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Lordy do I love books like this: "A photo of a secret CIA prison. A map designed to help visitors reach Malibu’s notoriously inaccessible public beaches. Guidebooks to factories, prisons, and power plants in upstate New York. These are some of the more than one hundred projects represented in Experimental Geography, a groundbreaking collection of visual research and mapmaking from the past ten years."
There are a few interior shots over at the Melville House site; I'll try to post some more. (Hat tip to Time Out Chicago's always excellent book coverage.)
Buy this book from Amazon.com
The Paper Cuts blog has a brief post about Penguin's 150th anniversary edition of Darwin's On the Origin of Species, which features a new painting by Damien Hirst commissioned specifically for the book cover.
Read the Paper Cuts post and what Hirst has to say about the painting.
Design by Eric Baker Design
So when I first saw this -- which documents, among other things, the almost $8M it takes to win an average Senate campaign -- I thought "well, that doesn't look like so damn much money at all; that's a couple of thousand of dollars at best." But that's what makes this work: it's the couple of thousand bucks that anybody who wants to play has to throw into the bribery pool campaign contributions that makes the system particularly and almost universally dirty.
An interview with J.G. Ballard, whose autobiography Miracles of Life I'm currently reading. It's a wonderful book, but I don't know why I'm wasting time reading non-fiction when there are 1,000 novels we all must read.
 The catalog for the Gateways book cover exhibit is now available. If this doesn't seem worth your 25 euros, you're reading the wrong blog: "Over 400 cover designs by 53 designers from 14 countries. This 444 page book contains colour reproductions of all the book cover designs featured in the exhibition. Each cover reproduction is accompanied by a small explanatory text by the designer. Other texts include an introductory essay by Andrew Howard, a text by Jon Grey about his work and a text by David Pearson about the development of the Penguin ‘Great Ideas’ series."
Twitter experiment bookd got off to a fast start but is suffering the effects of auto-DM spam. It's still up, so check it out if you're a Twitter user and interested in receiving short-form book recommendations. There's also a blog. My only regret so far is not keeping a list of all the douchenozzles using auto direct messaging so that we could all say hi to my new friends.
For the record, those are beer bottle caps, poker chips, and condoms (although what are meant to be poker chips look way too much like checkers).
Hi all:
For those of you who are Twitter users, I've set up a little experiment at twitter.com/bookd.
Long story short, it aggregates book recommendations from multiple contributors (that is, you :-)) into one Twitter stream.
Check it out, or visit the bookd blog for more information. Questions / comments / etc. should be sent to bookdblog@yahoo.com.
Designer credit to come
Help me with this one.
In New York magazine last spring, Christopher Bonanos wrote about the use of melting ice cream on book covers and jackets. Designer John Fulbrook III tells us why it's used: "In jacket design, one classic solution is using the charged object -- one that tells you more than it should. (Using ice cream) also gives you a sense of time, because the ice cream’s melting. It’s one of the rare cases where you get to add a sense of action, that urgency, to a personified object.”
At first I thought we had another such cover here, but then I noticed: these popsicles aren't melting, they're bitten (aggressively?), perhaps suggesting the anger author Robin Romm feels during her last visit with her terminally ill mother. The NY Times review describes the book as "a furious blaze" with "little mercy;" Romm's anger is "an intemperate spray of fury." Slow, melting popsicles wouldn't get that across.
I love illustrative techniques that show action and (when appropriate) the passing of time, and this is in many ways profoundly sad: the diminished popsicle communicates several levels of loss.
But what do you think: too subtle? Or if that's not the right word, does this register as whimsical, and inappropriately so?
(UPDATE: A reader suggests popsicles may be used here because they provide relief to chemo patients.)
Design by John Gall
I was a philosophy major and was even silly enough to go to grad school to continue studying it, but reading sentences like "The call must do its calling without any hubbub" (Heidegger, Being and Time) convinced me to jump ship after two years and find a job. So to me, this cover reads not only as a headstone for dead philosophers but for philosophy itself, nicely kicked over with relish. But please contribute your own less cynical interpretation in the comments.
Design by Coralie Bickford-Smith
I've got a design crush on Coralie Bickford-Smith, and I'm not alone. She was recently interviewed by Karen Horton over at design:related; read this wonderful, deep interview as soon as you can. I poached this cover from the interview, and if it does nothing for you, you should at least think about one thing: how cool is it that Penguin designers are free to play so much with the Penguin logo?
My thanks to those of you who voted this year. A total of 4,502 votes were cast; that's a 79% increase from last year's 2519 votes.
From very early on, it wasn't even close. David Pearson's cover design for The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction garnered just over 15% of the votes and is your favorite of 2008:
Why You Should Read Kafka Before You Waste Your Life received just four more votes than Against Happiness; they rounded out the top three:
Other designs receiving greater than 5% of the votes are Obsession, A History; Violence; Maps and Legends; and Soon I Will Be Invincible.
Again, thanks for your votes, your visits and your comments. Here's all of this year's favorites, in case you missed them.
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