Trouble

In the past, a good number of readers have asked "Must the words "A Novel" or "Stories" appear on a book cover?" The answer is now clear: yes, they must be included, and used only to depict facial hair. ;-)

Fragile Things

I'm left wondering if the cute puppy dog and kitty cat are on the back cover. Someone please tell me there's something tongue-in-cheek going on here...

Buy Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders.



The UK version? A bit less of an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach:

A Hedonist in the Cellar, UK cover

Lots of readers liked the American cover. I prefer this one.

Print Magazine Regional Design Annual

Returned from vacation to find the always excellent Print Magazine Regional Design Annual waiting for me. There's some brilliant stuff that I'll be posting throughout the week.

Subscribe to Print magazine

The Female Thing

Laura Kipnis is a controversial academic figure, but I don't know enough about her work (her foci are "political correctness, sexual harassment in the workplace, (and) women’s complicity with consumer culture" according to the Times review) to connect this cover to what she does.

I do know, however, that this image creeps me out. The model is either barely pubescent, or is what lots of American men want the lower half of women to look like. But how that might relate to the book itself, I don't know. Anyone know?

(NOTE: My wife points out that those are "man hands." I think she's right -- the position of the hands suggests those aren't the model's hands. Thoughts?)



A tighter crop on the leaf makes the image a bit more ambiguous:



And what about something that's not so monochrome?

Say Hi to Tom Kelly

Tom is the author of three novels: Payback (1997), The Rackets (2001), and Empire Rising (2005). Both The Rackets and Empire Rising were selected as Notable Books of the Year by the New York Times; read a review of Empire Rising by Joe Klein here.

So Tom: I'll get this started: the cover for Empire Rising is by Henry Sene Yee, yes? Art direction by Susan Mitchell, I'm guessing? What kind of involvement did you have with either of them?



If you haven't read Tom's books, grab a copy below. You'll be glad you did.

Beauty Junkies

Wow, there are so many different ways this topic could have been portrayed. I'm on the fence with this one. I like how the repitition of the image reinforces the scope of the issue; actually, I'm a bit suprised that it's only 15 billion...

AC / DC

Man, those guys in AC/DC haven't aged too well...

Buy this book: AC/DC: The Savage Tale of the First Standards War

Ghost Plane

A great idea, nicely executed.

Buy this book: Ghost Plane: The True Story of the CIA Torture Program

The Gaze

There's a good reason why the type looks so "circus-y": "Loosely organized around a neurotic obese woman and a feisty dwarf, (The Gaze) teems with parallel plots and digressions, freely leaping from modern apartment living in Istanbul to a 19th-century Turkish freak show and fur hunts in 17th-century Siberia."

I think I just found a book for vacation :-)

Buy this book: The Gaze

Mission to America

"Kirn’s satirical novel follows two young men who are dispatched from a cloistered religious community in rural Montana to recruit converts from present-day America." Fun to think if this has wound up in the "wrong" hands.

Buy this book: Mission to America

Johnny Cash: The Biography

I know why his eyes are closed here, but when I first saw this I thought more of his death than of anything else.

Buy this book: Johnny Cash: The Biography



UPDATE: Here's the other cover that readers are discussing in their comments:

Leap Days

Ugh. Leap Days is new. The Bryson book is from 2000.

Buy this book: Leap Days: Chronicles of a Midlife Move

The Boy Detective Fails

I thought this was a McSweeney's title when I first saw it; it's Planet Punk instead. I was a huge Encyclopedia Brown fan when I was a kid...perhaps this is the next book for me to read?

Travels in the Scriptorium

"Both chilling and poignant, Travels in the Scriptorium is vintage Auster: mysterious texts, fluid identities, a hidden past, and, somewhere, an obscure tormentor." And apparently, a really really big horse.

Guest Blogger Tom Kelly

I've arranged what I hope will be a nice treat for y'all. Author Tom Kelly has graciously agreed to guest-host this blog from October 23-27.

Tom is the author of three novels: Payback (1997), The Rackets (2001), and Empire Rising (2005). Both The Rackets and Empire Rising were selected as Notable Books of the Year by the New York Times; read a review of Empire Rising by Joe Klein here.

