Birds & Apocalypses

In honour of Russell Hoban, who has just passed away, a great author of both adult and children's books, and the man responsible for one of the greatest novels of all time, the post-nuclear-holocaust Riddley Walker, I thought I'd take a look at another avant-garde take on the apocalypse, Adam Novy's The Avian Gospels.

I first came across this via a rave review in Publishers Weekly. It sounded fascinating, and that was before I actually saw the book. Published by Short Flight/Long Drive Books, it's a thing of beauty, taking its cue from the book's title and theme with a very biblical look--most specifically, the little Gideon's you find in hotel rooms.

Designed by Elizabeth Ellen and Aaron Burch, the woman behind SF/LD and the man behind the parent Hobart Pulp, this design splits the book into 2 volumes--a fat 'old testament' and a thin 'new', with gilded page edges, ribbon bookmarks and page reference numbers.

After buying these, I found that everyone who orders them from the publisher gets a free ebook edition too, which is probably a good idea. But if ever you needed a reason to avoid ebooks, it's when the physical alternative is this beautifully considered and produced.

SF/LD seem to specialise in these genre/format-warping exercises: Karl Taro Greenfeld's story collection is disguised as a series of travel guides, while Michelle Orange's travel book is in the format of a passport. This sort of madness is only to be encouraged.

Speaking of Religion

..and speaking of religious books, have a look at this series of classic Christian writings published by Hodder in the UK. The covers are designed by Stuart Bache (last posted about here). You would not think that a colour scheme that was predominantly grey would be so eye-catching.

And my favourite, by a Nineteenth-Century minister and Darwinian, with a lovely 'profusion of life' cover:

UPDATE: The final cover above is actually by Mark Read, Senior Designer at Hodder, while the Bible cover below was designed by Crush.

Which reminds me of this Hodder-published Bible from a little while back, with a clever, gorgeous and funny/sad cover:

Phaidon New Testaments & MORE!!!

In 2000, art press Phaidon produced a series of four beautiful books, the 'New Testament' series. The basic idea is a simple one, but I don't think it's one that any other publisher had come up with. The idea is that most Western artists have tackled some aspect of Jesus's life story, some literally, some quite tangentially. The four books each took a significant moment in time of the New Testamant, and showed how artists have interpreted it over 1500-2000 years.



The four books are Annunciation...



.. Last Supper...



.. Crucifixion...



.. and Descent.



All four are beautiful compact hardbacks with metallic covers and no title on the front. The interiors have just enough text to guide you through the common motifs the artists made use of and to give you a little historical context; for the most part, the art speaks for itself.






Foolishly I bought only two of the four books at the time: Annunciation is now available only as a cheaper, less elegant paperback. If you're looking for a crash course in Western art fitted to an Easter theme, here's the place to start.

* * *

In other news, I just read an article in the Guardian Review about a new UK survey of people's non-reading habits. You should read the whole thing (it's the second item on that page, after a bit of strangely unfunny humourous waffle from Will Self), but I've bolded a couple of bits that most struck me in the extract below:

"These are not families with literacy difficulties: they just do not read," the survey noted. "Parents would support reading at school, but wouldn't force their children to do it at home," Wilson-Fletcher said. Reading was seen as isolating, while communal activities such as DVDs or Wii games were valued more. The research revealed that if participants did enter a bookshop, they found it "acutely anxiety-inducing" and "overwhelming". Bookshops and libraries must become more user-friendly, the research concluded, while publishers must explore new ways of presenting books (jackets could be better, was one suggestion, with quick content clues on the front cover). And books should also be sold in less elitist environments, such as "newsagents, station platforms, vending machines, supermarket queues, on the counter in cafés and hairdressers". The "book of the film" could be sold at cinemas, while more recent books should be provided for Nintendo DS, which "associates book reading with a more familiar leisure experience".

In other words, if this survey has its way, in the future, all books will look like this:

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.