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Wednesday, June 20, 2007

After Dark hard casing

If you take the jacket off Haruki Murakami's After Dark you find a nice surprise. The front and back hard casing are different colors. I don't think I've ever seen this before, and I would love to know if it's meant to refer to the sisters -- one in a coma, the other an insomniac -- who are the main characters.




5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Along similar lines, over the past decade, there have been lots of interesting book designs without dust jackets at all (from McSweeny's,for example) - and historically, there's so much fantastic binding and case stamping! Dust jackets are ephemeral things - it'd be great to see more design attention paid to the more lasting covers of books.

Adam McIsaac said...

The catalogue for Ann Hamilton's installation Tropos was bound this way, and using very similar colors, only in cloth. I believe (although I'm not sure, as it's at home and I'm writing from work) that it was designed by Lisa Naftolin. A lovely book, and I remember being struck by the simplicity and beauty of that binding solution when I got it.

Anonymous said...

very interesting! and enlightening! you know, you can tell A LOT about a person by the shape of their thumb.

Joseph said...

I prefer not to speak of the horrible childhood accident that resulted in toes being sewed onto my hands to replace my thumbs. :-)

Me said...

Simply effective.