Freas covers on Astounding Science Fiction in the late 1950s. October 1958 for instance. But most of all February 1959, the pirate with a slide rule clenched between his teeth. I think Freas was a genius in his way. I liked his Mad magazine covers, too. How does this relate to New Worlds? Because those Astounding covers created a feeling of mystery, curiosity, surprise, and a need to know more. They also had an air of authority. The magazine was so sure of itself, and its vision, it had no problem using covers that were–well, incomprehensible! They were almost a gesture of defiance toward the reader, as if to say, “what do you make of THIS”? The October 1958 issue showed a midwestern guy in a checked shirt selling a can of snake oil to a black-skinned alien humanoid sitting on a levitating electromechanical saddle. The incongruity delighted me. I also liked the humor. I tried for the same kind of effect in the cover I did for NW #188, where a demented hippie is looking downward with revulsion–at the contents list of the magazine. That was a pre-existing Nasemann photo, which we didn’t know what to do with till I decided to put it on the cover. We had no problem making fun of ourselves, even though we were also very serious. We were too arrogant to entertain doubts about our judgment.

New Worlds, 1967-1971

Cinco capas dos únicos cinco números da New Worlds que possuo. Foram publicadas entre 1967 e 1971, no período mais arrojado e experimental desta revista de FC inglesa, no qual foi editada por Michael Moorcock e teve por porta-estandarte e contínua inspiração um J.G. Ballard no auge da sua forma. Na verdade, o arrojo foi tal que era impossível afirmar-se que se tratava de uma revista de FC: a “SF” era agora “speculative fiction” ou tudo aquilo que as “novas vagas” fossem trazendo à costa. Moorcock soube rodear-se de talento jovem na escrita de ficção e não-ficção (o crítico de arte residente, Christopher Finch, por exemplo, escreveu para a New Worlds ensaios seminais sobre M.C. Escher, Peter Phillips ou Richard Hamilton) e no grafismo (fazendo conviver nomes “cotados” como Eduardo Paolozzi com estreantes como Charles Platt).
O meu próximo texto na Bang! será sobre este período febril e fascinante da revista, pleno de surpresas visuais, e que faz parecer uma tremenda injustiça o facto de a Ambit (outra revista literária em que Ballard e Paolozzi colaboraram) ter sido motivo de um artigo na Eye e de uma monografia em torno das colagens de Paollozi (The Jet-Age Compendium), e a New Worlds destes anos não ter ainda merecido essa atenção.

Capa de Eduardo Paolozzi (Agosto de 1967). Reproduz um excerto do portfolio Moonstrips Empire News desse ano, o qual é tema de longo ensaio de Christopher Finch dentro da revista. Este é o número dominado por Paolozzi, que tem ainda no verso da capa um anúncio à abertura da sua exposição e aparece mencionado na ficha técnica como “conselheiro aeronáutico”.

Capa de Stephen Dwoskin (Abril de 1968). Uma das melhores capas da New Worlds, e uma que poderia certamente ser reproduzida em qualquer livro sobre o design editorial em Inglaterra nos anos de 1960. O gosto pela abstração a partir de detalhes fotográficos, a palete cromática mínima, o impacto do espaço a negro na composição fazem lembrar as capas de Terry James para o London Science Fiction Book Club da altura.

Capa de Mervyn Peake (Abril de 1969). Capa póstuma (Peake morrera no ano anterior), tendo Moorcock escolhido um desenho de Peake que se adequasse ao destaque desse número, a publicação na íntegra de A Boy and His Dog de Harlan Ellison.

Capa de Andrew Lanyon (Dezembro de 1969). Outra capa ao nível da de Dwoskin: perfeita composição tipográfica (de novo apenas a Helvetica, seguindo o logo da revista), uso eficaz da fotografia, fazendo-a caminhar quase para a abstracção ou para a insinuação de formas ameaçadoras ao estilo surrealista (e a ligação com as palavras “God” ou “Hitler” nos títulos ainda acentua mais a sua estranheza e a sua força hipnótica sobre o observador).

