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Tag: evan gaffney

Book Covers of Note, March 2021

Spring has arrived, the clocks have gone forward, and here are some new and recent covers to wrap up your month…

Amoralman by Derek Delgaudio; design by John Gall (Knopf / March 2021)

Antonio by Beatriz Bracher; design by Janet Hansen (New Directions / March 2021)

Consent by Vanessa Springora; design by Stephen Brayda; art by Rozenn Le Gall (Harpervia / February 2021)

Fulfillment by Alex MacGillis; design by Na Kim (Farrar, Straus and Giroux / March 2021)

How to Read Numbers by Tom Chivers & David Chivers; design by Luke Bird (Weidenfeld & Nicholson / March 2021)

Last Call by Elon Green; design by Evan Gaffney (Celadon Books / March 2021)

Misplaced Persons by Susan Beale; design by Sara Marafini (John Murray / March 2021)

My Friend Natalia by Laura Lindstedt; design by Sarahmay Wilkinson (Liveright / March 2021)

Pure Gold by John Patrick McHugh; design by Jack Smyth (New Island Books / February 2021)

Recent East by Thomas Grattan; design by Alex Merto (MCD / March 2021)

Speak, Okinawa by Elizabeth Miki Brina; design by Janet Hansen (Knopf / February 2021)

Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul by Jesse McCarthy; design by Steve Attardo (Liveright / March 2021)

Why the Innocent Plead Guilty and the Guilty Go Free by Jed S. Rakoff; design by June Park (Farrar, Straus and Giroux / February 2021)

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Book Covers of Note, March 2020

This feels a bit like blogging at the end of world, but I am taking my joy where I can get it these days. I hope you can find at least a couple of minutes respite from the stress by scrolling through a few nice book covers.

Normally I link titles to the Book Depository because they ship internationally, but I won’t be doing that this month. Please try — more than ever — to support your local independent bookstore instead. Amazon does not need your money.

In Canada, many independent stores are offering free local delivery. Some may still be offering curbside pick-up, although that no longer seems to be the case in Toronto and Montreal. If you are in the US, you can also check out bookshop.org, which allows you to order online and support local stores. LitHub posted some other tips on how to help (US) bookstores here. I know there are some fundraisers for booksellers doing the rounds too. If anyone has collected them together in one place or can point to other useful resources, please let me know — I’ll be more than happy to post the links.1

Stay safe. Read books.

Actress by Anne Enright; design by Evan Gaffney (W. W. Norton / March 2020)

The Age of Innocence and The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton; design by Tristan Offit (Scribner / January 2020)

Companions by Katie M. Flynn; design by Laywan Kwan (Scout Press / March 2020)

Days of Distraction by Alexandra Chang; design by Allison Saltzman; illustration by gg (Ecco / March 2020)

The Discomfort of the Evening by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld; design by Pete Adlington (Faber & Faber / March 2020)

Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo; design by Richard Bravery; illustration by Karan Singh (Penguin / March 2020)

I believe Penguin are reissuing Bernardine Evaristo’s backlist with similarly bold covers.

The hardcover of Girl, Woman, Other, also designed by Richard Bravery, features an illustration by Ali Campbell:

Heavy by Dan Franklin; design by Luke Bird (Constable / March 2020)

Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor; design Jamie Keenan (New Directions / March 2020)

Inferno by Catherine Cho; design by Greg Heinimann (Bloomsbury / March 2020)

The Inland Sea by Madeleine Watts; design by Anna Morrison (Pushkin Press / March 2020)

I think this fits with the new psychedelia trend that I mentioned last year.

Ledger by Jane Hirshfield; design by John Gall (Knopf / March 2020)

My word, it’s good to have John Gall designing covers for Knopf again.

Michael Kohlhaas by Heinrich von Kleist; design by Paul Sahre (New Directions / March 2020)

Our Revolution by Honor Moore; design by Robin Bilardello (W. W. Norton / March 2020)

We Inherit What the Fires Left by William Evans; design by David Litman (Simon & Schuster / March 2020)

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Book Covers of Note August 2014

Here is this month’s selection of recently noted covers:

2am-at-the-cats-pajamas
2 A.M. at the Cat’s Pajamas by Marie-Helene Bertino; design by Christopher Brand (Crown August 2014)

bend-of-the-world
The Bend of the World by Jacob Bacharach; design by Jamie Keenan (W. W. Norton May 2014)

brave-man-seven-stories-tall
Brave Man Seven Storeys Tall by Will Chancellor; design by Richard Ljoenes (Harper July 2014)

butterflies
Butterflies in November by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir; design by Nathan Burton (Pushkin Press June 2014)


Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami; design by Suzanne Dean (Harvill Secker August 2014)

(See the U.S. Cover here)

girls-from-weintraub
The Girls from Corona del Mar by Rufi Thorpe; design by Abby Weintraub (Knopf July 2014)

