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Tag: book design review

Favourite Covers of 2011

After posting my long overdue picks for 2010 last week, here are my selections for my favourite book covers of 2011.

I’m currently reading Where The Stress Falls a collection of writing by Susan Sontag published in 2001. In an essay about art she quotes Paul Valéry on the painter Corot. “One must always apologize for talking about painting” he says. I know just what he means. I feel the same way about book design. Perhaps even more than a painting, what you see is what you get with a book jacket. If you have to explain why it works, it probably doesn’t. Or you’re talking to the wrong crowd. But there’s something else too. I also feel like I need to apologize for not knowing more; for producing reductive lists like this one; for being, well, so presumptuous…

The 2011 list has changed a few times in the last few days and would likely be different again if you asked me tomorrow — not for lack of quality you understand, but simply because narrowing the list down to a manageable number and deciding which should be in the final ‘top 10’ was just plain hard. This isn’t a definitive survey of book covers in 2011 by any means (sorry!) it’s simply a list of the book jackets that caught my eye this year — designs I thought that were beautiful, a bit different, audacious, a bit out of the ordinary, a bit worthwhile…  I’m grateful to all the designers who created these covers, who gave me suggestions and helped me source the images. Once again, I’ve been struck by their generosity. Nevertheless I have surely I’ve missed some great covers. Tell me what they are in the comments.

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My Favourite Covers of 2010

At the end of last year, Joseph Sullivan, curator of the late lamented The Book Design Review, asked me to write about my favourite covers of 2010. I’d always stayed away from such posts in the past because it was Joseph’s thing (his 2009 list is here). But since it was Joe who was doing the asking and The BDR was on “indefinite hiatus,” how could I not?

For various reasons, the list I compiled didn’t get used in the end, and it has sat in my drafts folder for about year now. I now have a list of my favourite covers of 2011, but before I post it I thought I would share that original list from 2010, if only for a bit of context.

I’ve made a few minor alterations to the list I sent to Joe — mostly to better accommodate the series designs and to fully utilise 12 months of regret and hindsight — but it is more or less intact, in spirit at least.

I’ve included the short introduction I wrote for the original piece to explain my process (or lack thereof…).

(Hindsight = 20/20: Apparently I like negative space. A LOT).

The Top 10 Book Covers of 2010

Selecting an annual top 10 of anything — film, music, books — is fraught with difficulty. Not only do you have to sift through all things you have seen, heard, and read over the course of a year (assuming you can remember them all), you must somehow take into account all the things you meant to get to and didn’t (where does one even start?). Worse, you are haunted by the awful, inevitable realization that there were any number of incredible things so outside your usual cultural range that they didn’t even register on your consciousness — the “unknown unknowns,” to borrow Donald Rumsfeld’s immortal phrase. Fate usually decides that you will discover at least one previously unknown work of brilliance exactly 24-hours after you publicly declare your favourites…

Then, having grappled with (ignored) all those thorny issues (and plunged on regardless), there is further problem of what actually constitutes good (let alone “great”) book cover design. Part science, part art (part pleasing interested parties), good book cover design is slippery and alchemical. How does one judge? Using what criteria? Ask 10 designers and you will surely get 10 differently nuanced answers.

I have not read all the books on this list, so I cannot claim authority on appropriateness of every cover to its subject (surely an significant consideration, and yet who would want to limit their list only to the books they had read?), so my criteria, such as they were, included the quality of the overall design — the composition, image selection and typography — as well as originality, swagger and the indefinable  je ne sais quoi essential in my opinion to really great covers.

And with that complete abdication from any claim to comprehensiveness or authority, I introduce my picks for the top 10 book covers of the last year with apologies to all the designers — particularly outside of North America and the UK — whose amazing work I have missed, forgotten, or otherwise neglected.

The covers are presented in alphabetically by title.

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Goodbye BDR

Just like every other book blogger (and their mum),  I was sadden to read that Joseph Sullivan has decided to put his blog The Book Design Review on an “indefinite hiatus.”

The BDR has consistently been one of my favourite book blogs and was one of the first I added to my RSS reader.

It was a revelation to discover a blog that was about books and design. But more importantly The BDR made me realise that book blogs could be about the people who made books as well those that wrote them, and that enthusiasm might just be more interesting than snarkasm.

Nevertheless, I understand why Joe is taking a break (and I hope it is just a break, even though I don’t really think it is). Taking blogging seriously — taking the time to curate material and write about it well — can wear you down. There is (self-imposed) pressure to deliver, and when it doesn’t pay (and it doesn’t) it is hard to justify — especially if other creative projects fall by the wayside…

But, to be honest, I also feel kind of responsible. In the 5 years since Joe started The BDR a lot of other book design blogs like mine (even though I tell myself this isn’t really a book design blog) and sites like FaceOut Books and Pieratt‘s The Book Cover Archive have cropped up. Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but it’s also fucking irritating. Even though he’s always been very kind to me, I’m sure Joe must have thought WTF? on more than one occasion. Perhaps the Amazon poll for the best book cover of 2009 was the final straw?

All I really know though is that I will miss The BDR terribly, and that will try not to disappoint Joe’s regular readers who chose to haunt The Casual Optimist in its (hopefully temporary) absence.

Thanks again Joe. (And sorry).

(Pictured: The Great Perhaps, designed by Jamie Keenan, one The BDR‘s Favourite Book Covers of 2009)

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