Capa de Charles Platt (Março de 1970). Platt fez melhores e piores capas do que esta na New Worlds, mas a algo cacofónica composição dos títulos é compensada pelo impacto do motivo fotográfico (uma caixa metálica de arquivo) no fundo vermelho,e a forma como as palavras e as imagens na gaveta se compõem como numa colagem. Segundo a ficha técnica, trata-se de uma parcela do arquivo do “departamento de arte de um dos principais editores e importadores de livros e revistas eróticos da Grã-Bretanha”.

Next month a text of mine on the 1967-1971 period of New Worlds magazine will be published in Bang! magazine. Edited mainly by Michael Moorcock and having in J.G Ballard a frequent and inspired (and inspirational) collaborator, the magazine was the “bible” of the then-known-as “new wave” of  “speculative fiction” writers from the USA and Britain. Breaking away from the traditional and very conservative formal restraints of the genre, the New Worlds of these years was a visually striking literary magazine, also publishing seminal essays on visual artists like M.C. Escher, Peter Philips or Eduardo Paolozzi (a friend of both Ballard and Moorcock, who was also pivotal in the magazine’s new look’s inception). Ambit, a small “experimental” literary magazine Ballard and Paolozzi were also collaborators of during the same period, got the attention of Eye magazine some years ago (see the article here) and the collages Paolozzi did for it were the subject of a recent monograph (The Jet-Age Compendium), but New Worlds – a very proud, surprising and graphically interesting item of London’s ebullient 1960s alternative press scene – remains distant from the attention and study it deserves.
These are the only 5 issues of New Worlds I own. From top to bottom, the covers are by: Eduardo Paolozzi (August 1967), Stephen Dwoskin (April 1968), Mervyn Peake (April 1969), Andrew Lanyon (December 1969) and Charles Platt (March 1970).
For more on New Worlds in this period, read my interview with Michael Moorcock: part I and part II.

“Nostalgic for the future”

Este é o número 9 (de 1974) da revista Science Fiction Monthly (SFM), publicada pela New English Library (NEL), uma editora de paperbacks criada em 1961 e especializada, sobretudo, em ficção científica. Bastam as dimensões para traduzir a importância que o género tinha na altura: 40 x 28 cm, num misto de revista glossy e jornal (as folhas não são agrafadas), sendo que o verso da capa servia de poster, exibindo uma obra do ilustrador entrevistado em cada número e que serviria, igualmente, de capa para uma das publicações da NEL ou de outras editoras.

Este é o único número desse revista que possuo, e a razão para isso compõe-se de duas palavras: David Pelham (cuja ilustração para Tiger! Tiger! de Alfred Bester adorna a capa). As duas páginas que lhe são dedicadas tinham como claro pretexto a reedição pela Penguin, nesse ano de 1974, das obras emblemáticas de J.G. Ballard da década precedente, com novas capas e uma caixa (Prova A) primorosamente ilustradas e concebidas por Pelham, que era à altura o director de arte da grande editora inglesa.

Prova A

O interesse da entrevista aqui publicada (apesar do título algo pomposo: “The artist in Science Fiction”: para vê-la e lê-la na íntegra, ir aqui e aqui) estende-se, contudo, para além da inegável importância deste designer no panorama da edição inglesa desses anos. Não sendo um ilustrador exclusivamente dedicado à fantasia e à FC, como todos os outros entrevistados pela SFM, e não tendo apenas, dentro do género, ilustrado as capas de Ballard (são suas muitas das capas da série de FC da Penguin dos anos 70, bem como a icónica capa de A Clockwork Orange, e já na Panther em finais dos anos 60 se encontram capas suas para obras de FC), ele é aqui apresentado quase como “o” ilustrador de Ballard, uma simbiose que teria a sua justificação no conhecido apreço que o autor manifestou por essas capas da Penguin de meados da década. O curioso é que a simbiose se traduz a um nível extra visual: se Ballard sentiu que as ilustrações de Pelham “cristalizavam algumas das suas mais poderosas imagens literárias”, este, por seu lado, parece pensar e exprimir-se em uníssono com aquele.

