Books, Design and Culture
As previously mentioned, Ladybird By Design is an exhibition of over 200 of original book illustrations from the late 1950s to early 1970s currently on display at the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill on Sea.
In this short film, Lawrence Zeegen, curator of the exhibition and author of the accompanying book, and Jenny Pearce, daughter of former Ladybird editorial director Douglas Keen, talk about the history of Ladybird and what made the books so special:
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At the AIGA’s Eye on Design blog, Margaret Rhodes talks to Jason Booher, art director of Penguin imprint Blue Rider Press, about book cover design:
Comments closedThe key to creating stellar covers, according to Booher, is to first throw out the tired adage about not judging books by them. “Graphic design is really about selling things,” he says. Lest that sound soulless, the good news here is that Booher is selling other people’s creative ideas. And while every book is unique, Booher says he starts by reading the six or so manuscripts he gets per season, and then mentally digests them all. “You read it, you try and find the soul of the book, something that makes it special, and make it come alive,” he says.
Congratulations to all the winners at last night’s Academy of British Cover Design Awards!
Shh! We Have a Plan by Chris Haughton; design by Chris Haughton (Walker Books / March 2014)
Spiders by Tom Hoyle; design by Rachel Vale; illustration by Sam Hadley (PanMacmillan / November 2014)
Wolves by Simon Ings; design by Nick May; illustration by Jeffery Alan Love (Gollancz / January 2014)
Tigerman by Nick Harkaway; design Glenn O’Neill (William Heinemann / May 2014 )
Badmouth by Alan Wall; design by Jamie Keenan (Harbour Books / January 2014)
The Black Eyed Blonde by Benjamin Black; design by Jonathan Pelham (Mantle / February 2014)
Plenty More by Yotam Ottolenghi; design by by Caz Hildebrand and Sakiko Kobayashi / Here Design (Ebury Press / September 2014)
Gollancz Simon Ings; design by Nick May; illustration by Jeffery Alan Love
(Above: City of Iron Fish. Gollancz / April 2014 )
Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka; design by Jamie Keenan (W. W. Norton / February 2014)
All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews; design by Helen Crawford-White / Studio Helen (Faber & Faber / June 2014)
Burial Rites by Hannah Kent; design by James Annal ( Picador / March 2014 )
Well done Jon Gray and Jamie Keenan for organizing the awards. All the shortlisted covers — selected by judges Mark Ecob, Yeti Lambregts, David Mann, Richard Ogle, Donna Payne, Rafi Romaya, Henry Steadman, Jim Stoddart, Rachel Vale, and Claire Ward — can be found on the ABCD website.
You can see the 2014 winners here.
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Earlier this month Vintage UK published new editions of The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir, The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf, and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecroft.
As CMYK, the Vintage design blog, revealed, these new editions were designed in-house by the talented Mr. Matthew Broughton, and feature black and white photography by Anton Stankowski on The Beauty Myth and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and Joy Gregory on my personal favourite, The Second Sex.
Interestingly, Vintage have also published smaller format ‘short editions’ of the same three books — The Second Sex, The Beauty Myth, and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman — featuring key extracts from the main texts.
In contrast to the sharp photographic covers above, the short editions feature illustrated covers designed by Gray318 with something of retro, E. McKnight Kauffer or Alvin Lustig, feel:
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Here is March’s selection of new and noteworthy covers. It’s a little bit of the Merto and Mendelsund show I’ll admit, but I assure you there really are some brilliant covers by other designers this month too!
The A-Z of You and Me by James Hannah; design by Leo Nickolls (Doubleday / March 2015)
The Bookseller by Cynthia Swanson; design by Kimberly Glyder (Harper / March 2013 killed)
Discontent and its Civilizations by Mohsin Hamid; design by Rachel Willey (Riverhead / February 2015)
Field Notes from a Catastrophe by Elizabeth Kolbert; design by Patti Ratchford; illustration by Eric Nyquist (Bloomsbury / February 2015)
I also loved Eric’s ‘H is for Hawk’ illustration in the February 22nd edition of The New York Times Book Review.
