Pleasurable Kingdom

OK...everyone together...one, two, three: AWWWWWWWWWWWWW



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Interview w/ Chip Kidd, and a note on the cover below

Chip Kidd is interviewed by Jonathan Safran Foer in the May issue of I.D.

If you're a fan of Kidd, you won't learn anything you don't already know. Except perhaps this:

Foer: Favorite book cover of all time?

Kidd: You Shall Know Them by Vercors. Pocket Books paperback edition, 1955. Designer unknown:



And it turns out Kidd, not John Gall, designed the Murakami book below.

Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman

I'm a huge fan of Murakami and of Mssrss. Kidd and Gall, who seem to divide the Murakami catalog into hardcover (Kidd) and paperback (Gall). So if history means anything, this should be Kidd, but it looks like John Gall's work to me.

Anywho...just yesterday I posted the cover to Absurdistan -- in some ways a similar cover, but in all ways an inferior one.



They both have interesting palettes, but that's about where the mutual compliments end. This cover has me absolutely intrigued. Everything -- the photo treatment, the colors, the type, that logo at the top on the right -- are perfectly evocative of a particular time. The eyes are brilliant and almost a little creepy. And if you step back from this one, you'll notice (well, at least I did) that the black, purple and white shapes form a sort of head or a helmet or a figure that contains the eyes. The maroon is the background, and there's another figure next to the main one, but his/her eyes aren't visible.

A bit of a stretch? Probably. But any cover that makes me look this hard and this long is a good one, right?

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Possible Side Effects

This -- the 6-fingered hand -- has to have been done before. I don't have any prizes to give, but certainly someone can point out another similar (if not identical) cover?



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Stravinsky: The Second Exile

When I see this in person I bet I'll really like it. I love the chair w/ the jacket and I'm dying to see what that is in the background.



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Family and Other Accidents

Charming and cute, but I wonder if this would be better if:

1. family/and/other/accidents/a novel weren't displayed so linearly, and

2. the author's name was below the egg carton, or elsewhere.

Thoughts?



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Absurdistan

I so want to like this, I really do. But it's far too neat and restrained.



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New Will Self covers

Will Self is a wonderful, trippy writer, and his books definitely deserved an overhaul. I'm always excited when an author's catalog gets this kind of unified treatment:





I like these, but can't help but note the similarity between these and what was recently done to Sarah Vowell's books:



Are the new Self books too close to Vowell's?

The Chick-Lit Debacle

We've all heard by now about the "unintentional and unconscious" copying that has Kaavya Viswanathan in a little plagiarism trouble. Here's an article.

What's this got to do with book design? I can't give her/him props, but an anonymous comment (#16) over at Gothamist points out the similarity between these covers:



The Weiner book came first; the book on the right was written by the person who is claiming that her work was plagiarized by Viswanathan.

While it's pretty clear from what I've read that there's definitely something more than "unintentional and unconscious" copying going on, I wouldn't get too high up on my soapbox if the cover of my book is a clear copy of another chick-lit book.

(And before someone claims this is all the marketing department's fault, let's remember that there's a designer and an art director out there who really fell down on the job with this one.)

Glow-in-the-dark Haunted?

An ad in this weekend's NYTimes Book Review said that this new paperback glows in the dark. No mention of that at Amazon or at the Anchor Books site.

Gimmicky, no doubt. But does anyone know of any other (serious) book covers that do this?