Book Cover Inspiration

I’m not a fan of Margaret Atwood but this is a brilliant...

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 22:29:42 +0100

I’m not a fan of Margaret Atwood but this is a brilliant cover. I love the spot-varnish pixels, and the creepy pink-eyed bunnies on the wrap are a great bonus! Jacket design by William Webb; photo by Michael Wildsmith.

The Violins of Saint Jacques is the only novel by Patrick Leigh...

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 11:15:53 +0100

The Violins of Saint Jacques is the only novel by Patrick Leigh Fermor; when first published it boasted this lovely dust jacket by Robin Ironside. Today marks the second anniversary of Paddy Leigh Fermor’s death, but his reputation as a writer continues to thrive. The final volume of his journey on foot from Holland to Constantinople, The Broken Road, will be published in September.

I hate to find myself disagreeing with the hugely-talented Daniel Gray, but I must. In his blog...

Thu, 30 May 2013 12:47:05 +0100

I hate to find myself disagreeing with the hugely-talented Daniel Gray, but I must. In his blog post on The Great Gatsby, he says of Penguin’s current Popular Classics range:

I love these little things – cheap and simple and low-maintenance. You don’t have to feel precious about the binding or the cover, you can just stuff it in your pocket and dip into it whenever, wherever. As much as I love a beautiful big hardback book, there’s something liberating about reading something so basic – the printy equivalent of a simple text file. The design gets out of the way and just gives you the words. They are books purely for reading.

The Penguin Popular Classics range, launched in the 1990s, was a truly wonderful thing. It consisted of cheap reprints of public domain bestsellers using old printing plates that were readable and well-set. The covers were similar to those of the full-price Classics format, but using an oval title frame and less-stellar artwork. This series, and the Wordsworth Classics that preceded them, revolutionised reading; they sold for £1, giving the pre-internet reader a chance to explore great literature at minimal cost. I still have a shelf of them that are going strong after nearly two decades.

The more recent Penguin Popular Classics range, with a cover design by David Pearson, are one of the reasons I embraced ebooks. I worship the printed book and will never relinquish it, but the new Popular Classics are trash. They are poorly printed on low-grade paper and offer an appalling reading experience. David Pearson did his best with the cover design – highlighting the ‘green’ nature of the books (they decompose while you are still reading them) but even the world’s best-designed book cover doesn’t look so good when it’s wrapped around a sheaf of toilet paper and bound like a glossy magazine.

The printed book is not a newspaper to be thrown away after reading; it is to be read, shelved, referred to and read again. This Penguin series consists of classics, which are, by definition, not disposable. Ultimately the PPC design is a triumph of form over function. For a casual read, the cheap-and-ugly public domain paperback has been superseded by the free-and-slightly-less-ugly ebook. Better to dispense with the cheap-and-nasty altogether:

And though we are, indeed, now, a wretched and poverty-struck nation, and hardly able to keep soul and body together, still, as no person in decent circumstances would put on his table confessedly bad wine, or bad meat, without being ashamed, so he need not have on his shelves ill-printed or loosely and wretchedly-stitched books…

(From Ruskin’s Sesame and Liles; free ebook available here.)

Form/function griping aside, Daniel Gray’s blog post is 100% correct in its critique of the Great Gatsby film. Save the ticket price and buy yourself the Everyman hardback instead!

Single-serving books from Qantas that last as long as your...

Tue, 28 May 2013 09:29:09 +0100

Single-serving books from Qantas that last as long as your flight. It sounds like a strange idea, but the covers are great!

Just in case you thought Chip Kidd just made idiosyncratic book...

Tue, 14 May 2013 14:41:46 +0100

Just in case you thought Chip Kidd just made idiosyncratic book covers (silly you!), here’s a great example of one of CK’s idiosyncratic book layouts, enshrining some helpful advice from Neil Gaiman.

RIP Stom Thorgerson. (This is off-topic, as he wasn’t a...

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 10:08:20 +0100

RIP Stom Thorgerson. (This is off-topic, as he wasn’t a book designer, but he was the Stanley Kubrick of album cover design.)

"When the collection [For Esme — With Love and Squalor] did not do well in England, Hamilton..."

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 15:42:27 +0100

“When the collection [For Esme — With Love and Squalor] did not do well in England, Hamilton sold the paperback rights to Ace Books, a specialist in cheap, mass-market imprints. In the mid-50s, they reprinted the collection with a cover that featured a tacky blonde and a lurid blurb-line: “Explosive and Absorbing — A Painful and Pitiable Gallery of Men, Women, Adolescents and Children.” By the time Salinger discovered what had happened it was too late for any intervention, besides tearing up his remaining contracts with Hamilton.”

