Fire, Water

Following this marvellous cover for Ben Marcus's last novel, The Flame Alphabet...

..Peter Mendelsund has done it again with a matching watery cover for Marcus's new story collection. Both books are from Knopf. (See my interview with Peter here.)

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...

Mendelsund Foucaults

Synchronicity! A week or so ago, keen-eyed reader Monty Carlo (possibly not his real name) pointed me towards these beautiful covers designed by Peter Mendelsund for the Vintage US covers of Michel Foucault's work. I hadn't seen them: over here in the Commonwealth our Foucaults aren't so striking, as the actress said to the bishop. And then the other day the Casual Optimist lists them as part of his much-delayed best covers of 2010 post. So here they are...

 

These were even part of the AIGA 50 of 2010, so how I missed them I don't know. Feebleness, presumably.

"It's like it's on fire!"

Posted on Peter Mendelsund's blog:

I have no idea if this is the actual final cover (the book's not out until January), whether Peter was the designer, or how many layers of jacket were required to create that effect, but I love it and want it NOW!

(For my interview with Peter, see here.)

Mendelsund Kafkas

I haven't much to say about these marvellous covers that hasn't already been said by either their designer, the great Peter Mendelsund (who I interviewed here), or in this very thoughtful post at the Casual Optimist. But I couldn't not show them, since they're so good. So, here are Mendelsund's upcoming covers for the works of Franz Kafka, forthcoming from Schocken Books in the US in mid-2011. Click for much bigger images.

Set Hair

Peter Mendelsund's cool cover for a (we hope) upcoming autobiography from the late Benoit Mandelbrot, who died 12 days ago:

This obituary from the UK's Daily Telegraph is a masterpiece of clarity and concision if you want to know what the fuss was all about.

Three Skulls

Designer unknown Photo by Fredrik Broden (but shouldn't Ibsen have also got a credit as being author of the play here translated and adapted?)

Designed by Oliver Munday (and spotted here)

Designed by Peter Mendelsund (who I also discussed yesterday, and interviewed here)

Heavy Larsson

I'm no fan of the mysteriously popular Stieg Larsson. Prose with the grace of a software manual, endless pointless detail, a have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too approach to sexual violence against women where rape is tut-tutted over after being described in lavish and drooling detail, and a classic male Mary Sue hero are just some of his books' many problems. But if you were a Larsson fan, you could so a lot worse than get hold of this upcoming and rather lovely Knopf boxed set of his trilogy, designed by Peter Mendelsund (from whose blog most of these pictures were stolen).

I'm also intrigued by these slightly peculiar Spanish (heroine as doll) and French (heroine as sexy Wednesday Addams) versions (the final image being the French boxed set).

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