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Design by John Fulbrook III
Don DeLillo's 9/11 novel.
The title most likely refers to the Falling Man photograph. USA Today had (it's gone now) a link to Anne's Fernham blog; she got hold of an advance copy and there's a brief but good description of the book over there.
DeLillo is in the pantheon of great American writers whose books are so thematically enormous that the design of their covers is often fairly generic: see Pynchon's Against the Day, Roth's Everyman, and McCarthy's The Road. This easily could have followed the same path.
Something tells me there's more going on here. It certainly has me wondering: are the towers still there, below the clouds? There's a good deal of tension here, knowing what we know about what happened that day, what's about to happen, or what's happening below and we just can't see it. Or maybe this is the view from the place from which we as people have fallen.
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Design by Milan Bozic.
A real nice example of the kind of design I love: simple, hand-made (at least in appearance), and flat. Surely flatness isn't always compelling, but in some cases it really works. This is one.
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Not a very lusty position?
Whence the bloody bunny?
These are 46 horror stories from Israel, though they acrobatically shape-shift from the political to the fabulous, and are outwardly comic. They amount to a worldview more frightening than their subjects (and these are scary enough: the Holocaust, sexual dysfunction, sadistic birthday-party magicians).
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I can't remember a US or UK edition of David Maine's fiction drawn from the Bible that hasn't been interesting. (I'll try to find some time to post some others).
I love the different approaches here: first, the UK edition, which goes for Samson's hair; then, the US version, depicting the aftermath of Samson pulling down the temple.
Both of these are winners.
"Benjamin Black is really Booker Prize winner John Banville, and Christine Falls is his inaugural volume in a crime series starring Quirke, a lonely, hard-drinking Dublin pathologist."
I have gone back and forth on this one for the last week. I saw it at the airport, I think, but for the life of me can't remember who designed it and if it had spot-varnish on the title (I think it did).
I don't read crime books, and I'm sorry to say I don't look at them all too much either. So I'll let you tell me: is this a particularly good crime title? Or just a few steps ahead of what I'm assuming is a pretty cookie-cutter approach to the genre?
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On my way to Las Vegas for an IA Summit. I don't often break form away from the book thing, but I'm bored out of my skull, forgot my headphones, and can't connect to my work email. As far as I can tell, a plane has neither taken off nor landed here in... 6 hours? a fortnight? It's a mess.
Some observations:
1. Approx. 150 people crowded in front of McDonald's, with only slightly fewer McD's employees pinballing off each other trying to fill orders. Older woman in front of me drops A PENNY and bends over to pick it up, crashing into at least 3 people (yours truly included) with her Iowa-sized ass. I will die a poor man -- I know this -- but if that's the price I have to pay for not picking pennies up off the floor on what is giving the Sunday after Thanksgiving a run for its money, I'm OK with that.
2. Two kinds of milk -- "white" and "chocolate" -- seem to have a tourist couple confused. "Is the white milk vanilla milk?" Oh, to live in a country where "white" always means "vanilla."
3. Word most overheard: FUCK!
4. Word most overhead in the presence of small children: FUCK!
5. Small children often sound like ducks -- very angry ducks -- when they are bored, hungry and otherwise DONE.
6. It amazes me how tech-stupid airports are. Announcements from one airline blend with those from the airlines next to and across from them. Hell, even Lollapalooza pretty much figured out the sound bleed problem last summer, and they had to deal with some real crap: yes, I'm talking to you, Jared Leto. Where the hell is the airport / airlines SMS?
7. I'm reminded of why there are several plastic surgery shows on TV. It's because lots of people get plastic surgery. I haven't seen this many fake boobs in a long time. I am waiting to go to Vegas, though...
8. The portable DVD player market must be dead. There are about 18,000 people milling about in terminal 2 and I think I've seen about 3 kids watching something on a DVD player. Just saw one kid who couldn't have been 18 months old watching something on a Mac Book Pro. Must have been Neal Pollack's kid.
9. The sky has gone from Midwestern-there's-gonna-be-a-twister green to, oh, I don't know, puce. It's lovely and I think my plane, now projected to take off about 4 hours late, can cut right through it like a knife through buttah.
10. Other than Neal Pollack's kid, myself and some dude with dreadlocks who is clearly on his way back to Oberlin, there are very few Macs here. Steve Jobs, just thought you would like a field report.
11. Apparently, two planes are racing toward gate F10: one will pick up the good people who want to go to Phoenix, and another will pick me and all of my silicone-enhanced friends and go to Las Vegas. See observations 3 & 4 above for what came out of most Pheonix-bound mouths, as apparently the Vegas-bound plane is in the lead and we'll get first crack at sitting on the tarmac for a few hours.
12. There's the plane. Talk to you later. Thanks for keeping me company.
Design by Rodrigo Corral.
The scan does not do this justice to this wonderful cover. (And yes, the map o' smokes continues on the back.)