O que torna o interesse desta entrevista realmente duradouro é, creio, uma tensão surda que subjaz ao simples facto de ela ter ocorrido. Apesar de trabalhar numa editora modelo e de usar a ferramenta da moda na altura (o aerógrafo) e se inscrever numa linha estética devedora da Pop, as ilustrações de FC de Pelham não eram obviamente “ortodoxas” no sentido comercial que a NEL ou as outras editoras do género defendiam e promoviam. Pelham pensa e trabalha como um designer e um director de arte, recorrendo a bancos de imagens, procurando cruzamentos entre o sentido do texto e o zeitgeist. A força motriz do conceito de “colagem” é nítida. A sua aportação heterodoxa à iconografia do género era já, em 1974, um trabalho solitário de resistência, herdeiro da pesquisa iconoclasta da New Wave inglesa (materializada na revista New Worlds), numa altura em que o próprio Ballard dava os primeiros passos para fora da FC. No cerne, a questão era: que imagem nova pode a FC ter, ou então, quanto da imagem e da estética do presente e do passado recente contamina a visão de futuros mais ou menos remotos?

Essa “nostalgia do futuro”, assumindo o futuro como a imagem decadente, sob a acção das forças da entropia, das novas tecnologias do presente, é o programa de Pelham nestas ilustrações genuinamente “ballardianas”. A suavidade das gradações dada pelo aerógrafo e a obsessão pelo acabamento perfeito (que contrariam de certa forma a “brutalidade” e “selvajaria” que Pelham vê nelas) não retiram às imagens uma profunda melancolia e uma malaise que era, ao mesmo tempo, alheia à estética da FC ilustrada por então e muito contemporânea aos anos pós-1968.

“Pelham describes his illustrations as ‘uncompromising, brutal and savage’: machines appear starkly and incongruously against a background of frightening simplicity –  and present a philosophy of the future in picture form. To Pelham these machines are the debris of our society: ‘I’ve a big thing about machines and their subsequent breakdown. I love the idea of all this work going into making a machine and then it not working or being left redundant.’
Pelham explains his outlook in terms of a simple analogy: as many people find romance in viewing previous epochs, so he finds romance in seeing the future as if it were already the past – in visualizing ruins created from the artifacts we are manufacturing now.” (SFM, nr. 9. vol. 1, 1974, pp.6-7)

In English soon.

Michael Moorcock: “I think I preferred my own imagination” (Part I)

Michael Moorcock, circa 1963 (photo taken from here).

With a career now spanning over 50 years, Michael Moorcock (born in London in 1939) is indefinable. A SF writer who set on a mission to turn SF on its head and who had little respect for its Golden Age ‘pantheon’, or a pulp writer who nevertheless, through the sheer refinement of his prose, made it to the The Times‘ 2008 list of “The 50 greatest British writers since 1945”? A core Londoner who wrote one of the best literary hymns to the city, Mother London, and yet feels at home in either Texas or Paris? A hugely read, cultivated, cerebral man of letters who made close friends and collaborators among Pop and comic book artists, and who mingled and performed with hard rock bands? James Cawthorn, one of the many artists he worked with, created in 1979 a dual portrait of Moorcock as the fin de siècle dandy aesthete and the wordage-obsessed barbarian, but one feels that there are at least five or more panels missing in that diptych.

Moorcock’s two sides: The Aesthetic and The Apocalyptic
(drawn by James Cawthorn in 1979).

I decided to contact him for this interview after my curiosity over his relationship with J.G. Ballard and their work at New Worlds magazine (of which Moorcock was editor before he was 30) lead me to read Colin Greenland’s 1980 essay The Entropy Exhibition, a neatly designed volume addressing the so called “New Wave” of British SF. I followed that with Death is no Obstacle, a series of interviews by Greenland, published by the Mancunian survivors Savoy Books, in which Moorcock’s astounding erudition and clear thoughts on his legendary writing (and editing) methods get under the spotlight. But both books somehow came up short in what concerned the visual side of his career (which has hardly been contained to the written word), the graphic flair of New Worlds alone (especially in the period of 1967-1971) serving as example that perhaps more could be unveiled or at least probed into.

