Thursday 24 March 2011

Cain

Spotted at the excellent John Gall's blog: Vintage US's new covers for James M. Cain's three most famous (and filmed) novels, created by Megan Wilson and Evan Gaffney.




Beautiful!

UPDATE: The sideways layout may be a reference to the occasional practise in the past of giving horizontal covers to various pulp and crime books. See here and here for more examples.

6 comments:

Craig D. said...

Not sure if I like the sideways layout, but I think the "1940s movie title screen" design is brilliant, despite my usual dislike of phony retro. It's certainly better than more "quote from the text on a white background" nonsense.

JRSM said...

Definitely! The sideways layout is has also been used a few times before on pulp/crime books: see http://therapsheet.blogspot.com/2008/11/book-you-have-to-read-grifters-by-jim.html and http://www.bookscans.com/Oddities/horizontal.htm

Ákos Polgárdi said...

On the screen they look like vintage postcards, rather than books. It'd interesting to see one IRL, though.

Brian Busby said...

Very nice. They've had me looking at my own modest Cain collection. I note that there isn't a bad or even mediocre cover in the lot. Is there something about Cain that brings out the good in design, or have I just been avoiding the crummy?

Curriculum Vitae said...

These are not phony retro, they are the actual movie titles, re-drawn. The books are sideways because that is the shape of the movie screen.

J. Kingston Pierce said...

There are many more examples of horizontal book covers to be seen here.

Cheers,
Jeff