Tom won't be posting cover designs, although he might be willing to discuss the covers for his books -- I'll make sure they're available for all to see. But the real point is to do something different for a week, and I thought it would be fun to have a great writer answer some of your questions. (Lord knows how much this is going to cost me in beer, but it's worth it :-))

If you haven't read Tom's books, grab a copy below. You'll be glad you did.

Bad Faith

Yikes:

The bottomless corruption, political and personal, of French fascism is explored in this absorbing biography of one of its most loathsome figures—Louis Darquier, commissioner for Jewish affairs under the Vichy regime. A violent anti-Semite and paid Nazi propagandist before WWII, he helped organize the deportation of French Jews, including thousands of children, to Auschwitz during the German occupation.

The UK cover is on top; the US on the bottom. I simply don't understand the UK cover. Not sure if that's Darquier on the cover, but if I saw this on the bookshelf I would never think it's a book about "one of French fascism's most loathsome figures." The US version? Much better.




And this book has caused quite a row:

The British-based author and former publisher Carmen Callil has become embroiled in a growing dispute over the limits of freedom of speech in America after a party celebrating her new book on Vichy France was cancelled because of the opinion she expresses about the modern state of Israel. Full story here.

iWoz

I like how the designer has incorporated elements of what the Apple identity used to look like (the rainbow colors from the old logo). And regardless of if you like them or not, this probably confirms that the reflection effect is taking over.

A Well-Paid Slave

The controversial title, its placement, and the photograph all work together here.

It's Superman!

The hardcover design for this was done by Chris Ware; it's charming. This loses a little something without the wonderful sweeping title of the hardcover, but it's still pretty cool. (The text running up the left side is the obligatory Superman disclaimer; curiously, it doesn't appear on the hardcover.)

Roll the Bones: The History of Gambling

I guess being literal has its merits sometimes, but when I see an old-timey historical image of people with ostrich-feather hats gambling on a book that is subtitled "The History of Gambling," I pretty much pass out from boredom, right there in the middle of Borders.

To be fair to the designer, though, this might be tougher than it looks. The title refers to dice games and dominoes; the subtitle is much broader (all sorts of gambling; here's the review). With such a wide scope, I think it would have been more fruitful to try to communicate something about the nature of gambling, instead of concentrating on depicting the games themselves. Just like, for example, a history of war shouldn't have a picture of World War II on the cover.

And the Ass Saw the Angel

I've counted at least 6 different covers for this book; this one (2001, Penguin UK) is definitely the best. Very Banksy-riffic.

A Hedonist in the Cellar

Hmmm. I'm more of a Pabst Blue Ribbon kind of guy, so I wasn't aware that McInerney wrote about wine. But I'm guessing it goes something like this: "Here you go again. All messed up and no place to go. Worse, you don't know where to get a nice bottle of chianti in NYC for under $20."

Seriously, though: does anyone else think less would be more here -- that is, fewer circles would have made this stronger?

French and German editions of Kafka on the Shore

I was recommending Murakami to someone last night and ran into these. The French one is certainly more surreal, but there's something about the shocking color and close crop of the German edition that appeals to me as well.

On Seeing and Noticing

The cover of Alain de Botton's new The Architecture of Happiness isn't worth posting, but this is.

House of Meetings

This is, in a word, brilliant. Need convincing? Read the Amazon synopsis:

There were conjugal visits in the slave camps of the USSR. Valiant women would travel continental distances, over weeks and months, in the hope of spending a night, with their particular enemy of the people, in the House of Meetings. The consequences of these liaisons were almost invariably tragic. "House of Meetings" is about one such liaison. It is a triangular romance: two brothers fall in love with the same girl, a nineteen-year-old Jewess, in Moscow, which is poised for pogrom in the gap between the war and the death of Stalin.

This isn't available in the States yet. Do any of my UK readers know who designed this?

Koba the Dread

Nothing against the US cover (top), but I really prefer the UK one (bottom). Far more creepy.