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Because I won't be blogging next week -- others will -- I've been cleaning house, reviewing a bunch of half-written posts that had been languishing in draft mode.
I had intended to publish Rex Bonomelli's design for Something to Tell You (top) after featuring the Faber & Faber UK edition (middle; original post here), but I never did. Jennifer Heuer's design for the forthcoming US paperback (bottom) is a good enough reason to post all three.
PS: Check out Faceout Book's interview w/ Rex.
US Design by Rodrigo Corral, Photograph by Scott Peterman
UK design by Miriam Rosenbloom
My jaw dropped when I found out the image gracing Jonathan Lethem's forthcoming Chronic City was a real photograph, taken from the 86th floor observation deck of the Empire State Building. Does Manhattan really look that isometric from that far up?
The New York Observer has a nice piece on the history of the image, and notes that "Mr. Peterman’s photo...was altered in the course of the design process, using 'shadowing and other special effects'.” But as far as I know, the (small) original on Peterman's site is the real deal, and not a trick of Photoshoppery. Amazing.
Buy this book from Amazon.com or from IndieBound.
PS: Check out what's on Amazon UK (but not, FWIW, on the Faber and Faber site). Whoa! Designer Miriam Rosenbloom sent in a better image: "The job is printed three colours with a fluorescent pantone orange and yellow so it is tough to get the tones right online." Thanks, Miriam!
The F Word designed by Lisa Force
The design for The F Word (fuck; not feminism) reiterates the academic design treatment seen on On Bullshit. A slightly more provocative design was done by Faber about 10 years ago (bottom image).
(PS: Cunning linguists rejoice: MILF made in the 3rd edition of Sheidlower's book. The Book Bench previews some others.)
Designer credits to come
Marilyn Monroe photograph by Eve Arnold
Oh, I love this, from the Guardian review: "Unlike his snooty modernist peers, (Joyce) was a socialist and democrat who believed in mass literacy - and was happier discussing Dickens with post office workers than he was sitting in bohemian cafes. Reading Ulysses may be a challenge, but so are most jobs. We shouldn't need a sacred priesthood to interpret it for us."
I've seen this photograph before and it's wonderful; I wonder if Faber was tempted to use an image of someone less iconic, in order to further underscore the "Joyce is for the common man and woman" argument put forth by the author. And check this out: it's not the only time this image has been used on a book about Joyce.
The U.S. cover just isn't hitting the same notes for me:
UPDATE: The Caustic Cover Critic points out a few more examples of the use of this particular Marilyn photograph, in addition to the use of another similar photo.
US design by Megan Wilson
Portraying what a daydreamer sees (the US cover, first image) strikes me as more powerful than an external view of the act of daydreaming (the UK cover, second image).
UK title designed by Simon Earith
US designer info to come
I was going through some bookmarks last night and rediscovered Penguin Books UK's great year-end post of their favorite designs of 2008. I love what Penguin art director Jim Stoddart says about the design of the UK edition (directly below): "It’s a perfect design for book about design. It’s classic, elegant and looks great in the shops."
Compare the wonderful stuffed-to-the-gills UK edition to the cleaner US design. Can we say the same thing about this that Stoddart says about the UK design?
An early front-runner for The BDR's 2009 This Takes Balls Award (see last year's nominee (and winner, I guess) here). And as I said to someone when I ran a similarly-themed ad on the site last year, please send your hate mail to The National Lampoon, circa 1973.
The inspiration:
The US edition:
Designer credits to come
UPDATE: Several readers have pointed out the series of books of which this is a part. Covers from the Massey Lecture series from 1961 to 2008 can be seen here. Thanks all!
Very different treatments of Margaret Atwood's "study of debt as an ancient and central motif in religion, literature, and the structure of human societies" (from the publisher's Web site). Clearly not a business book, so the UK edition (top) gets closer to what this cover should be.
The US edition (below) looks very much -- too much? -- like a business and finance title:
Designer info to come
Remember The Drunkard's Walk from a few months back? Discussion in the comments about the durability of the die-cut jacket on the US publication got fairly intense. Here's the UK edition, where the drunkard's walk looks more like me dancing after a few cocktails.