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

happy-are-the-happy-suzanne-dean
Happy are the Happy by Yesmina Reza; design by Suzanne Dean (Harvill Secker July 2014)

liars-wife
The Liar’s Wife by Mary Gordon; design by Linda Huang (Pantheon August 2014)

philip-larkin
Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love by James Booth; design by David Mann (Bloomsbury August 2014)

preparing-the-ghost
Preparing the Ghost by Gavin Frank; design by Ben Wiseman (W. W. Norton August 2014)

9780374248192
The Reef by Iain McCalman; design by Oliver Munday (Scientific American May 2014)

removers
The Removers by Andrew Meredith; design by Evan Gaffney (Scribner July 2014)

9781770893177
Spin by Clive Veroni; design by WAX (House of Anansi August 2014)

unspeakable-things
Unspeakable Things by Laurie Penny; design by Greg Heinimann (Bloomsbury July 2014)

we-are-called-to-rise
We Are Called To Rise by Laura McBride; design by Christopher Lin (Simon & Schuster June 2014)

what-we-see-when-we-read
What We See When We Read by Peter Mendelsund; design by Peter Mendelsund (Vintage August 2014)

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

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50 Covers for 2013

I decided to go in a slightly different direction with my covers list this year (see my lists for 2012, 2011, and 2010). It’s just a straight up list of the fifty covers designs with a few annotations and links a long the way. I’m sorry for woeful under-representation of Australian and NZ designers, and for completely ignoring the entire non-English-speaking world. I will try and do better in 2014. But until then, here, in alphabetical order, are my fifty covers of 2013:

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More New and Recent Book Covers of Note

So is this a thing now? I don’t know. You folks seem to like these posts, so maybe… (but probably not because a lot of designers I really like just don’t updated their portfolios that often—you know who you are… cold, hard, stare)…

Here are half-a-dozen covers that have caught my eye recently:

Carnival by Rawi Hage; design by Richard Bravery

I’ll Seize the Day Tomorrow by Jonathan Goldstein; design by Michel Vrana (I think this is actually from last year, but I saw it recently and I really like it. If I’d been paying better attention, it might well have made my 2012 list—maybe next to this!).

The Towers of Trebizond by Rose Macaulay; design by Charlotte Strick (also not that recent, but charlotte talks about her design process here).

Idiopathy by Sam Byers; design by Joanna Neborksy (Jonathan Gibbs wrote about this cover in his regular book design column for The Independent a couple of months ago, and funnily enough I believe the aforementioned Charlotte Strick was the AD on this)

Bleeding Edge by Thomas Pynchon; design by Evan Gaffney (this on the other hand is not out until September!)

 The Hamlet Doctrine by Simon Critchley; design by David A. Gee (also out in September)

Have a great weekend!

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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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Something for the Weekend

It Looks Pretty Cool” — Chip Kidd on his design for Haruki Murakami’s new novel 1Q84:

logistically the title is a book designer’s dream, because its unique four characters so easily adapt it to a very strong, iconic treatment.

F**ked — Author Dale Peck on founding  Mischief + Mayhem, a new publishing collective, in The Financial Times:

“The whole point of writing literature was that in exchange for not getting paid a lot of money, you could say whatever you wanted; now, you don’t get a lot of money and you don’t get to say what you want. All of which segues to why writing is f***ed.”

The Last of the Old-Style Hollywood Actresses — A Ballardian Primer to Elizabeth Taylor:

What did Taylor represent to Ballard? Less a sex symbol and more an emblem of the parallel landscape that celebrity culture in the 1960s and 70s inhabited, a virtual reality colonising the private lives of ‘ordinary’ people exposed, through mass communications and on a hitherto unprecedented scale, to a world as strange as an alien planet yet paradoxically erotic and near – a synthetic substitute for reality itself.

(images: cropped photograph of Elizabeth Taylor by Bert Stern via Dan Shepelavy (top). Cover of Crash by J.G. Ballard designed by David Wardle).

Too Much InformationThe New York Times of the meaning and the use of the word “information”:

The use of the word “information” itself… seems to have exploded since its earliest recorded appearance in 1387. (“Fyve bookes com doun from heven for informacioun of mankynde.”) As Michael Proffitt, the managing editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, notes in an essay written for the recent relaunch of the O.E.D.’s digital edition, “information” is the 486th most frequently occurring word in Project Gutenberg’s searchable corpus of mostly pre-1900 literature. A 1967 survey of contemporary American English ranked it 346th. And the rise of digital technology seems only to have speeded its ascent. One recent survey of online usage lists “information” as the 22nd most common word.

And finally… It seems unlikely that you haven’t seen these already, but still…

New Vintage paperback designs for James M. Cain “conceived by Megan Wilson, executed by Evan Gaffney.” Stunning stuff.

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