the naked ape

As tumblr is probably going the way of MySpace after Monday's purge, I am thinking of ways of transfering some of my activities there to blogspot. The easiest part will be the "old books" tag, as I already have the "antiquarian" tag here, so expect to find photos of old books (from my shelves or observed in the wild) here more often.

To begin with, here are some reflections on naked apes:

I’ve had the German copy of Desmond Morris’s classic pop science book for decades (print run dated 1978), but just this October I discovered the English paperback with a similar but different design (printed 1969):



Assuming that the English cover design was there first, it is interesting to look at what the German publishers changed. They kept most of the chimp and the general idea, but swapped the chimp’s head and the humans, who were replaced with blonder versions. Note also the only skin contact in the English cover is man to chimp, while the German version allows skin contact between humans.

I could marvel at this pair forever … come to think of it, I’ll go looking for other language editions using a similar picture, watch this space.

Update: here we go - first, from Wikipedia, a picture of the author with a 1969 Dutch edition using the same photo as my German edition (but more than one ape):



And here are four editions I found with similar pictures, in Dutch, Finnish, French and Italian: