This is a lovely, oversized (roughly A4) collection of images of Faber's covers from 1929 onwards. The text is minimal, but there are hundreds and hundreds of pretty pictures to look at. Excuse the photographs (which you can click for much bigger views), but there was no way I was killing this thing's spine with my scanner.
The book itself had its cover designed by Neil Gower, mimicking the classic work of Berthold Wolpe, who did pretty much all of Faber's covers for some 35 years (as well as designing Albertus, the font used on this and many other earlier Faber covers).
Faber, at least in its earlier decades, did not have the range of cover art of, say, Penguin, due in part to having one designer with a consistent vision, but there are plenty of gems here.
My only criticism is that Connolly seems to lose interest after about 1980, and there are hardly any covers from the last 30 years shown here. This means that there are few of Pentagram's covers, and, weirdly, absolutely none by Andrzej Klimowski. It was Klimowski's covers for the work of Milan Kundera that first caught my eye and drew my attention to Faber back in the late 1980s/early 1990s, when I was a young lad for whom the combination of literature and naked women was pretty much irresistable.
(For Klimowski doing Wodehouse, see here.)
8 comments:
Must. Have. Now. Looks like I'll be paying through the nose to have it shipped 'cross the pond, though.
No Klimowski?! What a shame :(
Joseph, if I might commend you here: http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/book/9780571240012/Faber-and-Faber-Eighty-Years-of-Book-Cover-Design -- It'll cost you only US$27, with free postage.
Readymade: It's a weird omission, isn't it?
Done and done! Thanks.
No Klimowski, no buy! :) I had the book ih the wish list for months, but I was expecting more text (in a "Penguin by Design" veign) and KLIMOWSKI. Thank you for the post though.
Pedro Marques
Hi, Pedro: I too was expecting lots of information, as with 'Penguin By Design', but instead there's about 10 (big) pages of text at the start, a single page of text for each decade, and then the indexes.
I'm glad I'm not alone in my Klimowski love!
And thank you for making me keep those 13 quid! ;) Really, a book on Faber book cover design that misses John McConnell/Pentagram 1980's superb art direction (that put Faber up there way above the lame Penguin of that decade) must only be attributed to a conscious decision of reappraising the old (forgotten) Faber covers (maybe Connolly explains that in those 10 pages, and being an author known also for his book on 1st edition book collecting I believe this was a personal choice rather than an objective view of F&F history). Then again, the cover (again) tells it all, so one cannot blame the author I guess.
Great blog, by the way! A joy to read (that post on the Austrian-Brazillian designer was a MUST read). Keep up the good work, mate!
(Any good book on Aussie book design?)
Pedro Marques
Thanks again--I don't know of any food Australian book design books, but if one emerges, I'll let you know!
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