These (perhaps too long and wordy) questions caught him jet-lagging in Paris after a flight from Texas, “distracted in finishing a book” and perhaps with some curiosity over the releasing this month of Savoy’s mammoth (and exquisitely designed by John Coulthart) Into the Media Web, a 700-plus pages volume collecting Moorcock’s non fiction writings. That he has still managed to come back with answers that are as revealing as they are precise, considering some of these facts and people belong to a now distant era, is a proof of the accessibility and worldliness of this legendary writer.

A 50-year long ride: Savoy Books’ Into the Media Web, due to be released this month (design: John Coulthart)

1. You began editing and writing at quite an early age, still in your teens. Apart from your obvious literary influences then, E.R. Burroughs and Robert. E. Howard mainly, were you image driven in any way? What were the comic books, book covers or films that stirred your imagination as a teenager, and did they so as strongly as the literary content?
Michael Moorcock: The only two comics I liked as a kid were Captain Marvel and Captain Marvel Junior from the US and The Eagle with Dan Dare et al. I didn’t otherwise like comics and went for the last juvenile magazine which was all text. It was called The Champion. I liked illustrators and in those days was able to get the J.Allen St. John jackets from the publisher to put around my 2nd hand copies. I loved magazines which carried illustrations or, for instance, the William books of Richmal Crompton which always had Thomas Henry’s beautiful illustrations. Very few films, all in all, but I tended to like the historical pictures like El Cid or The Vikings or those biblical epics. I never much liked SF movies and still don’t much. I think I preferred my own imagination!

“…in those days was able to get the J.Allen St. John jackets from the publisher
to put around my 2nd hand copies…”

2. In Death is no Obstacle you told Colin Greenland that you had written The Printer’s Devil (under the pseudonym Bill Barclay, for Compact Books in 1965) from the cover artwork for Dennis Wheatley’s The Devil Rides Out, the one where the devil literally rides on a horse’s back. Was it common to wrap up stories and novels around any given imagery in those publishing houses? And did you get to choose the images or were they imposed upon you?
MM: I did. It was common in the pulp world. I wrote at least one story (The Greater Conqueror) for a cover Carnell had by Gerard Quinn. Ironically he used the cover for a different issue. The artwork was shown to me and I would write a scene to fit it and whatever title the publisher had chosen.

3. J.G. Ballard was pretty much image driven as an SF writer (he cites in his autobiography going to see the Surrealists exhibitions in London in the 1950s and particularly the “This is Tomorrow” exhibition in 1956 as major influences on his writing). Being ten years his junior, did your visual references overlap his? You seemed to have mutual friends in the Pop Art scene, like Eduardo Paolozzi.
MM: Yes. I’d seen the same exhibitions. I introduced Ballard to Paolozzi. He liked surrealists more than I did, though I certainly was a great fan of them. It was one of the things we had in common. The main reason I wanted to make New Worlds big and printed on art paper was so I could use good illustrators and run articles on the new pop artists, many of whom were using SF imagery as we were.

Richard Hamilton’s collage “Just What Is It that Makes Today’s Homes So Different,
So Appealing?”, created for the 1956 “This is Tomorrow” exhibition

4. Did your shared disgust for what was (and is still) known as the “Golden Age” of SF extend to the way these texts were visually translated in the covers of magazines and paperbacks? In other words, were both of you claiming for a new visual identity for SF as well as for new themes and vocabulary?
MM: I loved all that pulp stuff as did Eduardo, Richard Hamilton and others. Hamilton accused me of ‘destroying’ SF precisely because he liked pulp. But we wanted to use certain techniques and imagery from SF, much as they did, to confront the modern world. We contended that English fiction had become lost in nostalgia and I argued that most SF was also disguised nostalgia. I had no interest in simply reproducing the nostalgic ‘buzz’ of old pulps and so on.

