Crane & Chabon

Another gem just arrived in the post: Michael Chabon's first collection of non-fiction, Maps and Legends. It's published by McSweeney's, and they've done their usual beautiful design job on it.

The book has three part-dustjackets or "belly-bands" layered one over the other, each cut to odd shapes and with a hole in the middle to reveal the title. Here's the book with and without its jackets...



..and here are the jackets/bands together and seperately. These four photos were pinched from the excellent design:related website.



The art is by mini-comics artist and writer Jordan Crane, more of whose work can be found at his Red Ink Like Blood site.

Here are the front and back covers in close-up: click for bigger versions.




UPDATE: Having now read this, I can say that this book is just right for readers like myself. It talks intelligently about the process of writing and reading, about late-Victorian and early 20th-Century adventure and pulp fiction, about the "literary" writer/critic prejudice against science-fiction that conveniently relabels literary science-fiction as "fables" or some other apparently non-embarrassing word, about the creation of cities and the recreation of childhood, about the power of maps and myths, and about golems.