The Book Design Review

Sunday, July 30, 2006

No Updates for a Few Days

Loyal readers: I'm off to Lollapalooza with my son, so there won't be any updates until Sunday, August 6. Very excited that my son's first concert experience will include the likes of Wilco, Flaming Lips, Ween, Common and Sonic Youth.

So while I'm gone, can the person who is thisclose to buying that 17" MacBook Pro go ahead and do so? C'mon, you know you want it :-)

Hello, Cruel World

Given the audience for this book, this strikes me as just about perfect:

A one-of-a-kind guide to staying alive outside the box, Hello, Cruel World is a much-needed unconventional approach to teenage suicide prevention for marginalized youth who want to stay on the edge, but alive.

The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs

UK on top, US on bottom.

Johnny Mad Dog

The paperback for Johnny Mad Dog (top), and the much hated hardcover (below). Hated by several of you, that is, when I originally posted it. I happen to love it.

Execution

Is it just me, or is the red noose a little bit too much? (And I will leave it up to you to find out what a "Spanish Donkey" is.)

Uncommon Carriers

Man, McPhee has written a lot of books -- according to Wikipedia, this is his 31st. I like this quite a bit -- it seems to be exactly the right tone for the subject -- but I want to see some hand lettering.

Sunday, July 23, 2006

How This Night Is Different

Any strong feelings about explicit design references to packaged goods? The jacket with the bottle of Manischewitz is new; you might remember the cover with the hot dogs from a few months back. And didn't someone get into some legal trouble for a jacket that looked a little too much like a Hersheys chocolate bar wrapper?

I Feel Bad About My Neck

Something about this just doesn't work, but as my loyal readers have pointed out, maybe it's just because of my pesky Y chromosome. :-)

UK Version of Terrorist

Wow. Look at the UK version of John Updike's Terrorist:

I'm guessing the Chip Kidd-designed US cover might be a little too reminiscent of a photo of one of the London suicide bombers:

Lord Vishnu's Love Handles

If we can judge a book by it's cover, I think we would have to conclude that this is a delightfully odd novel.

Catch a Wave

So who's idea do you think it was to make "Beach Boys" bigger than "Brian Wilson?" Marketing department or designer? I know what I think ;-)

Wednesday, July 19, 2006

Time to Update Your Links

The syntax of links on this blog will change on Wednesday, July 25.

If you link to or bookmark http://www.thebookdesignreview.com, you don't have to do anything.

If you have linked to http://nytimesbooks.blogspot.com in your blogroll or have that URL bookmarked, please update your link to http://www.thebookdesignreview.com.

If you've bookmarked, linked to or shared a link that contains "nytimesbooks.blogspot.com..." in the URL, that link will be broken.

RSS should be unaffected if you subscribe using the Feedburner links in the "About the BDR" links to the right. I'll provide up-to-date RSS links when the time comes.

Stay tuned, as I will post new links to the most popular posts, such as Best of 2006, favorites of 2007, and a few more.

Sunday, July 16, 2006

The Ballad of Lee Cotton

Wonderfully evocative of the 50's, and the different shoes make sense given Lee Cotton's life: A "black soul in a white wrapper" who begins a new life as a woman. Or better stated by the character:

"All my life I been hounded for being born the wrong color, or the wrong sex, or dating the wrong person, or living in the wrong place. We ain't what we're born. We're what we do with ourselves.

Interview with Paul Buckley

No doubt one of a bajillion links to Hear Hear's great interview with Penguin art director Paul Buckley. Shawn at Iridesco was nice enough to send the link for part 2.

And in case you missed it, here's part 1.

Thanks, Shawn!

The City Is a Rising Tide

Really, really beautiful. That's all I have to say.

Winkie

The protagonist of "Winkie" is a sentient, animate teddy bear on trial for a number of crimes including Unabomber-style terrorism...

The Ruins

It's never really good when the word "preposterous" appears in the first sentence of a review of your book. Worse is when your book features killer plants that "not only try to ensnare all of Mr. Smith’s characters, but also succeed in choking his novel to death." Ouch. On to the cover: I think it's easy to look at the title treatment and say "hmmm, that's too predictable." But to be honest, I can see myself doing something like that. Can you? C'mon, be honest :-)

Talk Talk / Tooth and Claw

There weren't many of you who liked the US cover of TC Boyle's Talk Talk when I first posted it. Now check out the UK version (bottom).