US edition by Keenan; UK edition by Al Heighton
The layoff-focused, comic workplace debut novel from Ed Park; Mark Sarvas' NYT review nicely points out that if this sounds similar to Joshua Ferris' Then We Came to the End, so be it: "considering the ubiquity of the work experience in American lives...perhaps the question shouldn’t be why there are two work-related novels right now but why there aren’t many more."
The frantic silliness of the UK cover (top) trumps the predictability of the US edition (bottom), although I wonder if we've seen enough of rounded typefaces to hold us over for a bit.
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Designer info to come
A farce about the death of Pakistani dictator General Zia which, according to some conspiracy theorists, was actually an assassination that may have involved a crow drunk on overripe mangoes. The US edition (top) is mighty literal, and I'm almost never a fan of that traditional military stenciling, regardless of the book it adorns. The UK cover includes the crow to nice effect, but the stylistically different second crow and the jets seem unnecessary. Buy this book from Amazon.com
US version by Darren Haggar
I love the restraint of the US cover (top), which emphasizes that this is a book about the entire bin Laden family and not just its most infamous member. And the plane is a clear reference to one of the stranger occurrences of the first few days after 9/11, when over a dozen members of the family were flown out of the US back to Saudi Arabia. Buy this book from Amazon.com
The UK cover is tacky by comparison, and someone who knows more about these kinds of things will have to tell us if that shape is more suggestive of a Sikh's ceremonial dagger than anything having to do with Islamic terrorism.
On top, the US edition. The UK edition is below.
Interesting what cropping and type can do: glancing at these very quickly (and conveniently ignoring the title), the US edition clearly registers as fiction to me, while the UK version could very well be a non-fiction book about raising earnest kids.
(A reader says: The chronology of these covers is that Barbara deWilde took the existing UK cover and reworked it for Knopf. Thanks for the info.)
Buy this book from Amazon.com
329 days until the end of the Bush presidency; who knows how long to fix the damage. I wish I could appreciate the attempt at humor in the UK edition (the second image), but I can't. To be honest, it sorta pisses me off. Weisberg's book has been described as "compassionate" and largely sympathetic to Bush, arguing that all this isn't *his* fault but rather can be set at the feet of Rove, Cheney, Rumsfield and Rice. Thus, the imagery of a puppet show in the UK version, which seems appropriate.
Maybe I just hate the idea of this book...
Designer names to come
The author of Here Comes Everybody wrote a guest post over at The Penguin Blog. It's brief but well worth reading if you like thinking about the power and limits of social media, user-generated content, and blogging.
The American cover (directly below) strikes me as a little bit too literal, and to be perfectly honest, the photo makes me think of well-dressed, very well-behaved kids in the pit at a concert that I would never want to attend.
The UK cover (below) is conceptually much stronger, recognizing that no matter how silly some social media content is, all of it is a public declaration of what one believes to be true, or relevant, or funny, or...whatever. If it's worth posting to You Tube, it's worth putting a new pin about it on your messenger bag too.
The Book of Other People designed by Darren Haggar,
My Mistress's Sparrow Is Dead designed by Jarrod Taylor
The BDR loves anthologies: see a few more here , here and here. (And for something even cooler, keep reading.)
The Book of Other People (gotta be Charles Burns illustrations, right?) comprises 23 stories by writers such as David Mitchell, Dave Eggers, George Saunders and Chris Ware. According to Publisher's Weekly, "(Zadie Smith's) instruction was simple: make somebody up." I'm dying to know if there are more illustrations on the back cover.
The designs for Eugenides' collection (US cover first, UK second) take solidly different approaches, and while it could probably be said that that the cardiograph zig-zags on the US cover aren't necessary and that the UK cover may be a bit too saccharine for all the stories contained within, doing so would be to quibble. Anatomy and silhouette are pretty much always great, and both would surely grab my attention on the new books table.
Oh, the cool thing? The profits from both of these books go to support Dave Eggers' 826 Foundation.
Designer names to come
The US version gets the academic treatment (ugh), while the UK book nails it, if by "nails it" one means "this is what my brain looks like when I listen to Daydream Nation and Loveless back-to-back." And that's a good place for your brain to be.
Both designed by Chip Kidd
UK cover is first, US cover is below it.
I don't know that I'm in love with the music notes and staff approach to the text (although it is growing on me), but I do know this: that picture of Sacks on the US cover is creeping me out and it's making me think of what surely is history's greatest t-shirt:
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