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Tag: coralie bickford-smith

Birds

birds

Book designers, bless them, really do like to put a bird on it. Following on from wild beasts and reptiles and amphibians, here is my latest post looking at animals on book covers, ‘Birds’:

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Acceptance by Jeff VanderMeer; design by Charlotte Strick; Illustration by Eric Nyquist (FSG / September 2014)

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Because I Love you by Barbara Toner; design by Sandy Cull / gogoGingko (Allen & Unwin / November 2012)

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The Bedside Book of Birds by Graeme Gibson; design by Scott Richardson (Random House / October 2005)

Bird_Catcher
The Bird Catcher by Laura Jacobs; design by LeeAnn Falciani (Picador / September 2010)

birds-without-wings
Birds Without Wings by Louis de Bernières; design by Matt Broughton (Vintage / April 2014)

black-swan
Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb; design by David Mann (Allen Lane / May 2007)

box-of-birds
A Box of Birds by Charles Fernyhough; design by Dan Mogford (Unbound / May 2013)

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Cartwheel by Jennifer duBois; design by Lynn Buckley (Random House / September 2013)

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Civil and Civic by Jonathan Bennett; design by David Gee (ECW / April 2011)

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Come Late to the Love of Birds by Sandra Kasturi; design by Erik Mohr (Tightrope Books)

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The Coincidence Authority by J. W. Ironmonger; design by Nathan Burton (Weidenfeld & Nicolson / September 2013)

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The Crow’s Vow by Susan Briscoe; design by David Drummond (Vehicule Press / April 2011)

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Darwin’s Finches edited by Kathleen Donohue; design by Matt Avery (University of Chicago Press / June 2011)

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Don’t Let It End Like This Tell Them I Said Something by Paul Vermeersch; design by Natalie Olsen / Kisscut Design (ECW Press /  October 2014)

dulwich
The Dunwich Horror by H. P. Lovecraft; design by Coralie Bickford-Smith (Penguin Classics / October 2008)

early-bird
Early Bird by Rodney Rothman; design by Paul Sahre (Simon & Schuster / April 2005)

grimm
Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm by Philip Pullman; design by Alison Forner (Penguin / November 2012)

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Floating Like the Dead by Yasuko Thanh; design by Terri Nimmo (McClelland & Stewart / April 2012 )

F+G
Florence & Giles by John Harding; design by Jo Walker (Blue Door / March 2010)

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Freedom by Jonathan Franzen; design by Charlotte Strick (FSG / December 2010)

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The Galapagos by Henry Nicholls; design by Nicole Caputo (Basic Books / August 2014)

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The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt; design by Keith Hayes (Little, Brown & Co. / October 2013)

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Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck; illustration by Kathryn McNaughton (Penguin / October 2011)


H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald; cover art by Christopher Wormell (Jonathan Cape / July 2014)

Grunt of the Minotaur emmanuel polanco
Grunt of the Minotaur by Robin Richardson; design by Emmanuel Polanco (Insomniac Press / October 2011)

Amanda Lindhout
A House in the Sky by Amanda Lindhout & Sara Corbett; design by Jennifer Heuer (Scribner / September 2013)

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Hunger by Lan Samantha Chang; design by David High (W. W. Norton / September 2009)

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Jenny and the Jaws of Life by Jincy Willett; design by Henry Sene Yee (Picador / June 2008)

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Kansas City Lightning by Stanley Crouch; design by Milan Bozic (HarperCollins / March 2014)

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Klauw van de valk by Wilbur Smith; design by Mark Ecob (Xander Uitgervers / unused)

love-hunger
Love & Hunger by Charlotte Wood; design by Sandy Cull /gogoGingko (Allen & Unwin / May 2012)

marabou-stork
The Marabou Stork Nightmares by Irvine Welsh; design by Matt Broughton (Vintage / January 2009)

Marrowbone-Marble-Allison-Saltzman
The Marrowbone Marble Company by Glenn Taylor; design by Allison Saltzman (Ecco / May 2010)

MORALITY
Morality for Beautiful Girls by Alexander McCall Smith; design by Mark Ecob (Abacus / December 2003)

meditations
Meditations by Marcus Aurelius; design by Emily Mahon; illustration by Yucel (Modern Library / August 2003)

midwich-cuckoos
The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham; illustration by Brian Cronin (Penguin / August 2008)

mind-of-a-thief
The Mind of a Thief by Patti Miller; design by Sandy Cull / gogoGingko; illustration by Cherie Strong (University of Queensland Press / October 2013)

mink-river
Mink River by Brian Doyle; design by David Drummond (Oregon State University Press / October 2010)

montress-forner
Monstress by Lysley Tenorio; design by Alison Forner (Ecco / January 2012)

naming-nature
Naming Nature by Carol Kaesuk Yoon; design by Chin-Yee Lai (W. W. Norton / August 2009)

never-ending birds
Never-Ending Birds by David Baker; design by Lynn Buckley; jacket illustration: Swallows by Audubon, The Granger Collection (W. W. Norton / October 2009)

