Books, Design and Culture
I am very, very late to this, but Penguin are in the process of reissuing Len Deighton’s thrillers as Modern Classics with new covers by Jim Stoddart inspired by Raymond Hawkey’s original paperback designs.
There are a lot more titles available now (Len Deighton wrote a lot of books!), but you can read more about the first wave of reissues in this Creative Review article from last year, and I’ve posted a few of my favourite covers below.
It’s been a while since I did a post of David Pearson series design, so I am delighted to share his brilliant new covers for the Penguin UK editions of John le Carré’s George Smiley novels, available this month. The design is a collaboration with Nick Asbury who wrote the copy for the covers (I talked to Nick to ages ago about his Corpoetics book if you’re interested).
The small type is the lovely looking Gill Sans Nova, recently designed by George Ryan for Monotype as a contemporary digital typeface derived from Eric Gill’s original work. The large type is Stephenson Blake Condensed Sans, which is not available digitally and was pieced together from different sources by David himself. I’m sure it was a total pain in the ass to do, but it’s a pleasing contrast and well worth the effort, I think you’ll agree! Jim Stoddart was the clever AD here.
This is my last monthly round-up for 2018. Next month I’ll post my round-up for the year. I have to confess that I have not given the blog 100% of my attention of late, so if you think that there are covers I might’ve overlooked this year please feel to send them my way for consideration.
Bitwise: A Life in Code by David Auerbach; design by Tyler Comrie (Pantheon / August 2018)
The Book of Beautiful Questions by Warren Berger; design by Tree Abraham (Bloomsbury / October 2018)
‘Broadsword Calling Danny Boy’ by Geoff Dyer; design Jim Stoddart (Penguin / October 2018)
The blackletter is similar, I believe, to the type used for the movie title / credits, and the chevrons are a nice reference to a design that appears in the movie. The Guardian reviewed the book last month if you are curious. (And someone in the UK needs to buy it for me as a Christmas present!)
The Deserters by Pamela Mulloy; design by David Drummond (Véhicule Press / September 2018)
Evening in Paradise by Lucia Berlin; design by Na Kim (Farrar, Straus and Giroux / November 2018)
Na Kim designed the cover for Welcome Home by Lucia Berlin, also released this month, too:
The cover of the UK edition of Evening in Paradise was designed by Justine Anweiler I believe. Justine designed the wonderful cover for hardback of A Manual For Cleaning Women:
Feminasty by Erin Gibson; design by Anne Twomey; photograph by Ricky Middlesworth (Grand Central / September 2018)
Usually I’m a bit reluctant to post the covers of celebrity books, but this is pretty great.
Celebrity book covers are often look beautiful — the recent memoirs by Sally Fields and Michelle Obama come to mind — but often that’s because of a glamourous photograph. The designer’s job is just to get out of the way. That makes sense from a marketing point of view, it’s just not terribly interesting from a design perspective. This feels like it has a bit more to it somehow. Or maybe it’s just more fun…
That all said, I have started to see this kind of swashy retro type pop-up more frequently of late. A couple of recent examples that come to mind are the covers of All the Beautiful Girls by Elizabeth J. Church, designed by Anna Morrison (Fourth Estate), and The Dakota Winters by Tom Barbash designed by Allison Saltzman (Ecco):
I was also reminded of Kelly Winton‘s covers designs for the reissues of Black Swans and Sex and Rage by Eve Babitz from Counterpoint.
I would guess the fonts are Bodoni or variants thereof, but no doubt someone with a better eye for type will be able to tell us for sure.
UPDATE: Anna Morrison tells me the font she used for All the Beautiful Girls is Cabernet, which just goes to show what I know. According to the ever-useful Fonts in Use, Cabernet is “an uncredited revival of Benguiat Caslon, a 1970s Photo-Lettering typeface by Ed Benguiat.” I’m pretty sure Benguiat Caslon was used for the iconic Philip Roth covers in the 1970s so I probably should’ve recognized it…
The Feral Detective by Jonathan Lethem; design Allison Saltzman; photograph Kate Bellm (Ecco Press / November 2018)
Heavy by Kiese Laymon; design by Na Kim (Scribner / October 2018)
Hippie by Paulo Coelho; design by Tyler Comrie (Knopf / September 2018)
Is this the year of the orange cover…?
