Sex in the Middle East

Sex and the Citadel is an upcoming (January 2013) non-fiction account of the changing sexual lives of men and women in the Arab countries. Given the usual Middle Eastern book cover cliches, you might expect some variation on pictures of headscarves and perhaps a phallic rifle or two. Fortunately, publisher Chatto & Windus have gone in a very different direction, taking a traditional Arabic design and slightly tweaking it to give it a more labial feel...

The original design that I believe inspired the cover

The US edition (Pantheon) has a proposed cover that's slightly less daring, though it's not finalised, by Peter Mendelsund...

Tapping

Not much to say about this one, other than it's really nice: simple, striking and spot-on. From Pantheon in the US, designer as yet unknown: is Paul Sahre. The bottom image is stolen from Peter Mendelsund's blog, where he talks more about the design.

Thomas Mallon: Watergate
  

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.

Bodyworld

Late last year I jumped on the Dash Shaw bandwagon, posting about his marvellous graphic novel Bottomless Belly Button. Now Pantheon has released a paper edition of another novel by Shaw, originally published online: Bodyworld (or Body World, depending on which bit of the book you look at). Designed by Shaw, it's a beautifully put together book, with a number of odd features. CLick the images below for bigger versions.

The cover is printed on metallic foil...

..while the 'spine' as actually at the head of the book, as it opens like a laptop to create an unusually tall double page (hence the book title printed in fluorescent orange ink in the left-hand page edges).

The endpapers have character guides...

..which fold out to reveal maps of the story's setting.

As for the book itself, I really enjoyed it. The fact that it's something of a science-fiction satire means it will probably have less of a broad appeal than Bottomless Belly Button, but it does demonstrate Shaw's intriguing range and visual design sense.