Books, Design and Culture
Peter Mendelsund‘s covers for the new New Directions editions of W.G. Sebald’s classic novels The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn, and Vertigo, are rather special. The books will be published November and are available individually and as a set.
Busy, busy October… here are this month’s book covers of note…
Aluta by Adwoa Badoe; design Michael Solomon; cover art Shonagh Rae (Groundwood / September 2016)
American Ulysses by Ronald C. White; design Eric White; photograph © Colorized History, colorized by Mads Madsen (Random House / October 2016)
The Architecture of Neoliberalism by Douglas Spencer; design Daniel Benneworth-Gray (Bloomsbury / October 2016)
The Best American Comics 2016 edited by Roz Chast; illustration by Marc Bell; design by Christopher Moisan (Mariner / October 2016)
Best American Nonrequired Reading 2016 edited by Rache Kushner; illustration and lettering by Jillian Tamaki; design by Mark Robinson (Mariner / October 2016)
The Birds and Other Stories by Daphne du Maurier; design Jamie Keenan (Virago / October 2016)
Virago’s other new du Maurier reissues are also really nice:
I wrote about the series last year.
Chance in Evolution edited by Grant Ramsey & Charles H. Pence; design by Jenny Volvovski (University of Chicago Press / October 2016)
Darktown by Thomas Mullen; design by Craig Fraser (Little, Brown / September 2016)
Another entry for the sideways covers collection (although this is not a first for Mullen’s books — the US paperback edition of The Last Town on Earth, published by Random House in 2007, also has a sideways photograph on the cover).1
Oh, and the cover of the US edition of Darktown (published by Atria in September) was designed by Laywan Kwan.
Don’t I Know You? by Marni Jackson; design by Phil Pascuzzo (Flatiron / September 2016)
A Gambler’s Anatomy by Jonathan Lethem; design by Gray318 (Doubleday / October 2016)
Ghostland by Colin Dickey; cover art by Jon Contino (Viking / October 2016)
Himself by Jess Kidd; design by Pete Adlington (Canongate / October 2016)
How to See by David Salle; design by Peter Mendelsund (W.W. Norton / October 2016)
Known and Strange Things by Teju Cole; design by Alex Merto; photograph Teju Cole (Random House / August 2016)
The Magic Toyshop by Angela Carter; design by Jack Smyth; illustration Pietari Posti (Virago / October 2016)
The Mothers by Brit Bennett; design by Rachel Wiley (Riverhead / October 2016)
Multiple Choice by Alejandro Zambra; design Jonathan Pelham (Granta / October 2016)
Nayon Cho’s design for the US edition of Multiple Choice, published by Penguin US, was featured in July’s covers post.
Reality is Not What it Seems by Carlo Rovelli; design by Coralie Bickford-Smith (Allen Lane / October 2016)
This goes rather nicely with Coralie’s design for Rovelli’s previous book Seven Brief Lessons in Physics:
Results May Vary by Bethany Chase; design by Misa Erder (Ballantine / August 2016)
Sirius by Jonathan Crown; cover art by Pascal Blanchet (Scribner / October 2016)
That Self-Forgetful Perfectly Useless Concentration by Alan Shapiro; design by Isaac Tobin (University of Chicago Press / October 2016)
The Wangs vs. the World by Jade Chang; design by Kimberly Glyder (Houghton Mifflin / October 2016)
The Wealth of Humans by Ryan Avent; design by Tom Etherington (Allen Lane / September 2016)
Who Killed Piet Barol? by Richard Mason; design Sinem Erkas (Weidenfeld & Nicolson / September 2016)
Wrecked by Maria Padian; design by Liz Casal (Algonquin Young Readers / October 2016)
It’s September. It’s busy.
