Designer David Pearson and friends have launched a new website for 500-word (or thereabouts) reviews of book covers from the past and present.
There are a lot names you will be familiar with among the reviewers. I particularly enjoyed John Gall‘s review of the cover for The Franchiser by Stanley Elkin designed by relative unknown Lawrence Ratzkin for Farrrar, Straus & Giroux in 1976:
“Cover design in the US went from being house-styled, design driven and idiosyncratic (think Grove Press or New Directions or whatever Push Pin was up to) to the ‘big book look’ of the 1970s defined by designers like Paul Bacon. Make the type as large as possible, centre it, and combine with some non-specific imagery. That look still defines what we see on the bestseller list to this day. It established a generic way for covers to look and a familiar shorthand for sales teams and booksellers to understand – ‘aah, this must be a … big book!’. It ignored design principles of layout, composition and conceptual thinking that had been codified over the previous 50 years in favour of a commercial literal-ness. It also took away a lot of the fun.”
Jamie Keenan’s review of Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell’s naughty cover for The Secret of Chimneys by Agatha Christie is also a good time.
2 Comments