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News from the World by Paula Fox; design by Roberto De Vicq de Cumptich (W. W. Norton / May 2011)

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The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin; design by Emily Mahon; illustration by Eleanor Grosch (Modern Library / August 1998)

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Pigeon by Karen Solie; design by Bill Douglas (House of Anansi / June 2009)

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Pigeon English by Stephen Kelman; design by Holly MacDonald (Bloomsbury / July 2011)

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Romeo Spikes by Joanne Reay; design by Chris Sergio ( Gallery Books / August 2012)

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Raven Girl by Audrey Niffenegger; design by Sara Corbett; illustration Audrey Niffenegger (Harry N. Abrams / May 2013)

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Silent Land by Graham Joyce; design by Emily Mahon (Doubleday / March 2011)

solo
Solo by Rana Dasgupta; design by Heads of State (Houghton Mifflin / February 2011)

Sweet-Bird
Sweet Bird of Youth by Tennessee Williams; design by John Gall (New Directions / June 2010)

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3 Elegies for Kosovo by Ismail Kadare; design by Matt Broughton (Vintage / May 2011)

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To See Every Bird on Earth by Dan Koeppel; illustration by Mike Langman (Michael Joseph / August 2005) 1

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Summer and Bird by Katherine Catmull; illustration by Jason Holley (Dutton / October 2012)


The Swan Gondola by Timothy Schaffert; design by Alex Merto (Riverhead / February 2014)


Treachery by S. J. Parris; design by Alexandra Allden, illustration by Daren Newman (Harper / August 2014)

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The Virtues of Poetry by James Longenbach; design by Kimberly Glyder (Graywolf / March 2013)

vulture
The Vulture by Gil Scott-Heron; design by Stuart Bache (Canongate / July 2010)

why-is-my-mother
Why is my Mother Getting a Tattoo? by Jancee Dunn; design by Catherine Casalino (Villard Books / June 2009)

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Whiskey Tango Foxtrot by David Shafer; design by Charles Brock / Faceout Studios (Mulholland Books / August 2014)

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Wizard of the Crow by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o; design by Peter Mendelsund (Pantheon / August 2006)

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Book Covers of Note September 2014

It’s hard to believe it is already September, but here we are… time for another round of book covers!

If you’re new to this feature, each month I collect together new and recent covers that have caught my eye in the previous few weeks. Although the focus is on books released in the current month, the posts also include covers I’ve missed earlier in the year. You can find the previous month’s posts here.

Thanks (as always) to my local bookstores — Type Books on Queen West, Book City on the Danforth, and Indigo Bay & Bloor — for fighting the good fight (and their wonderful displays!).

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Abbott Miller: Design and Content; design by Pentagram (Princeton Architectural Press / September 2014)

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Arvida by Samuel Archibald; design by Catherine D’Amours / Pointbarre (Le Quartanier / August 2014)
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(this is an obvious miss from last month’s post about maps. Sorry Catherine!)

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The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher by Hilary Mantel; design by Rodrigo Corral Design; photograph Demurez/Glasshouse (Henry Holt / September 2014)

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The City Under the Skin by Geoff Nicholson; design by Oliver Munday; photograph by George Baier IV (FSG / June 2014)

(Another one that should have been in the maps post. And yes, that really is someone’s back apparently)

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The Establishment by Owen Jones; design by Richard Green (Allen Lane / September 2014)

forensic-songs
Forensic Songs by Mike McCormack; design by Jason Booher (SOHO / July 2014)

god-telling-a-joke
God Telling a Joke by David Margoshes; design by David Drummond (Oolichan Books / May 2014)

Hack-Attack
Hack Attack by Nick Davies; design by David Drummond (Faber & Faber / August 2014)

herodotus
The Histories by Herodotus; design by Coralie Bickford-Smith (Penguin Classics / September 2014)

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Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison; design by JP King (Penguin / August 2014)

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Lippy by Bush Moukarzel; design by Jason Booher (Oberon Books / August 2014)

most-dangerous-animal
The Most Dangerous Animal of All by Gary L. Stewart with Susan Mustafa; design by Jarrod Taylor (HarperCollins / June 2014)