On New Worlds: “I had a very clear idea of the artists I wanted to use. For instance we were the first Anglophone publication to use Escher.”

The “New Worlds” issue of July 1967 (cover art by M.C. Escher).

5. When looking now at the covers of the 1967-1971 period of New Worlds magazine, one is still struck by how contemporary they look (some of them could still be used today). Did you have a very clear idea of what you wanted visually for the magazine or did the input given by the designers happen to coincide with your vision?
MM: I had a very clear idea of the artists I wanted to use. For instance we were the first Anglophone publication to use Escher. Vivienne Young had studied underJoseph Cornell. Pam Zoline had studied fine art at the Slade, so most of our covers were by fine artists. Fine artists were eager to work with NW because there were few publications commissioning covers by them. We used good new photographers like Gabe Nasemann, too.

[ Continued in PART II ]

Landscapes From a Dream

Excelente artigo de James Pardey sobre as capas de David Pelham na Penguin para os livros de J.G. Ballard: Landscapes From a Dream: How the Art of David Pelham Captured the Essence of J G Ballard’s Early Fiction (apanhado no Ballardian, mas originário da revista online Vector).

Ballard tipográfico

Retiradas de um bom volume monográfico publicado em 1984 pela RE/SEARCH (n. 8/9), estas são quatro experiências de J.G. Ballard numa nova forma de romance, compostas como se tratassem de anúncios publicitários em revistas científicas (sendo que essa foi a matéria prima de onde o autor retirou os elementso destas colagens). São da primeira metade dos anos de 1960, e foram publicadas na revista Ambit (publicação essa paga por Ballard, como se, realmente, de anúncios se tratassem!), revista da qual foi o editor de “prosa” durante muitos anos.
A Ambit serviu de laboratório “visual” para o escritor (foi nela que pré-publicou um excerto de The Atrocity Exhibition em 1970), da mesma forma que a New Worlds de Michael Moorcock, entre 1967 e 1971, também lhe permitiu experiências formais muito arrojadas, influenciadas, em grande medida, pelo seu convívio com alguns artistas da vanguarda londrina da altura, em especial Eduardo Paolozzi (de quem se publicou há pouco tempo o seu trabalho gráfico para a mesma Ambit, num volume chamado The Jet Age Compendium).

ADDENDUM e CORRECÇÃO: O sempre atento Michael Moorcock enviou-me, por email, e por sugestão do editor da Savoy e antigo colaborador da New Worlds Mike Butterworth, a informação de que afinal estes spreads foram publicados na New Worlds e não na Ambit (Martin Bax, o director da Ambit, apenas ficou com eles e tinha-os encaixilhados e bem confortáveis em cima da lareira).

TYPOGRAPHICAL BALLARD
These four samples of J.G. Ballard‘s 1960’s experiments on a new form of novel were originally published in the magazine Ambit, and were taken from a very informative issue of RE/SEARCH on Ballard, published in 1984. They look like ads in scientific magazines (which were precisely the source material for these collages) and their publication in Ambit was actually paid by the author as advertisement! Ballard used Ambit, of which he was “prose editor” for many years, as a visual laboratory, as he did, in a way, with Michael Moorcock’s New Worlds in its most radical period, from 1967 to 1971. He was by them greatly influenced by his friend the artist Eduardo Paolozzi’s work, whose graphic work for Ambit was recently published in a volume called The Jet Age Compendium.

Addendum and correction: I just got this email from Michael Moorcock to correct me on where exactly were these spreads published. And who better to do so than him? Here’s what he wrote:

Cheers, Pedro.
Mike Butterworth says Mr F is Mr F stuff never appeared in Ambit at all but only in NW. He quoted Pringle on the subject (always the most conscientiously researched). Turned out Jimmy had given them to Martin Bax who’d had them framed. They were then exhibited in Barcelona, thanking Bax, thus the confusion.
All best,
Mike