Wednesday 10 December 2008

The Good Book

A brilliant, novel approach to the book whose name means 'book', this is Crush Design & Art Direction's cover for a new edition of the Bible, published by Hodder.


Just fantastic. Here's the cover art without type.



When not published in fine bindings, the Bible often gets functional or dull covers. There have been some notable exceptions. Here's Chip Kidd's design for Richard Lattimore's translation of the New Testament, from 1996.



And then there are these little beauties from Canongate, designed by Angus Hyland of Pentagram, also from the late 1990s: they published a number of the main books asactual individual books, with introductions from various notables (some wise, some mad).







Here are a number of the covers en masse, in two images pilfered from the Bible Design & Binding blog.


7 comments:

yt said...

these covers actually make me want to read the content in it. Quite an accomplishment indeed.

Juliet said...

Fascinating. Those Canongate covers are quite brilliant.

Lucy Fishwife said...

Pretty! Canongate are fantastic. I suppose I should read it but I've already had the ending spoiled for me. And the film was pants (Mel Gibson version, natch).

JRSM said...

They're beautiful, aren't they? If you do read them, though, I advise you to stay away from the Fay Weldon intro to Corinthians: she is bonkers. The Alisdair Gray intro to Jonah, though, looking at it as a masterpiece of Jewish comedy, is great.

Lucy Fishwife said...

I am reminded of filthy Scottish standup comedian Frankie Boyle doing St Paul's Third Letter To The Corinthians : "Dear Corinthians, I've written to you twice now. No reply. I don't know how you do things in Corinth, but where I'm from, that's a bit rude."

JRSM said...

Lucy, just to let you know I've already used that joke twice now since reading your comment.

Ian Koviak said...

I remember these. It was a truly different take...