In the hands of a lesser designer, we would most likely be looking at a title spelled with cigarettes, or worse, the single-iconic-cigarette smack-dab in the middle.
Mr. Corral, you rock.
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"Containing over one hundred original essays...Cultural Amnesia illuminates, rescues, or occasionally destroys the careers of many of the greatest thinkers, humanists, musicians, artists, and philosophers of the twentieth century."
So here's the question: why pick Art Deco as the graphic style for such a book? I mean this as a serious question: for a book whose subject is an entire century of ideas, should it be "styleless," for lack of a better way of saying it?
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UPDATE: Here's what reader Jasfitz is referring to:
Design by Rodrigo Corral Design.
Wow. How much stronger is this because of the background? Lots, I would say. Not only does it give the cover as a whole some depth, but the repetition of "hurry up and calm down" is brilliant.
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Designer name to come.
Something similar has probably been done a number of times, but I don't care. It's funny, a little bit creepy, and pretty great.
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Unbelievably fun photo and great colors; sometimes red just *has* to be used.
I'm happy to introduce Book Design Gigs, a unique site that helps those who need book design help find talented book designers.
The long story, as short as possible:
1. Authors, publishers: Tell us what you need. For only $50 for 30 days, your ad will appear on the Book Design Gigs site. The three most recent ads will also appear on the front page of the Book Design Review (see above).
2. Designers: Stop by frequently, or be super-duper smart and grab the RSS feed, so that you'll be the first to reply to a post.
3. See Book Design Gigs for more details.
 
"Peter Houghton, an alienated teen who has been bullied for years by the popular crowd, brings weapons to his high school in Sterling, N.H., one day and opens fire, killing 10 people."
Do either of these covers convey this?
So if Eric Clapton = God, Frank Zappa = Jesus. Or so it appears...
Kundera designed the cover of his The Art of the Novel, and I'd wager a guess that he also did the cover of Faber and Faber version of this (the second image), a collection of essays on the craft and history of the novel.
This is a wonderfully clear illustration of different approaches to book cover design: one goes straight for the subject -- "A book about books? Let's put a book on the cover!" -- the other straight for the title / metaphor.
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I'm sorry to employ an overused phrase, but I think I just threw up in my mouth a little (not so much over the design, but just over the fact that this book exists).
On top, the more subtle UK cover of a novel that poses the question "What if the Soviets sent a man to the moon before the Americans, and we never knew?" Below that, the US version, with far superior type and a really unnecessary hammer and sickle. The placement of it is *so* wrong.
Amazing to think Prohibition lasted 13 years. The pull-quote in the NY Times review claims that there were 15,000 saloons at the start of Prohibition in 1920 and 32,000 just a few years later. Wow.
This cover strikes me as a little gimmicky, especially viewed next to the excellent photo accompanying the article in the Times:
Apparently, it is the 29th year that the Bookseller/Diagram Prize for the year's oddest book title will be awarded. How is this important cultural event NOT on my calendar?
As you would expect, there are some real doozies; suprisingly, there's not a Continental Philosophy title in the whole bunch.
The front-runner is said to be How Green Were the Nazis? Nature, Environment and Nature in the Third Reich:
But don't discount The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification.
Here I was all set to place my bets for the NCAA tournament, and now this comes along to compete for my money. Damn you, Bookseller/Diagram Prize!
This is an interesting one to think about, and I'd love to hear from y'all. I think the main reason this cover fails is because both the title and the main imagery, no doubt meant to be complemetary, are actually fighting for attention. Either tell the story cleverly through taking the title beyond simple type, or render the title simply and give me the payoff in the illustration.
Thoughts? Can anyone point me to a cover that does both and is all the better for it?
Designer name to come.
Teased on the front page of the Village Voice as "Jonathan Lethem's rock 'n' roll novel."
Uh oh.
I like Lethem. I loved Fortress of Solitude and Motherless Brooklyn. But if Delillo and Pynchon can't pull off rock n roll I'll be surprised if Lethem can. It doesn't look good: the Voice reviewer describes the lyrics to one song as "tough to imagine as a song written by adults, let alone enjoyed by hundreds of fans."
Re the design: (1) that's an older picture of Lethem on the cover, isn't it? (2) why all the ital / oblique? I don't hate it, but I always have to wonder when I see it. Does it make the book look like it's moving FASTER?
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The US version is on top; the UK version on the bottom.
For a book that's about "the ways performers chose, in the course of a song, to comment on themselves" and the ways in which performers are "inordinately interested in proving how real they are," the US version seems far too limited. Kurt Cobain (I think) on the cover, the all-too-predictable punk rock pink -- this just doesn't say "75 years of music history" to me. The UK version is trying much harder to reach into music history and to portray the artifice that is the subject of the book -- the flat figures are propped up and the cover as a whole looks like a diorama or sorts.
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