The Hole by José Revueltas; design by John Gall (New Directions / November 2018)
John Gall has a new book collecting 10 years of his collages out this month too.
You can read my 2011(!) Q & A with John about his collages here.
Homeland by Walter Kempowski; design by Dan Mogford (Granta / November 2018)
Dan also designed the cover for All for Nothing by Walter Kempowski a couple of years ago:
I Do Not Trust You by Laura J.Burns & Melinda Metz; design by Olga Grlic (St. Martin’s Press / September 2018)
I had it in my mind that snaky red covers with big white type were very “in” for thrillers right now, but the only other example I could think of was the US cover for Our Kind of Cruelty by Araminta Hall designed by Alex Merto, which is really not that similar…
Perhaps I am imagining it.
The Library Book by Susan Orlean; design by Lauren Peters-Collaer (Simon & Schuster / October 2018)
Notes from the Fog by Ben Marcus; design by Jamie Keenan (Granta / September 2018)
The US cover, which I featured in a previous post, was designed by Peter Mendelsund:
Odessa Stories by Isaac Babel; design by Anna Morrison (Puhskin Press / November 2018)
Portraits Without Frames by Lev Ozerov; design by Dan Mogford (Granta / November 2018)
The Son of Black Thursday by Alejandro Jodorowsky; design by Richard Ljoenes (Restless Books / November 2018)
Richard also designed the cover of Jodorowsky’s previous novel Where the Bird Sings Best:
And take a moment to check out Richard’s online portfolio, which is new I believe.
Wasteland by W. Scott Poole; design by Jaya Miceli (Counterpoint / November 2018)
The Winters by Lisa Gabriele; design by Nayon Cho (Viking / October 2018)
The dystopia described in George Orwell’s nearly 70-year-old novel “1984” suddenly feels all too familiar. A world in which Big Brother (or maybe the National Security Agency) is always listening in, and high-tech devices can eavesdrop in people’s homes. (Hey, Alexa, what’s up?) A world of endless war, where fear and hate are drummed up against foreigners, and movies show boatloads of refugees dying at sea. A world in which the government insists that reality is not “something objective, external, existing in its own right” — but rather, “whatever the Party holds to be truth is truth.”
“1984” shot to No. 1 on Amazon’s best-seller list this week, after Kellyanne Conway, an adviser to President Trump, described demonstrable falsehoods told by the White House press secretary Sean Spicer — regarding the size of inaugural crowds — as “alternative facts.” It was a phrase chillingly reminiscent, for many readers, of the Ministry of Truth’s efforts in “1984” at “reality control.” To Big Brother and the Party, Orwell wrote, “the very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense.” Regardless of the facts, “Big Brother is omnipotent” and “the Party is infallible.”
Michiko Kakutani, New York Times
As Nineteen Eighty-Four is suddenly more relevant than ever, I thought I would share a few of the recent covers for Orwell’s classic novel…
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I have to confess that I haven’t seen the TV adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, but I found Aaron Bady’s discussion of the series — and how it differs from the book — at The New Yorker, quite interesting:
In another year, the show’s insistence on humanizing fascists might have seemed like a provocative choice—an effort, like Arendt’s, to understand how normal people can find it in themselves to commit the worst atrocities. In 2017, however—when it is more urgent than ever to distinguish right from wrong, real news from fake, and differences of political opinion from the dangerous undermining of democracy—it feels instead like a pernicious cynicism. At the same time, the series depicts the ideological excesses of the Resistance in the most unforgiving light. More like Al Qaeda than French partisans of the nineteen-forties, they are grim, unsympathetic zealots, who use scattershot terror tactics and have no qualms about causing the suffering of innocent bystanders…
…This nihilism would have been alien to Philip K. Dick… Dick’s “The Man in the High Castle” focussed on how everyday people struggle to carve out lives of integrity in the face of evil, even while knowing—perhaps especially while knowing—that their actions will not ultimately change the course of history. In the novel, Frank Frink’s primary struggle is how to be an artist, not how to overthrow the Reich. In Dick’s view, this, too, was a form of resistance: his major theme as a novelist was the unavoidable complicity of living “normally” under empire; he believed in evil because he saw it everywhere. But if there wasn’t much hope in Dick’s fiction, that was exactly the point of writing it: even in the midst of a triumphant fascist dystopia, the quest for intellectual autonomy lived on in the dissident imaginations of those who could envision a different kind of world. It is telling, too, that the “man in the high castle” was in Dick’s novel not a collector of film reels but a novelist—an eccentric inventor of alt-histories who served as a stand-in for Dick himself. The character was, above all, a tribute to artists who dare to resist power in dark times.
