book jacket designs

CRASH-

Designing pornotopia: Travels in Visual Culture
James Ballard
Tests the readers tastes/sympathies- provokes strong reactions
Dark imagination
Cult book (naked lunch, lolita, clockwork orange)
Issues of marketing, the cover must be acceptable for sale.
Illusion
comparative analysis of existing covers
fidelity of text/ author
Follows trends of the period
Hard to summarise it with one image
Jonathan Cape 1973- phallic, crude gear stick illustration. Ballard "monstrously bad"
Ballard has interest in graphic design, designed for ambit magazine.
James Marsh version
Then reduced to red lips in rear view mirror.
Livre de Poche 1973, car grille metamporphises in to a tongue licking a female form.
Chris Foss 1972. The car menacing above the female figure, with bonnet open like gaping jaw.
Cronenberg film tie in 1996. Risqué in normative terms, does have sexual charge but no fetish indicated.