O Liver Sacks

Drawn to my attention by A Journey Round My Skull is the cover of the new Oliver Sacks book. "In The Mind’s Eye, Oliver Sacks tells the stories of people who are able to navigate the world and communicate with others despite losing what many of us consider indispensable senses and abilities: the power of speech, the capacity to recognize faces, the sense of three-dimensional space, the ability to read, the sense of sight. For all of these people, the challenge is to adapt to a radically new way of being in the world." (Click for a bigger version)

Designer as yet unknown--it's a Knopf books, so it could be any one of a number of geniuses. UPDATE: And it's the work of genius-in-chief, Chip Kidd (thanks, Anon and Liska!)

A Tale of Two Yoshidas

A new, noirish book by a Japanese author is translated into English, and released simultaneously on both sides of the Atlantic. The UK edition, from Harvill, is an uninspiring movie-poster style image...

..but the US edition, from Pantheon, is a very groovy thing indeed. (Click for a bigger version.)

Both designers as yet unknown,as neither edition is yet to be found in Australia.

UPDATE: Thanks to several commenters below, I can say that the second cover was designed by Chip Kidd, using artwork by Francois Robert--see more from his astonishing 'Stop the Violence' series here.

COMING TOMORROW: A combined interview with artist/writer Bob Fingerman and designer Peter Lutjen.

Supernature

A recent purchase was the Library of America's two-volume American Fantastic Tales set, a 1500-page collection of short fiction by the United States' best. Everyone is in here, from Edith Wharton and Henry James to John Cheever and Paul Bowles, from Charles Brockden Brown and Edgar Allan Poe to Willa Cather and Vladimir Nabokov. It's a genuinely excellent collection of the creepy, the peculiar and the savage.

What I want to talk about, of course, is the cover design. Both volumes were designed by Chip Kidd, with rather effective photographs. Volume one, which goes from the late 1700s to the 1930s, looks like this:

The second volume, which goes from the 1940s to now, looks like this:

The photographers are Andy and Michelle Kerry (volume one) and Fredrik Broden (volume two). Both images are well chosen. The earlier stories of volume one tend to focus on threats from the outside world, appropriate for a densely forested continent with settlements perched around the edges. The cloaked figure with the lamp is at risk from things in the woods or roaming the roads between villages. In volume two, much of the danger is found in domestic settings: the backyard, the home or the workplace.

The two are available together in a slipcase, which I couldn't resist. I'd have preferred less text on the box, but then I suppose that when the whole thing is shrink-wrapped, the potential buyer can't actually look at the individual books, so you need to let the box do the selling with all of the author names and so forth.

Here's the box...

..and here's what it looks like when possessed.

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.

Engulfed in Flames

A writer who divides many people who have read him is David Sedaris. His "97% true" books of personal stories are frequently hilarious, but some people I know who've read him find him a bit mean-spirited (though to be fair, he is his own main target). Those who have never read him are advised to try some of his work available from the New Yorker.

His newest book is entitled When You Are Engulfed in Flames. The title, as Sedaris has explained, comes from a badly translated emergency booklet in a Hiroshima hotel: "It was called ‘Best Knowledge of Disaster Damage Prevention and Favors to Ask of You.’ And it was broken up into different chapters. ‘When You Check In a Hotel,’ ‘When You Find a Fire,’ and ‘When You Are Engulfed in Flames.’ It just slayed me."

As well as a fine title, it makes use of an excellent Van Gogh painting on the front cover.



The painting is Skull with a Burning Cigarette, from 1885.



UPDATE: Have finally got my copy--I seem to have inadvertantly ordered the large-print version, so the size of the type is a bit scary. I note that the cover is a Chip Kidd design.

Charles Burns Continued!

Following on from my first Charles Burns post, I coincidentally received and read my copy of Chip Kidd's new novel, The Learners, yesterday. Kidd is the most famous book designer currently working, and certainly one of the most respected. He is also a very good novelist. This sequel to the moving and funny The Cheese Monkeys is a worthy follow-up. It also features a cover by Charles Burns.

At left you can see the front cover with its diagonally cut red half-jacket: the illustration itself is printed onto the cover boards. It's a characteristically alarming Burns image, and one very appropriate to a novel about a man whose life and ideas about himself are pretty much ruined by participating in Stanley Milgram's famous obedience experiment in 1961.

Here is the full cover (front and back), both with and without the jacket, so you can see Burns' artwork in full.