The cover of the Penguin Modern Classic edition (pictured above) was design by Jim Stoddart.
Comments closedSome of the most interesting and innovative book covers in the last few years have been designed as part of a series — designers and art directors seem to have more leeway with backlist titles (especially so if the author is no longer in the picture!) — and 2016 was no exception. Here are some of my favourite series designs from past year…
The Angelus Trilogy by John Steele; designed by Jason Booher (Blue Rider Press / 2016)
Inspector Littlejohn Mysteries by George Bellairs; design Stuart Bache (IPSO Books / 2016)
The Birds and the Bees; cover art by Timorous Beasties (Vintage / 2016)
Read more about the series on the Creative Review blog.
Virago Modern Classics Daphne Du Maurier; designs by Jamie Keenan, Neil Gower, Gray318, and Nico Taylor (Virago / 2016)
Vintage Eliot; cover art by Zeva Oelbaum (Vintage /2016)
Read more about the series on CMYK, Vintage book design tumblr.
Found on the Shelves / The London Library; design by David Pearson; illustration by Joe McLaren (Pushkin Press / 2016)
Read more about the design of the series at The Bookseller.
Gollancz William Gibson ‘Sprawl Trilogy’ and Burning Chrome; design by Sinem Erkas; cover art by Daniel Brown (Gollancz / 2016-2017)
Read more about the books and the design on the Gollancz blog.
Patrick Hamilton reissues; design by Jack Smyth (Abacus 2016- 2017)
Sonya Harnett reissues; design by Marina Messiha; cover art by Maxim Shkret (Penguin Teen Australia / 2016)
New Directions Roger Lewinter; design by Erik Carter (New Directions / 2016)
Macmillan Classics; design by Neil Lang (Macmillan India / 2016)
This is just a fraction of the covers designed by Neil and he is working on even more to complete the series.
Beck and Mal Peet reissues; design by Jack Noel; illustration by Telegramme (Walker Books / 2016)
Pelican Shakespeare; design by Manuja Waldia (Penguin US / 2016)
Mortal Engines by Stanislaw Lem (Modern Classics); series design by Jim Stoddart; cover art by Haley Warnham (Penguin / 2016)
The Great Science Fiction by H.G. Wells (Modern Classics); series design by Jim Stoddart; cover art by Evan Hecox (Penguin / September 2016)
Penguin Essentials; designs by Kyler Martz, Gray318, David Foldavi, Julian House (Penguin / 2-16)
See more of the series at Design Week.
Penguin Galaxy series; design by Alex Trochut (Penguin /2016)
No Man’s Land Trilogy by Andy Remic; design by Christine Foltzer; illustration by Jeffrey Alan Love (Tor / 2016)
Read more about Jeffrey Alan Love’s work on the series on Tor.com.
New Directions W.G. Sebald; design by Peter Mendelsund (New Directions / 2016)
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A new Penguin Modern Classic edition of Mortal Engines by Polish science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem is available in the UK this week. Art directed by Jim Stoddart, this is the third of Lem’s books in the Penguin Modern Classics series featuring cover art by illustrator and designer by Haley Warnham.
