The Book Design Review

Monday, June 26, 2006

Communication Arts Illustration Winners

Some winners from this year's Communication Arts Illustration Annual (book category). Congrats to all.

Oh Pure and Radiant Heart

This novel sounds great, and has been well-reviewed. What's it about?

Three physicists—Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, and Leo Szilard—are transported from their posts during the Second World War to the year 2003. After overcoming the usual time-travel quandaries—shock at children shouting expletives, unfamiliarity with power steering—the trio, being geniuses, quickly adapt. Szilard starts quoting rap lyrics. In penitence for their contributions to the creation of the atomic bomb, they set off on a mission to promote world peace, only to have their message hijacked by religious fanatics who believe that Oppenheimer is a herald of the Second Coming. (from Amazon.com/The New Yorker)

While I wasn't blown away by the hardcover design (top), there's something about it that I do like. Perhaps it's too simple and obvious, but somehow it works simply, and simply works. Compare to the paperback (bottom), in which the science-fiction aspect of this book is taken to the extreme. Even if you don't like the hardcover design, don't you like it better than the paperback?

The Last Song of Dusk

Wow. Put on your sunglasses:

The paperback is a bit more restrained:

Theft

Have wanted to post this for awhile, and as there's not much in this week's Review, here it is.

A little background: one review at Amazon calls this "a barbed, intriguing art caper."

I can't quite make up my mind about this jacket. The designer is Chip Kidd, and if anyone could have gotten away without a title and author on the front, it's him. I know that's pretty unrealistic and would give the marketing department serious fits, but I look at this image and somehow think it would be stronger if I had to work a little harder to put meaning behind what the woman is looking (or not looking) at. Thoughts?

Friday, June 23, 2006

King Dork

Yup, you're right. That is JD Salinger's Catcher in the Rye that's been scratched up and written on. And as this book is aimed at young adults, I would say this cover just about hits it out of the park.

Sunday, June 18, 2006

American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia

C'mon, what did you expect?

Something like this? :-)

In all seriousness, the article in the NY Times is worth reading. I spent 8 years at Encyclopaedia Britannica, and questions of who and what merited entry were always frustrating. Speaking about the brief coverage of contemporary figures like Newt Gingrich, William F. Buckley says:

"Newt came and went rather fast but didn't leave hard fingerprints," Mr. Buckley said. "The quote, unquote conservative politicians have a pretty short lifetime in encyclopedia usage.

"It seems to me that if one were looking for orientation in such a world that the encyclopedia tries to serve that you would be more interested in Burckhardt," he said, a reference to Jacob Burckhardt, a 19th-century Swiss historian of the Renaissance, "than in any of more than 100 conservative senators in the past 50 years."

Statement of the obvious: that's what makes print encyclopedias so difficult to produce -- your editorial prejudice, um, policy gets trapped forever, or at least until you publish a new edition. Buckley's comments also steer us toward a huge issue in reference publishing: what is knowledge, and what is information, and what's the difference? Discuss. :-)