(I’m not endorsing the content of this book at all, but the red acetate cover does need to be seen in person to be fully appreciated)

smoke-gets-in
Smoke Gets in Your Eyes by Caitlin Doughty; design by David High / High Design (W. W. Norton / September 2014)

transcriptionist
The Transcriptionist by Amy Rowland; design by Keith Hayes (Algonquin Books / May 2014)

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Wolf in White Van by John Darnielle; design by Timothy Goodman (FSG / September 2014)

wittgenstein-jr
Wittgenstein Jr by Lars Iyers; design by Christopher Brian King (Melville House / September 2014)

you
You by Zoran Drvenkar; design by Kelly Blair (Knopf / August 2014)

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Triangles, Quadrangles, Shards, and Fragments

This is my last post on book covers and triangles — for the time being at least. I hope you’ve enjoyed this three-sided, three-post design diversion (you can see the previous posts here and here):

Adjacent
The Adjacent by Christopher Priest; design by Martin Stiff, Amazing15 (Titan Books April 2014) 1

book-of-heaven
The Book of Heaven by Patricia Storace; design by Linda Huang (Pantheon February 2014)

book-of-my-lives
The Books of My Lives by Aleksandar Hemon; design by Jonathan Pelham (Picador February 2014)

box-of-birds
A Box of Birds by Charles Fernyhough; design by Dan Mogford (Unbound May 2013)

close-to-the-machine
Close to the Machine by Ellen Ullman; design by Clare Skeats (Pushkin Press March 2013)

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Connectome by Sebastian Seung; design by Matthew Young (Penguin June 2013)

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Contradance by John Peck; design by Natalie F. Smith (University of Chicago Press October 2011)

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Demons by Fyodor Dostoevsky; design by Peter Mendelsund (Vintage August 2004)

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Gun Dealers’ Daughter by Gina Apostol; design by Jaya Miceli (W. W. Norton August 2012)

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November 1916 by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (Farrar, Straus & Giroux August 2014)

August 1914 by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (Farrar, Straus & Giroux August 2014)

Stories and Prose Poems by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (Farrar, Straus & Giroux November 2014)

Design by Oliver Munday

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The Scandal of Father Brown by G. K. Chesterton; design by Matthew Young (Penguin

snowdrops
Snowdrops by A. D. Miller; design by Emily Mahon (Doubleday February 2011)

time-machine
The Time Machine by H. G. Wells; design by Coralie Bickford-Smith (Penguin May 2012)

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We Are Animals by Justin Torres; design by Gray318 (Granta March 2012)

your-face-mine
Your Face in Mine by Jess Row; design by Oliver Munday (Riverhead August 2014)

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Carolie Bickford-Smith—A Series Woman

In this new interview with Gestalten.tv, Penguin Press designer Coralie Bickford-Smith talks about her love of books, her design process and the importance of research:

[vimeo 65388307 w=500]

Coralie’s work is featured in Fully Booked: Ink on Paper, published earlier this year by Gestalten.


You can read my 2009 interview with Coralie here.

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50 Memorable Covers From the Last Four Years

The Casual Optimist turned 4 years old at the end of last week. While not exactly a historic achievement, the blog has lasted the length of a presidency and exactly 3 years, 11 months longer than I thought it would. In order to celebrate this minor triumph, I thought I would post some memorable book covers from the last 4 years. It was going to be 10 covers, then it was 20… It quickly became 25, then it was 30… by 30 I figured I might as well do 40… I missed 40 and had to cap it at 50. It was just for fun and not meant to be a definitive survey — it’s just 50 covers that have stuck in my mind. Let me know what you would’ve included in the comments. Leave a comment or send me an email if I am missing details or have incorrectly attributed something.

The keen-eyed among you will also notice that there are no covers from 2012. I’m keeping my powder dry. You can expect a post of my favourite covers of the year in the not too distant future. You can let me know your picks for 2012 in the comments as well. In the meantime, I’m going on vacation so this will be my last post for a while.

So here you go — 50 great covers with some occasional notes. Enjoy…

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Midweek Miscellany

City Air Sets You Free — Mark Lamster interviews P.D. Smith about his new book City: A Guidebook for the Urban Age, for Design Observer:

It was never my intention to write an architectural history. Cities are much more than the sum of their architecture or infrastructure. A city is made great by its people. Nevertheless, you cannot ignore the structures and spaces of a city. Winston Churchill once famously said: “We shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us.” Our urban environments undoubtedly shape us as people. That’s why between each of the eight sections in the book there are essays on more concrete features of the urban landscape, such as the Central Station, the City Wall, the Skyscraper or even the Ruins. But I hope that even here I don’t lose sight of the people who use these architectural spaces. After all, they are the life-blood of the city.