You can read more about Warnham’s collages in an interview with illustrator on AIGA’s Eye on Design blog.
This is another one of those posts that started out on Twitter — a flippant tweet from me sparking a conversation about books with cassette tapes and vinyl records on their covers. It turns out that putting a record on a cover has become quite popular. Unfortunately the composition of many of these covers is often strikingly similar, even if the tone/intent is different.
The combination of clunky retro-future technology of cassettes and the DIY aesthetic of mix tapes, on the other hand, provides a richer vein of inspiration…
The Art Behind the Tape by Marshall “DJ Mars” Thomas, Djibril Ndiaye, Maurice Garland, and Tai Saint-Louis; design UnderConsideration (2015)
The Big Rewind by Libby Cudmore; design by design Regina Starace (William Morrrow / February 2016)
The Counter-narratives of Radical Theology and Popular Music edited by Michael Grimshaw; design Palgrave Macmillan Design (Palgrave Macmillan / May 2014)
Don’t You Forget About Me by Jancee Dunn; design by Catherine Casalino (Villard Books / July 2008)
Earthbound by Paul Morley; design by Jim Stoddart (Penguin / August 2013)
He Died with His Eyes Open by Derek Raymond; design by Christopher Brian King (Melville House / October 2011)
An Iron Rose by Peter Temple; design by W. H. Chong (Text / June 2016)
Kill Your Friends by John Niven; design by Glenn ONeill; Photograph Colin Thomas (Cornerstone / July 2014)
Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death by Otto Dov Kulka; design by Jim Stoddart (Penguin / March 2014)
Bar Yarns and Manic Depressive Mix Tapes by Jim Walsh; design by Michel Vrana; lettering by Robert Lawson (University of Minnesota Press / NYP)
The New Sorrows of the Young W. by Ulrich Plenzdorf; design Clare Skeats; cover art by Joel Penkman; series design David Pearson (Pushkin Press / September 2015)
Signal to Noise by Silvia Moreno-Garcia; design by Erik Mohr (Solaris / October 2015)
Tape by Steven Camden; cover art by Keri Smith (HarperCollins Children’s Books / January 2014)
Tsar of Love and Techno by Anthony Marra; design Christopher Brand; photography Bobby Doherty (Hogarth / October 2015)
(I also rather like this tape-related killed cover by designer Na Kim)
So there you have it — cassette tape book covers are a thing. But please let’s not get started on VHS tape book covers…
In my last post on the book covers of 2015, I thought I would take a look back at some of the series that caught my eye this this year…
Stephen Baxter / Manifold; design by Mike Topping (Harper Voyager / 2015)
Stephen Baxter / The NASA Trilogy; design by Mike Topping (Harper Voyager / 2015)
Vintage Bronte; design by Suzanne Dean; lettering by Lily Jones; cover art Sarah Gillespie; picture research by Lily Richards (Vintage / 2015)
Noam Chomsky; design by David Pearson (Pushkin Press / 2015)
Rachel Cohn; design by Lizzy Bromley (Simon & Schuster / 2015)
Freemans; design by Michael Salu (Grove / 2015)
The very first Freeman’s anthology was published in fall this year, but hopefully this design will set the tone for the rest of the series. The second volume is scheduled for next year.
Vintage Feminism; design by Matthew Broughton (Vintage / 2015)
Little Black Classics; design by Jim Stoddart (Penguin / 2015)
(There are an awful lot of these!)
C. S. Lewis; design by Kimberly Glyder (HarperOne / 2015)
New Directions in Media History; design by David A. Gee (Polity Press / 2015)
New Modernisms; design by Daniel Benneworth-Gray (Bloomsbury / 2015)
Tim O’Brien; design by Jo Walker (Fourth Estate / 2015)
The Penguin Book of the British Short Story Volumes 1 & 2; design Matthew Young (Penguin /2015)
Picador Modern Classics; design by Kelly Blair (Picador USA / 2015)
Pushkin Vertigo; design by Jamie Keenan (Pushkin Press / 2015)
Russian Plays in Translation; design John Gall (Theater Books / 2015)
Radical Thinkers Volume 9; design by Rumors (Verso / 2015)
This isn’t a new series of course, but this set marked a colourful change of direction. You can read about the design here.
