More Motte

The first book designer who was kind enough to let me interview him was Nicholas Motte, who (in collaboration with Danielle Dutton) creates the wonderful covers for Dalkey Archive. (The Motte interview is here, Dutton's follow-up comments are here, and an overview of Motte's first Dalkey covers is here.)



Since then, Motte has produced a huge number of further Dalkey covers, remaking that publisher's line into one of the most eye-catching and unusual on the shelves. Using often abstract shapes, lots of white space and heavy black lines, fields of solid (usually primary) colour, and frequently with much of the illustration apparently falling off the edge of the cover, or zoomed in on to the point of losing obvious meaning, these are bold, beautiful graphics.

So here's an extensive selection of Dalkey eye-candy, both recently published and due later this year and in early 2010. Click for bigger versions.