The Four Books by Yan Lianke; design by Matt Broughton (Chatto & Windus / March 2015)
Get in Trouble by Kelly Link; design by Alex Merto (Random House / February 2015)
The Highway of Despair by Robyn Marasco; design by Jennifer Heuer (Columbia University Press / March 2015)
Holy Cow by David Duchovny; design by Rodrigo Corral; illustration and lettering by Natalya Balnova (Farrar, Straus & Giroux / February 2015)
I Am Sorry to Think I Raised a Timid Son by Kent Russell; design by Peter Mendelsund; hand lettering by Janet Hansen; photography by George Baier IV (Knopf / March 2015)
The Knife by Ross Ritchell; design by Alex Merto (Blue Rider Press / February 2015)
(Camouflage book covers are the New Thing!)
The Last Word by Hanif Kureishi; design by Jaya Miceli (Scribner / March 2015)
A Letter to a Future Lover by Ander Monson; design by Marian Bantjes (Graywolf / February 2015)
The Librarian by Mikhail Elizarov; design by David Pearson (Pushkin Press / March 2015)
Making Nice by Matt Sumell; design by Gray318 (Henry Holt & Co. / February 2015)
One Day in the Life of the English Language by Frank L. Cioffi; design by Chris Ferrante (Princeton University Press / March 2015)
The Poser by Jacob Rubin; design by Will Staehle (Viking / March 2015)
Satin Island by Tom McCarthy; design by Peter Mendelsund (Knopf / February 2015)
So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson; design by Matt Dorfman (Riverhead / March 2015)
The Swan Book by Alexis Wright; design by Ceara Elliot (Corsair / March 2015)
The Unloved by Deborah Levy; design by Katya Mezhibovskaya; photograph by Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison (Bloomsbury / March 2015)
The Walls Around Us by Nova Ren Suma; design by Connie Gabbert (Algonquin Books / March 2015)
We All Looked Up by Tommy Wallach; Lucy Ruth Cummins; photographer Meredith Jenks (Simon & Schuster / March 2015)
The version of this cover which caught my eye was actually wordless — and I believe that was the designer’s original intention — so I’m a wee bit disappointed that the publisher didn’t quite have the courage to follow through on that.
Worst Person Ever by Douglas Coupland; design by Alex Merto (Plume / March 2015)
At the New York Times, Ken Johnson reviews Everything is Design: The Work of Paul Rand, a new exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York:
Considering the punchy, wildly inventive covers he created in the 1950s for books by Henry James, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre and Herbert Marcuse, you might suppose that he aligned with the liberal intellectual wing of that period’s culture. From the late ’50s on, when he began working directly for corporations to shape their public identities, it seems he pledged allegiance to corporate America.
What he did for companies like IBM, ABC and, unfortunately, Enron, was to give each a unified public identity by visual means. He didn’t just create logos; he applied his designs to many facets of a businesses, from business cards and letterheads to product packages, and he required absolute uniformity in all those aspects. What was the secret of Mr. Rand’s success? One of several books about design that he wrote and illustrated is open to a page where he talks about the logo he created in 1962 for ABC, the image of three sans-serif, lowercase letters on a disc. Referring to a picture of the logo that’s heavily, almost but not quite illegibly blurred, he asks, “How far out of focus can an image be and still be recognized?” Pretty far, if it’s a Rand design.
That’s important because, unlike fine art works, graphic images are meant to survive less than ideal conditions. Awareness of that necessity is a big part of what makes Mr. Rand a godfather of today’s image-saturated media world. If it gives some politically oriented viewers pause to think of his evidently unwavering faith in American capitalism and of how he imprinted corporate identities on the minds of millions, that just makes his story all the more interestingly complicated.
There’s also an interesting review of the exhibition by Amelia Stein at The Guardian:
Rand liked to argue that manipulation is integral to design. It is a designer’s job, he wrote in Thoughts on Design (1947), to manipulate ingredients in a given space – to manipulate symbols through juxtaposition, association and analogy. These days, it is difficult to separate logos and branding from other, more insidious forms of manipulation. A recent return to flatness in corporate design – emblematized by Apple’s decision to abandon skeuomorphism in 2013 – could be seen as an attempt to invoke Rand’s heyday, when consumers trusted a brand’s visual cues to communicate some essential truth.
This is an important aspect of Rand’s legacy, enormous and complicated as it is. Although Everything is Design stops short of addressing the lasting implications, artistic and otherwise, of Rand’s work, it provides us with a necessary basis from which to do so… [Looking] at Rand is valuable if we want not just to be as good as Rand, but to understand the complexity of what it is to be good.
