BOGUS BOOKS is home to all the fake book covers featured in A LIFE IN CHEESE.
1.
HE PLOUGHED HER FURROW by BRONTE AUSTEN
For this cover I wanted something that resembled the bodice-ripping Mills & Boon romance novels of the 1970s. This was a fairly easy one to do as all I did was download a free book template and then added a suitably steamy picture in the aperture. All that was to be done after that was come up with a title - He Ploughed Her Furrow was taken from one of Robert Burns' rude poems and He Tweaked My Nipple Nuts is a line spoken by Kryton in the TV series Red Dwarf.
2. SHOPPING FOR CHEESE WITH MOTHER
I wanted Jim's favourite childhood book to be something that was instantly recognisable and for that I used one of the Ladybird books I remembered from my own childhood; my own personal favourite, and one that I read to my own children, was Piggly Plays Truant. For this one, however, I used a 1950s book called Shopping with Mother and just added Cheese to the title. You can still get hold of this book in second-hand shops today. The great thing about the Ladybird books was the exceptional artwork and the simplistic language that any child could follow. I obviously altered the text, using the exact same font, to include cheese. If this book were to be rewritten for today's children it would probably only contain one page - "Here is the supermarket. You can buy anything here."
3. CHEESE AND WHINE by E.L. Friteuse
Fifty Shades of Grey is so open to parody because it is unbelievably badly written. It reads like a very worldly wise twelve-year old girl had written it in between long periods of mobile phone usage. I wanted to do a copy of the cover that included cheese. The fork with the cheese on the end is at the exact same angle as the tie on the cover of the original novel. If rubbish like Fifty Shades of Grey can make £6 million in a few months it either says something about the intelligence of the readers or the power of advertising. Apparently it is the fastest selling book of all time . . . and also the most discarded one.
4. CHEESE MONTHLY June 2001
For this magazine cover I wanted to capture the naffness of 70s women's magazine covers, with their bold claims about losing weight and questionnaire's about whether your partner is good in bed or not. My wife has some of these magazines (they were handed down to her, obviously) and the adverts within their pages are hilariously sexist.
5. CHEESE GROWING FOR BEGINNERS by Jan Vandergraaf
Does anyone remember those black and yellow Teach Yourself Books that you could never teach yourself anything from because they were too difficult to understand? Teach Yourself Einstein's Theory of Relativity left me completely baffled. Mind you, I was seven when I tried to read it. I still didn't understand it when I read Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time, but Bill Bryson explained it in much simpler terms in A Short History of Nearly Everything.
6. CHRISTMAS IN A CAN by Claire Friteuse
Christmas wrapping paper, a can of cranberry sauce, some holly and a Santa hat. Simple!
7. CHUNDERBALL by Crispen Fotherington-Smythe
I got the picture of the kangaroo from the label off a bottle of Australian wine. I then copied it onto a PowerPoint slide and enlarged it and got this really nice blurry image. It was just good fortune that the kangaroo was looking over his (or her) shoulder - all I had to do then was add the rifle sight to the far right of the picture to suggest that the person at the other end of the rifle was drunk.
8. COOKING FROM A CAN by Claire Friteuese
This is my
homage to my favourite author of cookery books - Nigella Lawson. At parties around my house my friend Craig and I often take her books off the shelf in the kitchen just to look at the sexy photographs of her within the pages. I tried to make this cover look
exactly like the cover of her great book
How To Be A Domestic Goddess. The fonts are identical although the words are different and the cupcake from Nigella's book has been replaced with a can of dog food. Annabel Langbein, for those of you unfamiliar with New Zealand television, is kind of like the Kiwi version of Nigella. Hang on, what am I saying? Nobody is like Nigella. I recently bought her seminal cookery book
How To Eat and was massively disappointed to find that there was only one photograph of her in it. I haven't broken the news to Craig yet.
9. THE BOYS' BUMPER BOOK OF WESTERN PHILOSOPHY
I wanted this to look both pretentious and childish. I was originally thinking of using Rodin's
Thinker as the cover picture but my wife, Jackie, came up with the idea of using cowboys. It was so obvious really and after a bit of resistance on my part I decided to go with it. The picture is from the cover is from
The Riders of the Range Annual 1954. For those old enough to remember
Jeff Arnold and The Riders of the Range began as a radio series before it was adapted into a comic strip written by the great Charles Chilton with art by Frank Humphris. Chilton was a prolific writer; he was responsible for
The Adventures of PC49 although he is most fondly remembered for the classic BBC radio series
Journey Into Space. He was also the producer and occasional writer for hugely influential
Goon Show.
10. DIURETICS by Elroy Hubble
For this, I wanted something that looked almost exactly like L Ron Hubbard's
Dianetics. It was important that it contained at least one bold claim like THIS BOOK WILL CHANGE YOUR LIFE! I think it's a great marketing ploy for a book to claim that it will change your life without actually stipulating whether it would be for the better or not. WARNING! THIS BOOK MAY CONTAIN NUTS! was, I thought, nice and bold, as it perfectly sums up, in my opinion, the mental state of the followers of all the mad religious cults that have sprung up over the past two thousand years.
11. ELROY HUBBLE: FOIL & TROUBLE by Henry Higgins
I wanted this cover to look like the kind of biography that I would pick up from in a bookshop. I wanted it to have a kind of mysterious feel about it, whilst at the same time have some blurb telling you that it was a load of rubbish.
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2. POSSUM SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE
There were lots of magazines that had this kind of feel to them back in the 1950s and 60s. The cover here is just a copy of one from the 50s with just the titles and the date changed. The picture's still the same. There really wasn't any need to change it as it was perfect.
13. CHEESE-STEALERS FROM HOTHRATHERER by Elroy Hubble
It was important that this cover was as garish as possible. The picture is a detail from a much larger picture and I really wanted it to bear no relevance to the story, setting, characters or plot. As it was supposed to be the basis for another one of the crazy new religions that keep popping up then it should also have a bold statement claiming that it would change your life. Clearly, the only people whose lives are changed by books which bear the slogan 'This book can change your life' on the cover are nutters whise lives need changing anyway. Only not that way.
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