Unhand Me, Gray-Beard Loon

Stumbled across this one, an apparently not-available-to-buy book put together by design agency Pentagram (who've done a lot of cover work for Faber, Canongate (including the Pocket Canons discussed earlier) and others): it's a special illustrated edition of Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner, designed to be a showcase for the agency's artists. Click for bigger versions.







The book is designed by Angus Hyland. The cover is by Jimmy Turrell, and the interior art shown here is by (in order) Tom Gauld, Luke Best, Sam Weber and Adam Simpson. The actual book has work from many other artists. I want.

More here.

Kelman and Cardstock

The most recent books put out by Vintage Classics (such as their three Le Clézios) have been a bit frustrating, as they've got lovely covers but no design credits (UPDATE: see a bit below). Two of their other recent re-releases are these two by James Kelman.



They're both very simple ideas, very well done. A Disaffection is the story of a, well, disaffected teacher, while How Late it Was, How Late features a protagonist who goes blind after a spot of police brutality. In the absence of actual information, I'm going to guess that they're the work of Jo Walker, who has done a number of other nifty covers for Vintage. They're the work of Anna Crone, which I would have realised if I'd looked closer at the actual book, and which John Self pointed out in the comments.

Kelman's other books have also recently been gussied up by small Scottish press Polygon, using nice card-stock covers with simple graphic elements. UPDATE: These covers are the work of Angus Hyland of Pentagram. He notes: "The spare cover imagery, which uses bold typography and individual icons to hold the series together, echoes Kelman’s direct writing style. The lettering for the titles is scanned from a collection of wood-cut type, alluding to Kelman’s apprenticeship as a printer."






Covers not printed onto standard white card are surprisingly uncommon, but they can be very groovy, especially with big bold chunks of colour, as on these previously posted, coming-in-2009 Melville House covers for two Hans Fallada books.




The best example of using beautiful, non-white card stock is probably that provided by the wonderful Pushkin Press, to be the subject of a future post. Their beautiful, small paperbacks use textured coloured card for the covers, and also watermarked, high-quality textured paper for the interior pages. They are books that need to be fondled, so these images won't quite do the trick, but the Gracq cover scan does show some of the detail.

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.