The exhibition runs February 25 — July 19, 2015.
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At BBC Arts, Brian Morton writes about 80 years of Penguin paperbacks:
The ubiquity of Penguin books in modern British publishing conceals a paradox best expressed by founder Allen Lane’s colleague and biographer Jack Morpurgo, who said that even in Allen Lane’s lifetime, Penguin became “the least typical member of the genus it was said to have created”.
There had been paperbacks before Penguin – all French books were paperback for instance and Woolworth’s, soon to be a key outlet for the new imprint, sold their own cheap editions – but few ranged so eclectically and wide.
And, in a second article, he looks at the legacy of their covers:
Comments closedNo other house had quite Penguin’s confidence in design. Pan Books, which began publication a decade after, in the mid 40s, were defined by a Mervyn Peake colophon of the god playing his pipes, a hint perhaps that here was a house that wasn’t going to trouble you with books on microeconomics or English churches… but with something more sensuous and possibly sensual…
…At the opposite extreme, but no less successful in their way, were the Fontana Modern Masters which began publication under Frank Kermode’s editorship in the 1970s, combining seriousness, a quick-crib approach to major thinkers and a stunning simple visual device, which was that each group of books featured a tessellating cut-up of an abstract painting by Oliver Bevan.
Buy them all, lay them out on your table and you had a bit of modern art. Painterly abstraction and san-serif typeface seemed to go together and seemed to fit as well as Bevan’s angles…
…But it was Penguin which continued to perfect the idea of cheap books as items that might be collected and displayed.
With Valentine’s Day just around the corner, I thought I would share a few book covers that use hearts as part of their design…
All About Love by Lisa Appignanesi; design by Jamie Keenan (W. W. Norton / July 2011)
Alternatives to Sex by Stephen McCauley; design by David Ter-Avanesyan (Simon & Schuster / March 2006)
American Supernatural Tales edited by S. T. Joshi ; design by Paul Buckley (Penguin / October 2013)
Amy and Matthew by Cammie McGovern; design by Sharon King-Chai (Macmillan Children’s Books / March 2014)
The Campus Trilogy by David Lodge; design by Heads of State (Penguin / October 2011)
Cold Hands, Warm Heart by Jill Wolfson; design by Jack Noel (Walker Books / November 2011 )
Coming Clean by Kimberly Rae Miller; design by Lynn Buckley (New Harvest / July 2013)
Committed by Elizabeth Gilbert; design by Helen Crawford-White; illustration by Illustration Yulia Brodskaya (Bloomsbury / January 2011)
Don’t You Forget About Me by Jancee Dunn; design by Catherine Casalino (Villard Books / July 2008)
Eat My Heart Out by Zoe Pilger; design by Rose Stallard (Serpents Tail / January 2014)
The Empathy Exams: Essays by Leslie Jamison; design by Kimberly Glyder (Graywolf / April 2014)
Fraught Intimacies by Nathan Rambukkana; design by David Drummond (UBC Press / May 2015)
The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing by Melissa Bank; cover art by Lina Stigsson (Penguin / July 2011)
Gloss by Marilyn Kaye; design by Rachel Vale (Macmillan Children’s Books / June 2013 )
Happy are the Happy by Yesmina Reza; design by Suzanne Dean (Harvill Secker / July 2014)
The recently released US edition of Happy are the Happy published by Other Press, and designed by Kathleen DiGrado, also features a heart on the cover (if you know who the designer is, please let me know):
Heart of the City by Ariel Sabar; design by Henry Sene Yee (Da Capo / January 2011)
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad; design by Paul Buckley; art by Mike Mignola (Penguin / August 2012)
How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive by Christopher Boucher; design by Christopher Brian King (Melville House / September 2011)
How to Love by Katie Cotugno; design by Alison Klapthor; cover art by Alison Carmichael (Balzer + Bray / October 2013)
The Hundred Hearts by William Kowalski; design by Michel Vrana (Thomas Allen / May 2013)
In Case of Emergency by Courtney Moreno; design by Sunra Thompson (McSweeney’s / September 2014)