Pop Detritus — Peter Paphides reviews When Ziggy Played Guitar by Dylan Jones, for The Observer:

For many critics, Ziggy was the last desperate act of a craven opportunist. A New Yorker writer flown to see the Ziggy shows fretted that “Bowie doesn’t seem quite real”. But, as long as music journalism has existed, performers – be it Bowie in 1972 or Lana Del Rey in 2012 – have been docked points for their apparent lack of authenticity.

And, besides, it was those very notions of authenticity with which Bowie was playing when he created Ziggy. After several hapless reinventions, the only hit he had to show for his efforts was Space Oddity, but, as Jones points out, Ziggy Stardust was the result of a decade spent sifting through pop cultural detritus and working out which bits he could use to turn him into a pop star.

Don’t Believe the Type — Estimable Jon Gray on the recently revealed cover design for J.K. Rowling’s new novel:

JD Salinger famously had a clause written into his contract stating that no imagery could appear on his covers. Günter Grass will only allow his own drawings. The classic orange Penguins, the poetry covers of Faber: they tell us nothing other than this is a book of note, a book of importance. JK Rowling’s name is the important piece of information, the quality assurance mark, and it is stated very simply and boldly in the brightest and clearest way possible.

(Needless to say, Jon’s thoughts are more interesting that the cover itself).

Material World — An interview with mighty Coralie Bickford-Smith:

I always start by asking myself ‘what is the most effective set of book covers I can produce using just standard materials which are simple but incredibly effective to be within the usual budget constraints?’ To marry design with materials in the most considered and best way possible. So in a way it always starts with the materials so I can make my design suit that method of printing. With the cloth classics its was all about creating a book that would be loved and cherished and not throw away. The materials were the starting point. The foiling was a real struggle at first, the detail of the design cant be too intricate. So the patterns were all designed with this in mind so that the printers could reproduce the design easily. Every material has its limits and its all about getting to grips with those limits to produce an end product that looks effortless and deceptively simple.

My interview with Coralie is here.

And finally…

The Long History of the Espresso Machine

In the 19th century, coffee was a huge business in Europe with cafes flourishing across the continent. But coffee brewing was a slow process and, as is still the case today, customers often had to wait for their brew. Seeing an opportunity, inventors across Europe began to explore ways of using steam machines to reduce brewing time – this was, after all, the age of steam. Though there were surely innumerable patents and prototypes, the invention of the machine and the method that would lead to espresso is usually attributed to Angelo Moriondo of Turin, Italy, who was granted a patent in 1884 for “new steam machinery for the economic and instantaneous confection of coffee beverage.”

Great stuff… (see also: The Once and Future Coffeehouses of Vienna)

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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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Coralie Bickford-Smith | Serious Interview

Alan Trotter entertainingly interviews Coralie Bickford-Smith about her new cover designs for the Penguin Great Food series:

The lettering on the covers is by the talented Stephen Raw, and you can see all the finished designs on the Penguin Books Flickr.

My interview with Coralie is here.

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Penguin Great Food | Coralie Bickford-Smith

The Creative Review has an early look at three of the covers for Penguin’s Great Food paperback series to be released in April.

Designed by the wonderful Coralie Bickford-Smith, each cover draws on a decorative ceramic style relevant to the period of the writing.

Meanwhile, in new article for Fast Company Coralie talks about the inspiration behind her book covers:

“I want these books to be cherished like the literature inside,” says Bickford-Smith of her obsessive attention to detail. “If something is well considered, it will entice. People want to explore it, feel it. That design shines through and connects.”

And, if you missed it, my Q & A with Coralie from 2009 is here.

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Something for the Weekend

Limits and Boundaries — Peter Mendelsund, associate art director at Knopf, discusses his cover design for Jo Nesbø’s The Snowman with The New Yorker’s ‘The Book Bench’:

[O]ften my favorite jackets are the ones done after repeated rounds of failure and rejection. There’s something to be said for the desperation that rejection engenders in me. Sometimes, when the process feels most intractable and hopeless, a kind of last-ditch clarity appears. That being said, it’s also nice when you get it on the first stab.

And on the subject of super-talented book designers… A short Q &A with Coralie Bickford-Smith, Penguin senior cover designer, at 10 Answers.