Serpent’s Tail Classics; design by Steve Panton; series design Peter Dyer (Serpent’s Tail / 2015)
Lionel Shriver; design by Stuart Bache (HarperCollins / 2015)
Mark Twain; design by Isabel Urbina Peña (Vintage / 2015)
Wildcat Series; design by Jamie Keenan (Pluto Press / 2015)
3 CommentsA little bit later than scheduled, here is my October selection of book covers. There are three from Verso, and two by James Paul Jones, but I think it’s still another month of interesting, diverse, and eclectic work. I hope you agree…
Anything You Want by Derek Sivers; design by Zoe Norvell (Portfolio / September 2015)
Beatlebone by Kevin Barry; design by Rafi Romaya (Canongate / October 2015)
Beauty is a Wound by Eka Kurniawan; design by John Gall (New Directions / September 2015)
The Best American Non-Required Reading 2015; cover art by Eric Nyquist (Mariner / October 2015 )
Bream Gives Me Hiccups design by Jean Jullien (Grove Atlantic / September 2015)
Building Art: The Life and Work of Frank Gehry by Paul Goldberger; design by Peter Mendelsund (Knopf / September 2015)
The Double Life of Liliane by Lily Tuck; design by Abby Weintraub (Grove Atlantic / September 2015)
(I was raving about this cover on Twitter no so long ago. It really needs to be seen in person because the image doesn’t do it justice at all. The finish on the jacket is lovely and gives the design a beautiful nuance and subtlety)
Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff; design by Rodrigo Corral and Adalis Martinez (Riverhead / September 2015 )
The Great British Dream Factory by Dominic Sandbrook; design by Jim Stoddart (Allen Lane / October 2015)
Killing and Dying by Adrian Tomine; cover art and design by Adrian Tomine (Drawn & Quarterly / October 2015)
Laurus by Eugene Vodolazkin; design Gray318 (Oneworld / October 2015)
Music for Wartime by Rebecca Makkai; design by Lynn Buckley (Viking / June 2015)
Negroland by Margo Jefferson; design by Oliver Munday (Pantheon / September 2015)
The Nest by Kenneth Oppel; cover art by Jon Klassen (Simon & Schuster / October 2015 )
No Such Thing as a Free Gift by Linsey McGoey; design by James Paul Jones (Verso / October 2015)
Only Forward by Michael Marshall Smith; design by Stuart Bache (HarperCollins / May 2015)
Paulina and Fran by Rachel B. Glaser; illustration Kaethe Butcher; typography Nina LoSchiavo (Harper Perennial / September 2015)
PawPaw by Andrew Moore; design by Kimberly Glyder (Chelsea Green / September 2015 )
The Rise of the Novel by Ian Watt; design by James Paul Jones (Vintage / October 2015)
Scorper by Rob Magnuson Smith; design by Dan Mogford; illustration by John Vernon Lord (Granta / October)
The Seasons of Trouble by Rohini Mohan; design by David A. Gee (Verso / October 2015)
Trans by Juliet Jacques; Design and illustration by Joanna Walsh (Verso / September 2015)
Never mind that still feels like some crazy never-ending winter in Toronto, it’s (allegedly) April so here are a few new and recent covers that have caught my eye in the past month…
American Warlord by Johnny Dwyer; design by Oliver Munday (Knopf / April 2015)
Boring Girls by Sara Taylor; design by David A. Gee (ECW / April 2015)
City Beasts by Mark Kurlansky; design by Rachel Willey (Riverhead / February 2015)
Dismantling by Brian DeLeeuw; design by Zoe Norvell (Plume / April 2015)
Every Living One by Nathan Haukes; design by Alban Fischer (Horse Less Press / March 2015)
The Galaxy Game by Karen Lord; design by Charles Brock (Del Rey / January 2015)
The Game of Love and Death by Martha Brockenbrough; design by Nina Goffi; illustration by Christopher Silas Neal (Scholastic / April 2015)
(You know who could do an amazing Harper Lee cover? Christopher Silas Neal, that’s who!)