In Case We Die by Danny Bland; design by Jacob Covey (Fantagraphics / September 2013)
Irritable Hearts: A PTSD Love Story by Mac McClelland; design by Keith Hayes (Flatiron Books / February 2014)
Learning to Love Form 1040 by Lawrence Zelenak; design by Isaac Tobin (University of Chicago Press / April 2013 )
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov; design by Michael Bierut (Lolita Book Cover Project / 2013)
Love Poems by Bertolt Brecht; translated by David Constantine and Tom Kuhn; design by Jennifer Heuer (W. W. Norton / December 2014)
The Lover’s Dictionary by David Levithan; design by Jennifer Carrow (Farrar, Straus & Giroux / February 2011)
Love’s Winning Plays by Inman Majors; design by Eric White (W. W. Norton / July 2013)
The Man Who Touched His Own Heart by Rob Dunn; design by Ploy Siripant (Little, Brown & Co. / February 2015)
The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides; design by Jo Walker (Fourth Estate / April 2012)
The Messenger by Markus Zusak; design by Sandy Cull / gogoGingko (Pan Macmillan / November 2013)
On the Noodle Road by Jen Lin-Liu; design by Lynn Buckley (Riverhead / July 2013)
P. S. I Love You by Cecelia Ahern; design by Heike Schüssler (HarperCollins / January 2014)
Teeth by Hannah Moskowitz; design by Angela Goddard (Simon & Schuster / January 2013)
Things We Know by Heart by Jessi Kirby; design by Erin Fitzsimmons (HarperCollins / May 2015)
The Wet Engine by Brian Doyle; design by David Drummond (Oregon State University / May 2012)
With or Without You by Domencia Ruta; design by Greg Mollica; lettering by Rebecca Siegel (Spiegel & Grau / February 2013)
Canadian designer Catherine D’Amours kindly let me know about her work at Nouvelle Administration to redesign the ‘Lettres Libres’ series published by Montreal-based publisher Lux Éditeur, with the help of Jolin Masson, a freelancer for the team. Printed on craft paper, each cover has its own pattern based on the subject of the book.
I am also a big fan of Catherine’s work for Le Quartanier, another Montreal-based publisher. You can read more about her NOVA series here.
Here is this month’s selection of new book covers that have caught my eye…
Angry Youth Comix by Johnny Ryan; design by Keeli McCarthy (Fantagraphics / February 2015)
Dom Casmurro by Machado de Assis; design by Nathan Burton (Daunt Books / February 2015)
Etta and Otto and Russell and James by Emma Hooper; design by Gray318 (Penguin / January 2015)
The Fishermen by Chigozie Obioma; design by Gray318 (Pushkin Press / February 2015)
Girl in the Dark by Anna Lyndsey; design by Greg Heinimann (Bloomsbury / February 2015)
I Am Radar by Reif Larsen; design by Will Staehle (Penguin Press / February 2015)
Ismael and His Sisters by Louise Stern; design by Dan Mogford (Granta / February 2015)
The Italians by John Hooper; design by Nicholas Misani (Viking / January 2015)
Karate Chop by Dorthe Nors; design by David Pearson (Pushkin Press / February 2015)
Munich Airport by Greg Baxter; design by Anne Twomey (Twelve Books / January 2015)
The Room by Jonas Karlsson; design by Christopher Brand; photograph by George Baier IV (Hogarth / February 2015)
Shooting Stars by Stefan Zweig; design by David Pearson (Pushkin Press / February 2015)
The Utopia of Rules by David Graeber; design by Christopher Brian King (Melville House / February 2015)
These rather fabulous typographic covers were designed by Ákos Polgárdi for Európa Könyvkiadó‘s Student Editions series. Works of classic literature from Hungary and around the world, each cover features text from the book as a background pattern.
You can see more of Ákos’ book covers on his website.
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Designer David Pearson has created some rather nice typographic covers for the UK editions of Noam Chomsky available from UK publisher Pluto Press.
In addition to the talented Mr. Pearson, Pluto Press’s design manager Melanie Patrick kindly let me know that the publisher is currently working with designers such as David Drummond, David Gee, Jamie Keenan, Dan Mogford, and Jarrod Taylor. You can see some of the results on their new Tumblr Pluto Press Covers, including this slick (ba-dum ching!) cover for the forthcoming Artwash by Mel Evans, designed by Mr. Keenan:
