A tale of two front covers

By the time you read this, Sam&Sam’s new book should be available through Amazon. I say ‘should’ because publishing a book through Amazon has been yet another fresh learning curve for us and sometimes we just had to wait to discover what would happen next and in particular when. It is only a 91-page book, but the effort of getting it out has been…well, enough to prevent me posting regularly on Calderonia for two months!

Eventually, Sam2 will do a guest post that describes his experience of typesetting this book with a different package from my biography of George and publishing it with Amazon, as he did a year ago about typesetting that book and publishing it ourselves with UK master printers Clays of Bungay. All I will do now is explain why the new book has two covers:

Right: the ‘first edition’ cover, left: the ‘second edition’ cover

Naturally, we produced a range of designs for the cover to show to the principal author, John Polkinghorne, fully aware that he does not like ‘quantum hype’ on his book covers, i.e. artists’ impressions of electrons, gluons, bosons etc. The design on the right won, and I would be the first to agree that it suggests a serious philosophical work (too serious?).

However, I am extremely fond of the one on the left. This incorporates a work of art by Naum Gabo entitled ‘Opus 9’ and I first saw it at Kettle’s Yard when we were beginning to think of cover designs. I was struck by its beauty. Appropriately, too, for the contents of the book, it seems to suggest deep space and ‘The love that moves the Sun and the other stars’ (Dante). But John, understandably for a former Professor of Mathematical Physics at Cambridge University, sees it as not so much a work of art as yet more ‘quantum hype’!

We have therefore compromised by producing a ‘first edition’ (publication date 8 September) using what Sam2 and I call ‘the typographical cover’, i.e. the one on the right, and a ‘second edition’ (publication date John Polkinghorne’s eighty-ninth birthday, 16 October) using what we call ‘the Gabo cover’. These two editions will run in parallel. It is, I explained to John, fashionable these days to give readers a choice of cover when they purchase books printed and bound on demand, and he accepted that.

The only textual difference is that the imprint page of the second edition carries a lengthy acknowledgement to the Gabo Trust and the Tate Gallery for permission to use Naum Gabo’s mysterious image on the second cover. I am indeed grateful to them.

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS 

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’  Michael Pursglove, East-West Review

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.