Skip to content

Midweek Miscellany, August 5th, 2009

Foucault — A nice new cover design from David Drummond (approval pending).

(And apparently I like photos of the backs of people’s heads)

Kill Your DarlingsPrint asks book designers Carol Devine Carson, John Gall, Paul Buckley, Rodrigo Corral, John Gray, Gabriele Wilson, Paul Sahre, and Peter Mendelsund about the covers that didn’t quite make it:

every book jacket designer has at least one that got away—a fresh, inventive cover that was shot down en route to the bookstore shelf. These “lost” covers form a parallel universe in which the books we read and love exist in entirely different skins.

Re-typing History — The Financial Times reports on typographer Mike Parker’s challenge to the accepted history of the ubiquitous Times New Roman:

The… evidence for his version of history is a brass pattern plate bearing a large capital letter B. He holds the plate up to show the familiar form of the letter, its characteristic curves and serifs. The point, he says, is that such pattern plates represent a technology that was not used after 1915. The creation of Times New Roman was announced in 1932.

Bite-Size Edits — Baking books with the Book Oven chefs.

Forgotten Bookmarks — the “personal, funny, heartbreaking and weird things” found in books at a rare and used bookstore.

The Book Depository launches in the US. There are details at The Book Depository blog.

And finally…

Trial and Error — Author Matthew Pearl discusses the evolution of the cover for his novel The Dante Club. It’s nice to read about an author not having a hideous experience with a publisher for a change, and I actually think that the cover design for The Dante Club, while not flashy, gives a lot of great visual cues to readers about the nature of the book (which is really what it is about isn’t it?).

One Comment

  1. Hugh McGuire

    Hey Dan, Thanks for the plug …

Comments are closed.