Hausfrau by Jill Alexander Essbaum; design by Gabrielle Bordwin (Random House / March 2015)
Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman; design by Julia Connolly; illustration Petra Börner (Vintage / April 2015)
How to Run a Government by Michael Barber; design by Barnbrook (Allen Lane / March 2015)
Love and Other Foreign Policy Goals by Jesse Armstrong; design by Matt Broughton (Jonathan Cape / April 2015)
The Man Who Planted Trees by Jim Robbins; design by Thomas Ng; photograph Peter Kupfer (Spiegel & Grau / March 2015)
The Musical Brain by César Aira; design by Rodrigo Corral (New Directions / March 2015)
Odd Man Out by F. L. Green; design by M. S. Corley (Valancourt Books / March 2015)
On the Way by Cyn Vargas; design by Alban Fischer (Curbside Splendor / April 2015)
(I also like Alban Fischer’s cover for Does Not Love by James Tadd Adcox, published by Curbside Splendor in 2014, a lot)
Plague and Cholera by Patrick Deville; design by Sian Wilson (Abacus / April 2015)
The Queen of Bright and Shiny Things by Ann Aguirre; design by Anna Booth; photography by Jon Barkat and Gary Spector (Feiwel & Friends / April 2015)
The Road to Character by David Brooks; design by Jim Stoddart (Allen Lane / April 2015)
The Seven Madmen by Roberto Arlt; design by Steve Panton; series design Peter Dyer (Serpent’s Tail / February 2015)
The Splendid Things We Planned by Blake Bailey; design by Greg Mollica; cover art by Matthew Cusick (W. W. Norton / February 2015)
The Strange Case of Rachel K by Rachel Kushner; design by Paul Sahre (New Directions / March 2015)
Syrian Notebooks by Jonathan Littell; design by David A. Gee; photograph by Mani (Verso / March 2015)
Tout Peut Changer by Naomi Klein; design by Nouvelle Administration (Lux Éditeur / March 2015)
Voices in the Night by Steven Millhauser; design by Janet Hansen (Knopf / April 2015)
(Another great 2014 cover I missed — but saw in a bookstore recently — is Janet’s design for Hiding in Plain Sight by Nuruddin Farah)
Whispering Shadows by Jan-Philipp Sendker; design by Gray318 (Atria / April 2015)
The Woman Who Read Too Much by Bahiyyih Nakhjavani; design by Anne Jordan (Stanford University Press / April 2015)
(I like this unused unused comp very much too)
Worthy by Denice Turner; design by Kimberly Glyder (University of Nevada Press / April 2015)
To paraphrase The Smiths circa 1987, I may have started something I can’t finish with this triangles on book covers thing. Typical me. This is my second post on the topic, and there is one more in the works, but then I think I will be done. Enjoy…
Antifragile by Nassim Nicolas Taleb (Penguin hardcover November 2012)
Antifragile by Nassim Nicolas Taleb (Penguin paperback November 2013)
Design by Jim Stoddart
The Castle by Franz Kafka; design by Peter Mendelsund (Schocken 2011)
The Dark Winter by David Mark; design by Jamie Keenan (Blue Rider Press October 2012)
Dubliners by James Joyce; artwork Apfel Zet (Penguin April 2012)
Generation A by Douglas Coupland; design by Jennifer Heuer (Simon & Schuster June 2010)
The Night Before Christmas Nikolai Gogol (New Directions Oct 2011)
Design by Rodrigo Corral
Persona Non-Grata by Tom Flanagan; design by Scott Richardson (Random House April 2014)
Tenth of December by George Saunders; design by Chelsea Cardinal (Random House August 2013)
Three War Stories by David Mamet; design by Alex Camlin (Argo-Navis November 2013)