What amazingly different takes on the same book. What's the book about? A woman has her identity stolen and ultimately figures out the culprit is and undertakes a cross-country chase w/ her boyfriend to find him. Oh yeah, she's deaf too.

The UK version could be the cover for dozens if not hundreds of books. That's the kiss of death for me.

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And a little bonus post: what scares you more, a panther or raccoons? Yeah, me too. Raccoons are nasty.

Kensington Gardens

Groovy, baby, groovy!

Friendship

If you read a review that stated "Drawing on Aristotle, Montaigne, Cicero and Pliny, Epstein lucidly paraphrases and applies wisdom to his own life experience, producing a meditative memoir that is refined and modest in tone, but perhaps too hermetic," would you expect to see something like this? The crazy Rankin Bass type seems really inappropriate.

Sunday, July 09, 2006

The Commissariat of Enlightenment

There's a lot of Soviet-inspired jacket design out there, but this might be one of my favorites.

The Banquet Bug

Let's learn a freaky new word, shall we?

Nyotaimori: "the practice of eating sashimi or sushi from the body of a woman, typically nude, for the purpose of sexual excitement." (Thanks, Wikipedia)

Oh yeah, the book: "This is the fantastical tale of Dan Dong, an unemployed factory worker whose life takes a series of unexpected twists after he discovers that, by posing as a journalist, he can eat exquisite gourmet meals for free at state-sponsored banquets." And I guess there's a prostitute or something thrown in there too.

I can't wait to see the paperback.

A Book About Trees

I'm not sure about many things in life, but I'm *very* sure I will never utter this sentence, either aloud or in my head:

I have always been a bit ashamed of my lack of knowledge about tree species...

But if you're as tortured as the reviewer is over your lack of knowledge about trees, this is the book for you. The Penguin UK version (top) looks great, although there's part of me that expects Frodo Baggins be hiding in there somewhere. The US hardcover version (bottom) perhaps recognized that, and thus came up with something blander than bland.

Sex, Rock & Optical Illusions

I know, I know, you all hate this, but think about it: how many jackets so perfectly match the subject matter (or at least the title? Is there anything more rock and roll than sneaking a blowjob and a glory hole into a design? I think not.

One Mississippi

Not really sure what I think about this, but it reminded me of another lawn-related jacket from a few months back:

But One Mississippi is probably closer to this:

Monday, July 03, 2006

Tamar

So what happens when you're on the shortlist for the prestigious Carnegie Medal? Your paperback gets redesigned, and your name gets a LOT bigger on the cover.

(And now that he's won, should we expect another redesign?)

Gallatin Canyon

How great is this jacket? A brief description of the book (or rather of the title story) is in order:

In the title story, an unnamed smalltimer sets out on a business trip down the winding Gallatin Canyon, Mont., road with his girlfriend, Louise. He conducts his business dealings with phony bluster and indecision, humiliating himself in the eyes of this woman he hopes to marry; things get worse from there.

The selection and treatment of this photo is pretty much perfect. Publishers Weekly talks about "the prevailing dreariness," and if that sky doesn't say "dreary," I don't know what does. And how brilliant that the photo is NOT of the canyon. Rather, we're forced to wonder about the canyon beyond the barrier, and what happens there. Lastly, the barrier itself is wonderful: scarred by repeated crashes and scrapes, it tells us that you don't want to be on this road or in the canyon that's below.

Damn, Knopf puts out some great work.

The Long Tail

Kottke.org links to a review of Chris Anderson's The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Selling Less of More. It's a great article and the book is sure to get tons of press. The idea? That electronic retailing creates niche markets and combats "hits" syndrome. It turns out that the Amazons and Nexflixeses ;-) of the world *don't* make 80% of their revenue on 20% of their inventory. Check this out:

At Amazon.com...a quarter of all book sales come from outside the site's top-one-hundred-thousand best-sellers.

This is great news for people who read more than Stephen King novels and listen to music other than U2. And this was the promise of the Internet back in the day, at least vis-a-vis publishing: any book that's been published, any music that's been recorded, speedily delivered to your house in either atoms or bits -- your choice.

The article throws a few punches at Anderson's arguments, but I won't recount those here. Read the article your own bad self.

So: good review in the New Yorker, interesting thesis and evidence. And, unfortunately, a cover that's as predictable as the sun coming up tomorrow morning, North Koreans be damned. Why are business titles so uninspired? Can someone point one out that's not? Are business titles designed like this because publishers don't think design matters to business readers? And was there no one involved in the production of the book who noticed the awful kerning between the "T" and "a" in "Tail?" I guess there wasn't.