Carrion Comfort

Design by Lisa Marie Pompilio
Photograph by Ken Rosenthal

The first of this year's favorite covers posts will appear tonight (I have to chase down a few design credits). In the meantime, feast on this, before it feasts on you.

Now That We're Done Gorging Ourselves...

Thin is in.

(The Pattern in the Carpet designed by Martha Kennedy; Changing My Mind designed by Richard Bravery and illustrated by Si Scott; Memoir designed by Rodgrigo Corral and illustrated by Corral and Ben Wiseman)

I Am Thankful For...

Dionne Warwick riding on top of a big turkey balloon.



Happy Thanksgiving. Back on Monday with the first round of this year's favorite covers, as selected by the staff of WORD Books.

Cash vs. Zeppelin

A Heartbeat and a Guitar designed by Shepard Fairey
When Giants Walked the Earth designed by Orion Books

I don't do snarky very well, but on the way to see the new Shepard Fairey-designed book about Johnny Cash, I saw this new clearly-not-designed-by-Shepard Fairey book about Led Zeppelin. You get what you pay for.




UPDATE: Orion Creative Director Lucie Stericker was nice enough to point out that images of all four members have been produced as posters; here's everyone else:

Something New for This Year's Favorite Covers Post

Each year since the BDR started, I've written a "my favorites of the year" post (here are the 2008, 2007, 2006, and 2005 lists.)

This year, I've got something different in mind.

I've asked the staffs of three independent bookstores to contribute a list of their 10-15 favorite book covers and jackets of 2009. I'm really looking forward to seeing what they pick. It's a big, big publishing world, so I'm hoping their involvement helps reveal the wide range of fantastic design out there.

Here are the participants and the dates on which their selections will appear:

WORD, Brooklyn, NY: Monday, Nov 30
RiverRun Bookstore, Portsmouth, NH: Monday, Dec 7
The Book Table, Oak Park, IL: Monday, Dec 14

I've run a poll the last two years, and based on the large number of people who voted for their favorite, I think I'll do that again. Perhaps I'll take the top three for each store's list (as voted by you) and put them all into a super duper mega poll.

Does this sound fun?

In Cold Blood, Magnum Collection Edition (and a few others)

BDR reader Cynthia pointed this out to me this morning; it's one of six in the Penguin Magnum Collection published earlier this year. Click for a much larger version -- and note the removable sticker. Cool.


Penguin has published a number of different editions over the years; here's a few. The first is designed by David Pelham (1970); the second is uncredited and is from 1966. (The first two images are from Seven Hundred Penguins.) Anyone know anything about the last two?




Illustration by Andy Bridge:


UPDATE: I missed this one, designed by S. Neil Fujita. (Read about the hatpin and Capote's reaction to it here):

On the Road

Apologies for the lack of activity here; I'm traveling on business. Regular posting should resume in a few days, hopefully with an announcement about 2009's favorites of the year post. It's going to be very different, and hopefully entertaining for y'all.

Off to eat more carne asada fries...

How to Be Inappropriate

Design by Alvaro Villanueva

This is so spot on: it really is inappropriate to forgo a belt when wearing a nice pair of trousers.

Not Everyone Loves the New Nabokov Editions

Lots of folks are talking about the John Gall-curated Nabokov redesigns. And well they should -- it's not often that we see an author's entire body of work redesigned by such an impressive cadre of designers.

Three days before Gall posted the series at Design Observer, though, a BDR reader wrote in about the "best Nabokov cover I've ever seen--blows the sh**ty Vintage/Random House motif out of the water." His words, not mine. Here's what he sent in (source here); if anyone's got any info on this cover, please pass it along.

(UPDATE: "(the designer is) Jerzy Faczynski, a well-known Polish ex-pat who not only did book design, but built a few churches, painted watercolors, made prints, and fought wars. He died, I believe, in 1994.")


Here's Carin Goldberg's new cover for Pnin:


Oh, and what the heck: via Wikipedia, here's another:

This Time Is Different

Design by Karl Spurzem

Having just watched the season finale of Mad Men, it's hard not to think of that show's opening credit sequence when looking at this cover for an examination of financial crises.

As series creator Matthew Weiner states (at about 2:15) when talking about the sequence, "American businessman jumps out the window, that is a statement...it's part of our iconography."