I, Reader — Alexander Chee on e-books and life spent reading for The Morning News:

Many ponderables remain regarding the e-book. At a personal level, I am someone who has read books in poor light for decades without hurting my vision (despite what my mother claimed), and I’m keeping, well, an eye on that—the iPad gives me headaches in ways reading on paper never did. As a writer and former bookseller, I understand the e-book’s imperfections and limits, and monitor the arguments that it will end publishing or save it, and potentially kill bookstores, which would kill something in me, if it were to happen. But I also believe that the book as we know it was only a delivery system, and that much of what I love about books, and about the novel in particular, exists no matter the format. I’ve lately been against what I see as the useless, overly expensive hardcover, and I admit I enjoy the e-book pricing over hardcover pricing. Still, I’ll never replace the books on those shelves, and there’ll always be books I want only as books, not as e-books, like the new Chris Ware, for example, which would be pointless on an e-reader. This really is just a way for me to have more.

Rage Against the Machine — Onnesha Roychoudhuri’s long and much talked about article on Amazon for the Boston Review:

What happens when an industry concerned with the production of culture is beholden to a company with the sole goal of underselling competitors?…

The conceit is that that $9.99 price tag is what the market demands. But in this case Amazon is the market, having—with no input from its suppliers—already dictated the price and preempted the standard fluctuations that competition and improved efficiency impose on prices…

Cheap books are easy on our wallets, but behind the scenes publishers large and small have been deeply undercut by the rise of large retailers and predatory pricing schemes. Unless publishers push back, Amazon will take the logic of the chains to its conclusion. Then publishers and readers will finally know what happens when you sell a book like it’s a can of soup.

Talking About My Generation — The LA Times’ David L. Ulin on Gary Trudeau’s 40: A Doonesbury Retrospective:

[T]he trick, the secret of “Doonesbury,” that, in its topicality, its ongoing dailiness, it is really about something more profound. Trudeau highlights that in his introduction: “It’s not about Watergate,” he writes of the collection, “gas lines, cardigans, Reaganomics, a thousand points of light, Monica, New Orleans, or even Dubya.” No, indeed, although such elements do show up here, more important are the people, the dance of generations, their humanity. This is where “Doonesbury” is at its most compelling…

And finally…

Andrew Kuo, who creates off-beat music infographics for The New York Times,  talks about his new book of personal work,  What Me Worry (published by The Standard), at Interview Magazine (thx PMac!).

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Something for the Weekend

More Than Words — Yves Peters takes a typographical look at the winners of British Book Design and Production Awards 2010 for FontFeed. The winners all look wonderful, but, as Peters notes, it is a shame that only the publishers are credited, not the designers of the books.

An Archaeology of Business Cards — Penguin book designer Coralie Bickford-Smith discusses her workspace and her work with From the Desk Of…:

Right now I’m in the middle of designing a 20-book series, as well as sundry standalone titles, and my desk is usually a mess of ideas and scribbles on innumerable scraps of paper. There’s a whole archaeology of business cards, post-it notes and other treasures under there. I like to be surrounded by the current proofs to make sure the designs are working and that any tweaks are made in time for the final print. I like my desk – it’s my own tiny world in a big office.

My Q & A with Coralie is here.

Reading the ProcessThe New Yorker’s Book Bench interviews book designer Rodrigo Corral:

Reading is always part of the process when we’re working on a book jacket or cover for fiction. I read, I take notes, I take breaks. I’ll stop on the title, re-read it, and think about how it plays into the book and its overall message and intent. It’s rare to be able to illustrate the tone of the entire story by only depicting one moment from the book, so I prefer using a new image or design that I feel represents the story accurately.

The Rejection of Literalism — Steven Heller talks about his biography of designer Alvin Lustig Born Modern* with Imprint:

I did not get the impression that Lustig went into the book jacket biz with a literary bent. He did, however, have the temerity to try just about anything. And since, as a kid, he was interested in designing his way, he just, well, designed his way. So, I guess “confidence” is the right word. It was ballsiness. He had a vision—wherever it came from—and he pursued it. He was largely self-taught.
And, also via Imprint

Design Dossier: Graphic Design for Kids by Pamela Pease published by Paintbox Press, seen at The Daily Heller.

12 Reasons to be Excited About Publishing’s Future — Following up an earlier post about the love of books, Digital Book World‘s Guy LeCharles Gonzalez asks book industry folks why they’re excited about publishing.

And finally…

Help Me Destroy Public Radio” — Alec Baldwin channels Jack Donaghy for his “Do Not Pledge To Public Radio” pledge drive promo for NPR.

* Born Modern is published by Chronicle Books, who are distributed in Canada by my employer Raincoast Books.

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