The Death Of Book Illustration
Okay. So I know this is 98% off the topic of cartoons, but I just wanted to share my grief over the lack of illustrations in modern “grown-up” literature these days. Such an added kick is artwork in the books of, say the 1800s, that it’s a colossal drag that we don’t see such drawings, paintings, and etchings in works by Johns Grisham, Updike, or Irving. Or Danielle Steele. Why is that? The cost? I can’t think of too many books that wouldn’t benefit by a handful of illustrations. One artist’s interpretation of another artist’s art. Heck, there are probably tens of thousands of talented illustrators out there who’d be eager to take a crack at a gig like that. Anyway, if you’re into this sort of thing, please see BibliOddyssey for a big dose of inspiration. Now, granted, most of the illustrations on this blog are not from works of fiction, but they still may make you yearn for the days of Phiz, True Williams, and Thomas Bewick.
PS. If anyone reading this can send me to a copy of the speech Bruce Springsteen gave when accepting his Academy Award for the “Streets of Philadelphia” in 1994, I’d appreciate it. He mentioned something about art helping art, and I think it’s appropriate to an entry on illustration and writing.
PPS. By coincidence, the four modern-day authors I chose to use as examples above are all in the Random House stable. So maybe that’s where I should send my concerns.
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On August 22nd, 2006 at 12:00 am
What an interesting thought - I wonder what a modern-day Rackham would look like illustrating for a current thriller novel.
I think we don’t see book illustration (or, typically, any other illustration) like we used to because the internal imaging process has eaten its own tail. From nothing, to hand-drawn illustrations which show style but leave specific, literal details up to the imagination of the reader, to photo-illustrations which show explicit-down-to-the-last-detail pictures of real people and tell us “this is what the character looks like” in order to establish the marketed property in concrete, back to nothing again. I imagine publishers assume that we already have a photo in our heads of Tom Cruise or Harrison Ford to plug in to the main character role and that trying to engage the imagination differently would be simply irrelevant.
Re-reading, I think I come off as being a little more bitter than I actually am. Call it “bitter-sweet”, I suppose. Take a James Bond movie poster example. When I compare the colorful, design-crazy imagery of smirking semi-cartoon characters bathing with a pile of hotties or flying mini-copters through impossible sky-scapes of exploding ordnance in the posters for You Only Live Twice (did any of this actually happen in the movie the way it’s represented?) to the homogenized steel-blue photo collages of the later Brosnan movies, it definitely makes me yearn for the ’60’s (even though I was born in the ’70’s).
Speaking of “born in the ’70’s”, how crazy would a really stylishly-illustrated V.C. Andrews book be? That could get really freaky.
On August 22nd, 2006 at 12:00 am
There was a guy who ran Ted Turner’s ‘Turner Publishing’ who agreed with you Eric. He released a few books with illos, but mostly, like everything else at that company, it didn’t do too well. I think it’ll take someone doing an everyday edition of Lord of the Rings or something to maybe kick start a new trend.