One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding

Design by Evan Gaffney Design

I haven't seen this in person yet -- I'm hoping that the receipt is embossed. UPDATE: it is, slightly.


It's interesting that the copy on the receipt and the copy it partially obscures (which I think is supposed to make us think of a wedding invitation) is the same. Would this be stronger if the bottom layer read like a real wedding invite? I think so. UPDATE: The underlying text *is* more like an invite than I first thought. I'll blame my error on my nasty cold and the time I posted this (6:10am!)

Theft: A Love Story, paperback

Design by John Gall

Chip Kidd's design for the hardcover wasn't everyone's cup of tea, but it's grown on me over the months. Here's the new paperback:


Interesting to note that the Kidd cover suggests theft through absence (there's obviously a painting missing) whereas the Gall cover uses the canvas to depict something that hasn't yet happened; it sort of reads more like "(There's going to be a) Theft."

Or maybe this cold is getting the best of me and I should just lay down.

The Tourists

The cover for The Tourists jumped out at me in a Borders yesterday. And by "jumped out" I mean whomped me in the side of the head.

I try to keep things decidedly not mean-spirited here, but when boosting an idea, you would do best to aim lower than stealing from John Gall.

UPDATE: Most who have left comments feel this might be coincidental. See, I told you I don't do mean-spirited very well :-) (And for the newer readers, we have previously discussed the issue of flattery, imitation, or something worse.)

The New Chabon spine

Design by Will Staehle


The spine for Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union. More on this fantastic jacket here.

Not only beautiful, but I love how it reads as a sentence:

"Harper Collins presents The Yiddish Policemen's Union by the Pulitzer Prize winning author of the The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Michael Chabon."

I can't recall ever seeing something like this. Can you?

Buy this book from Amazon.com

A Death in Belmont, Hardcover and Paperback

It was about a year ago that Sebastian Junger's A Death in Belmont came out (first image below). At the time I thought it was really good, and both the final designer and another designer who worked on the initial round of concepts wrote in about their experiences with this title. I still really like it.

So how disappointing is the new paperback (the second image)? It's about as generic as covers get. This happens all to often when books move into paperback. A notable exception: Eat the Document (which is a great book, BTW).

Little Stalker

Design by Archie Ferguson

We haven't seen little plastic people in quite some time. I'm guessing a little might go a long way.

And maybe the type geeks in the crowd can tell me why the "S" looks so weird?

Let's Play the "No Title on the Cover" Game

Design by Rodrigo Corral, illustration by Jacob Magraw-Mickelson

UPDATE: The circle is a cut; the "R" peeking through is on the book itself, as is the word "RANT."

This novel was released on May 1:


Here's a description from Amazon:

A high school rebel who always wins (and a childhood murderer?), Rant Casey escapes from his small hometown of Middleton for the big city. He becomes the leader of an urban demolition derby called Party Crashing. On appointed nights participants recognize one another by such designated car markings as “Just Married” toothpaste graffiti and then stalk and crash into each other. Rant Casey will die a spectacular highway death, after which his friends gather testimony needed to build an oral history of his short, violent life. Their collected anecdotes explore the possibility that his saliva caused a silent urban plague of rabies and that he found a way to escape the prison house of linear time."

So: who wrote this? (No running to the bookstore to look at the spine, you.)

French Books

I own a fair number of books, but very few of them are written in French. My French is, as they say, merde.




I love how these books from imprint 10/18 look (click on the thumbs for bigger images), and it might be because of the rigid type guidelines. It's not just these: Gallimard's layout is even more consistent, with placement of the title and author pretty much always in the same place. What do you think: are all of these designs "incomplete" because the type doesn't play a big role, or is it liberating not to have to make type choices?

The New Yorkers

Design by Charlotte Strick, photo by Valerie Shaff

One of the blurbs on Amazon.com states this is "a funny, varied, farcical roundelay of people and dogs on a New York block." I'm guessing the proportion of 1 dog to 1/2 out-of-focus person is just about right.

A Cross of Centuries

I'm fond of this style -- drawing on top of photos -- and sort of surprised we don't see it more often. This isn't the best example of it, but do you like this approach? Have an example that works better?