Thursday, March 24, 2005
(8:50 PM) | Anonymous:
Continuum's Changing Minds Series: Or, WTF?!?!
I think I speak for many of us when I say, I am thankful that Continuum Books bought out a bunch of smaller book publishers. Not that I favor monopoly, but it is nice to know that I can always get a hold of Barth's Church Dogmatics (though I likely never will). More than the availability of Barth, I was more pleased when Continuum bought Athlone and continued to publish the aesthetically pleasing white and red covers. Much like the Princeton editions of Kierkegaard's corpus, these books are just classy and I don't feel either dumpy reading them in public (like Hackett editions) or ridiculous, like a wanna-be Andy Warhol (like the Minnesota books that are the size of magazines).So you can understand my horror when I was perusing Continuum's website and found that they had, indeed, changed many of the classic books format. Instead of classy they now look like skateboard graphics. While trying to hard to be bad may have been cool in the early 90's, it just looks horrible for an academic book.
Here are a couple samples with commentary:
So the photograph is kind of "edgy". It is, after all, a mother fucking tank! Nothing is edgier than a tank! Oh, I get it, "War Machine." It's just, I don't know, did they really have to use that faux-70's lettering? Is this a book about a Vincent Gallo movie?
This one seems to suggest that the graphic designer knows shit about these books. Rather, he is just going off of the title or some analysis that a lackey at Continuum wrote up for him. This wouldn't be a problem, but it is due to the drama that this cover is trying to portray.
Derrida is rolling over in his grave.
Yeah, that's right; Erasmus & Luther are blowing up in this joint!
Something about this cover and the fact that Heidegger was a Nazi just rubs me the wrong way. It's all so Middle Earth and the Hand of Saruman.
OK, seriously, over the mother fucking top! Is Bataille a death metal musician for Christ's sake?! What’s with the swastika? Not classy!
But what is great is to juxtapose that cover with this one:
Now, I have to be honest. Some of these covers do play to my teenage angst left over in my 22 year-old body. I also like that by cutting down the size of these books Continuum has lowered the cost for many of these books by about half. The small font is attractive and all that, but I still feel like these should have wheels and I should be standing on top. If it came down to it and I had a choice between the Minnesota editions of Deleuze and Guattari I might choose the Continuum for the text formatting.
British friends, do you think people look ridiculous reading these in the Tube? Am I being too hard on Continuum?
