Amazon Does Covers

I'm no big fan of Amazon, but I was interested to see them running a public vote on the best book covers of 2009 (here, although the link seems not to work half the time), which included a number of covers new to me. So here are some of those I hadn't seen before, which I also really like.

Design by Alison Forner for Padgett Powell's novel The Interrogative Mood

Design by Banksy

Design by Barbara de Wilde

Design by Ben Gibson

Design by Bunpei Yorifuji

Design by Carin Goldberg

Design by Mark Robinson

Design by Michael Bierut and Yve Ludwig of Pentagram

Design by Peter Mendelsund (who I interviewed here)

Design by Robert Frank and Gerhard Steidl, of Frank's Portfolio

Design by Scott Magoon, for Steve Jenkins' picture book

New Nabokovs

A recent post previewed two of Penguin UK's newly redesigned Vladimir Nabokovs.

I've managed to get hold of a few more from the series. Some of these work really well, and some I'm less certain about--I need to see them in the real world. I'm still unsure of the designer(s), too. (UPDATE: All-seeing Alan Trotter tells me it's Pentagram.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

They have a very mid-century, European look, which is appropriate enough. I especially like The Eye and Despair, while Laughter in the Dark doesn't seem remotely sinister enough, even with the hint of blood.

MORE UPDATES: Joseph of the amazing Book Design Review pointed out these amazing American Nabokov reissues which are imminent, while Kev Mears has this startling edition of Despair lurking in his shelves.

Faber & Faber & Faber & Faber...

My most recent purchase of book porn is Faber and Faber: Eighty Years of Book Cover Design (which I first mentioned here).



This is a lovely, oversized (roughly A4) collection of images of Faber's covers from 1929 onwards. The text is minimal, but there are hundreds and hundreds of pretty pictures to look at. Excuse the photographs (which you can click for much bigger views), but there was no way I was killing this thing's spine with my scanner.





The book itself had its cover designed by Neil Gower, mimicking the classic work of Berthold Wolpe, who did pretty much all of Faber's covers for some 35 years (as well as designing Albertus, the font used on this and many other earlier Faber covers).







Faber, at least in its earlier decades, did not have the range of cover art of, say, Penguin, due in part to having one designer with a consistent vision, but there are plenty of gems here.

My only criticism is that Connolly seems to lose interest after about 1980, and there are hardly any covers from the last 30 years shown here. This means that there are few of Pentagram's covers, and, weirdly, absolutely none by Andrzej Klimowski. It was Klimowski's covers for the work of Milan Kundera that first caught my eye and drew my attention to Faber back in the late 1980s/early 1990s, when I was a young lad for whom the combination of literature and naked women was pretty much irresistable.



(For Klimowski doing Wodehouse, see here.)

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.