#Fontana paperbacks

[thefugitivesaint]

''A Chamber of Horrors'' unlocked by John Hadfield, 1970 Source

[the25centpaperback]

False Scent by Ngaio Marsh, cover by Unknown Artist (1963)

[weirdlookindog]

A Chamber of Horrors ed. by John Hadfield - Fontana Books, 1970.

[paperbackpurgatory]

Horror Stories (1974)

The 2nd Fontana Book of Great Horror Stories

[djohnhopper]

BOOKS: Fontana Ghost Stories... Expanding my pdf library with some Fontana ghost story books. These little paperback anthologies of great ghost stories used to be really popular, and I devoured them when I was a teenager. To revisit them, decades afterwards, seems fitting.

[annlarimer]

Fontana took the best bits from however many script drafts there were (I think I've got three but they're in the garage - no idea how many there actually were), wove them together, added a ton of her own stuff, and made the best possible version of the story that could fit in a standard 70s novelization paperback. (Much in the same way Alan Dean Foster turned the animated series stories into little jewels, but way gayer.) She also gave Helena more to do. There's even a nice hardcover edition that's hard to find but won't come apart.

The series bible and surviving scripts are not great, even for 70s SF, so even after all this time I'm not quite sure how I feel about the show not getting picked up. Whoever was in charge at NBC then insisted that they ignore the ending of the pilot, so Questor never [SPOILER], and (perhaps seeing the homoeroticism on the wall) toss Jerry Robinson into the bin, so that Questor again becomes a fugitive in search of his origins. I will happily watch Robert Foxworth read the phone book, but this was a fucking terrible idea.

Here is a bts photo that I am not supposed to own.

@paperbackparadise did a hilarious remake of the first paperback cover called MAKING A FUCK MAN and can I find it? I cannot.

with the much-appreciated help of helen @mashbrainrot i found + read the entire novelization of The Questor Tapes, written by Trek alum DC Fontana (available here on internet archive), and i have some. choice snippets to share with you all (in the order they appeared in the book)

(more under the cut:)

(this one ^ made me insane because i quite literally made a joke about jerry doing up questor's tie for him while watching the movie. this and several other moments felt like DC Fontana was somehow in my brain while writing)

(a brother's...Uh-huh)

these and so many other moments in this novelization made me lose my mind. i highly recommend reading it if you enjoyed the questor tapes--it's a quick read, adds a lot of interesting material to the movie, and is overall just an excellent adaptation!!

[chuckbbirdsjunk]

[seattlemysterybooks]

ebay

1949 Gollancz hardcover

1955 Fontana reissue

cover art by John Kose

Seattle Mystery Bookshop

[graphicpolicy]

Preview: Getting Dizzy

Getting Dizzy preview. Dizzy wants to be the best! But with everything she's tried, including roller skating, this teen can only achieve one thing-disaster. #comics #comicbooks

[my-52-weeks-with-christie]

[mzannthropy]

Here are my Agatha Christie paperbacks (found in a charity shop years ago) I’ve been meaning to photograph. Except for the two in the bottom pic, all are Fontana publications; the The Big Four and N or M were published by Pan Books. As far as I was able to establish, the covers for A Caribbean Mystery, Nemesis, Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side, Sparkling Cyanide and By The Pricking of My Thumbs were illustrated by Tom Adams, probably the best known Agatha Christie artist. The cover for Sad Cypress was done by Ian Robinson, using the same style as Tom. The rest I don’t know. 

My favourite is the Mirror Crack’d cover. I’m sure you agree with me that’s it’s beautiful!

[ijustkindalikebooks]

Elephants Can Remember by Agatha Christie.

[the25centpaperback]

Colour Scheme by Ngaio Marsh, cover by Unknown Artist (1964)

[weirdlookindog]

The Second Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories, 1970.

[fall-from-typeface]

Book Cover Design: The influence of Psychedelia and Modernism

Abstraction continued through the late 60’s and into the 70’s with the added influence of psychedelia; colours were bright and flashy and layouts freed from their historical restraints.

Chester Anderson, The Butterfly Kid 1967 Cover Design Gary Morrow. Harlan Ellison, Approaching Oblivion 1974 Cover Design by Leo & Diane Dillon. Michael Moorcock, The Singing Citadel 1970 Cover Design by Bob Haberfield.

Modernism in book cover design also grew in this era. Rudolph de Harak was an influential designer of the time whose work is deeply rooted in modernism. De Harak’s work was not limited to one area; he later went on to design exhibitions, environmental art and teach for 25 years but in the 60’s and 70’s he was responsible for designing nearly 350 covers for McGraw-Hill Paperbacks.

“The nearly 350 covers he designed throughout the 60's for McGraw-Hill paperbacks, with subjects like philosophy, anthropology, psychology and sociology, offered him a place to test the limits of conceptual art and photography. He used the opportunity to experiment with a variety of approaches inspired by Dada, Abstract Expressionism and Op-Art. His McGraw-Hill paperbacks, especially, had a strong influence on contemporary graphic design.”

(Heller, 2002)

A selection of some of the 350 book covers designed by Rudolph de Harak for McGraw-Hill. Pictures from Alfalfa Studio, 2017.

The Fontana Modern Masters, a series of pocket guides on writers and philosophers of the 20th century were unique in that their cover art were a series of abstract art, that when placed together with the other books in the series, formed a larger, composite artwork. The idea was that of Fontana’s art director John Constable who commissioned the artist Oliver Bevan to design the first collection published in 1970/1971.

“These angular shapes in garish, clashing colours gave the covers an ‘edgy’ quality that was offset with soft typography superimposed across the top of the artwork in a rounded sans serif bold. And, in a stroke of marketing genius, the back cover explains that ‘the set combines to form [a] whole painting, and can be arranged in an unlimited number of different patterns’ – an obvious enticement to buy all ten books and make your own art à la Vasarely”

(www.eyemagazine.com, 2009)

Fontana continued to publish collections in this manner up until 1984, with each collection focussing on a different shape, from rectangles and squares to triangles and circles.

Book covers for Fontanta Modern Masters from 1970 - 1984

References

Graphéine - Agence de communication Paris Lyon. (2017). A short history of book covers - 3/4 - Graphéine. [online] Available at: https://www.grapheine.com/en/history-of-graphic-design/history-of-book-covers-3.

Heller, S. (2002). Rudolph de Harak, 78, Artist And Environmental Designer (Published 2002). The New York Times. [online] 30 Apr. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/30/arts/rudolph-de-harak-78-artist-and-environmental-designer.html?pagewanted=1 [Accessed 24 Feb. 2021].

Alfalfa Studio. (2017). The Modernist Compositions of Rudolph de Harak. [online] Available at: http://alfalfastudio.com/2017/01/21/joses-blog-the-modernist-compositions-of-rudolph-de-harak/ [Accessed 24 Feb. 2021].

www.eyemagazine.com. (n.d.). Eye Magazine | Feature | The shape of the century. [online] Available at: http://www.eyemagazine.com/feature/article/the-shape-of-the-century [Accessed 24 Feb. 2021].

[michaelsellars]

The 18th Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories, edited by R. Chetwynd-Hayes. #horror https://t.co/urWvtw34la

The 18th Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories, edited by R. Chetwynd-Hayes.#horror pic.twitter.com/urWvtw34la

— Michael Sellars | Paperback Horror | Horror Writer (@HorrorPaperback) November 12, 2020

from Twitter https://twitter.com/HorrorPaperback