- Can you blame him for insisting all his future covers be so minimal? (Article.)

"The clearest explanation of a good cover that I have ever heard came from Michael Beirut. I was a..."

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 15:37:00 +0100

“The clearest explanation of a good cover that I have ever heard came from Michael Beirut. I was a guest invited to critique a book-cover project he had given to his Yale students. As I was struggling to express some notion about why a particular concept may or may not be working, he got right to the point: “It has to look like what it is.” Indeed.”

- John Gall. (From a good article on book cover design from VQR.)

theoinglis: “Jason Booher designs book covers as well as other...

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 10:18:05 +0100

theoinglis:

“Jason Booher designs book covers as well as other things”

Another winner from David Drummond: Why Philosphise? by...

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 10:16:36 +0100

Another winner from David Drummond: Why Philosphise? by Jean-Francois Lyotard.

Cover for The Broken Road, the final (posthumous) volume...

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 14:38:23 +0100

Cover for The Broken Road, the final (posthumous) volume recounting Patrick Leigh Fermor’s journey on foot from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople. The cover art by the highly-talented Ed Kluz is a perfect companion to the earlier PLF covers by John Craxton, though, with the greatest respect, Kluz’s hand-rendered type is superior. The book is edited from Patrick Leigh Fermor’s papers by his biographer and friend Artemis Cooper, and will be published in September. (via Patrick Leigh Fermor blog.)

lovelybookcovers: The Penguin Lines Series celebrate the 150th...

Wed, 27 Mar 2013 10:09:18 +0000

lovelybookcovers:

The Penguin Lines Series celebrate the 150th anniversary of the London Underground with one book to represent each tube line. Not bad at all, although some covers are much more appealing than others.

Each author chose their own images for their cover (which may explain why they’re a bit hit and miss) but the whole thing was overseen by Jim Stoddart.

Just saw this. The cover for John Gray’s new book, The...

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 14:48:38 +0000

Just saw this. The cover for John Gray’s new book, The Silence of Animals, uses the eye-bogglingly wonderful Carnovsky artwork alluded to hitherto.

Great cover; I love the pen-strokes.

Tue, 19 Mar 2013 12:50:12 +0000

Great cover; I love the pen-strokes.

beatonna: tiny-librarian: I just found this series of books...

Tue, 19 Mar 2013 12:20:14 +0000

beatonna:

tiny-librarian:

I just found this series of books about the wives of Henry VIII, and I have to say I ADORE the covers.

Henry gets progressively older in each one, which is fantastic since most show him as old fat Henry all the time.

The wives all look quite decently accurate too, and are based on portraits done of them. I like that they each have their successors lurking in the background of their covers, like a reminder that they’re not going to be Queen for very long.

I wish more books would do illustrations like this nowadays, instead of using portraits or stock photos.

haha Henry creeping around on these covers is the best.

Henry! You total perv.

Gallery of pulp vintage paperback covers. C’est...

Mon, 11 Mar 2013 14:52:25 +0000

Gallery of pulp vintage paperback covers. C’est magnifique!

Bad Blood by Arne Dahl. One of many excellent covers designed by...

Fri, 08 Mar 2013 15:04:02 +0000

Bad Blood by Arne Dahl. One of many excellent covers designed by Pablo Delcan (via Jacket Mechanical).

Alif the Unseen by G. Willow Wilson. I love everything about...

Mon, 04 Mar 2013 14:06:00 +0000

Alif the Unseen by G. Willow Wilson. I love everything about this cover (designed by Christopher Sergio Design).

Compiled by Joseph Shaylor, from my shelf of books about books.

Sat, 02 Mar 2013 15:24:03 +0000

Compiled by Joseph Shaylor, from my shelf of books about books.

Brilliant gallery of international covers for Nabokov’s Lolita,...

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 22:33:00 +0000

Brilliant gallery of international covers for Nabokov’s Lolita, ranging from the ingenious to the inappropriate to the downright scary. Personal favourites include John Gall’s ‘lips’ (the version shown here is the unused, ‘racier’ draft) and Megan Wilson’s ‘legs’ covers. I suppose it’s appropriate, given the book’s theme of the corruption of the New World, that the most aposite covers for the book have been designed for US editions. My own copy is the Everyman from 1992, whose typographic livery echoes that of the Olympia Press – the original publisher of Lolita. A new book on the art of Lolita by John Bertram and Yuri Leving will be published in August 2013.