All We Shall Know by Donal Ryan; design by James Paul Jones (Transworld / September 2016)
Art of Memoir by Mary Karr; design by Robin Bilardello (Harper Perennial / September 2016)
Before by Carmen Boullosa; design by Anna Zylicz (Deep Vellum / August 2016)
The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning and the Universe Itself by Sean Carroll; design by Jamie Keenan (Oneworld / September 2016)
Cannibal by Safiya Sinclair; design by Nathan Putens; artwork by Wangechi Mutu (University of Nebraska Press / September 2016)
Cannibals in Love by Mike Roberts; design by Na Kim (FSG Original / September 2016)
Carousel Court by Joe McGinniss Jr.; design by Ben Wiseman (Simon & Schuster / August 2016)
Drinks: A Users Guide by Adam McDowell; design by Danielle Deschenes (TarcherPerigee / September 2016)
Dr. Knox by Peter Spiegelman; design by Oliver Munday (Knopf / July 2016)
Gold from the Stone by Lemn Sissay; design by Pete Adlington (Canongate / August 2016)
The Good Immigrant edited by Nikesh Shukla; design by James Paul Jones (Unbound / September 2016)
Little Nothing by Marisa Silver; design by Rachel Willey (Blue Rider Press / September 2016)
Looking for the Stranger by Alice Kaplan; design by Isaac Tobin (University of Chicago Press / September 2016)
The Nix by Nathan Hill; design by Oliver Munday (Knopf / August 2016)
Notes from the Shadowed City by Jeffery Alan Love; cover art by Jeffrey Alan Love (Flesk / September 2016)
Phantom Limbs by Paula Garner; design by Matt Roeser (Candlewick / September 2016)
Raindrop covers could be a new thing…
Pour Me Life by A. A. Gill; design by Jason Booher (Blue Rider Press / September 2016)
Reputations by Juan Gabriel Vásquez; design by Alex Merto (Riverhead / September 2016)
Sex and Death edited by Sarah Hall and Peter Hobbs; design by Luke Bird (Faber & Faber / September 2016)
The Strange Case of Rachel K design by Paul Sahre (New Directions / September 2016)
This paperback cover is a nice contrast to last year’s hardcover, also designed by Mr. Sahre:
Stranger Father Beloved by Taylor Larsen; design by Anna Dorfman (Gallery Books / July 2016)
Substitute by Nicholson Baker; design by Spencer Kimble (Blue Rider Press / September 2016)
33 Artists in 3 Acts by Sarah Thornton; design by David Drummond (W.W. Norton / September 2016)
Timekeepers by Simon Garfield; design by Pete Adlington (Canongate / September 2016)
Concentric circles… still a thing (see here for more examples).
Time Travel by James Gleick; design by Peter Mendelsund (Pantheon / September 2016)
War and Turpentine by Stefan Hertmans; design by Oliver Munday (Pantheon /August 2016)
Welcome to the Universe by Neil Degrasse Tyson, Michael A. Strauss, J. Richard Gott; design by Chris Ferrante (Princeton University Press / September 2016)
Loving these minimal black and white covers for books about the universe…
Wolf Boys by Dan Slater; design by Grace Han (Simon & Schuster / September 2016)
The Wonder by Emma Donoghue design by Kimberly Glyder (Little, Brown & Co. / September 2016)
The Wonder by Emma Donoghue design by Jo Thompson (Picador / September 2016)
The UK and US covers actually make a lovely pair…
I swear that these posts are taking me longer and longer to compile, but rest assured there are some wonderful covers this month:
All the Time in the World by Caroline Angell; design by Lucy Kim (Henry Holt / July 2016)
American Girls by Alison Umminger; design by Philip Pascuzzo (Flat Iron / June 2016)
Beast by Paul Kingsnorth; design Mark Ecob; illustration Alan Rogerson (Faber & Faber / July 2016)
Boy Erased by Garrard Conley; design Rachel Willey (Riverhead / May 2016)
A Cop’s Eyes by Gaku Yakumaru; design by Peter Mendelsund (Vertical / May 2016)
Contested by Michaela Desoucey; design Jason Alejandro (Princeton University Press / July 2016)
Corbyn by Richard Seymour; design by Dan Mogford (Verso / July 2016)
Creativity Class by Lily Chumley; design by Amanda Weiss (Princeton University Press / July 2016)
Dialogue by Robert McKee; design by Catherine Casalino (Twelve Books / July 2016)
Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff; design by Melissa Four (Windmill Books / July 2016)
It’s interesting to compare/contrast this new cover for the UK paperback with the covers of the UK hardcover, designed by Suzanne Dean, and the US hardcover, designed by Rodrigo Corral and Adalis Martinez:
The Food & Wine of France by Edward Behr; design by Samantha Russo; photograph Oddur Thorisson (Penguin / July 2016)
Grace by Natashia Deón; design by Elena Giavaldi (Counterpoint / June 2016)
The Hatching by Ezekiel Boone; design by Chelsea McGuckin; art by David Wu (Atria Books / July 2016)
Hot Little Hands by Abigail Ulman; art direction by Greg Mollica; design by Ben Wiseman; photograph by RJ Shaughnessy (Spiegel & Grau / May 2016)
It’s also interesting to see US hardcover next to the purely typographic cover from Australia designed by Laura Thomas, and the racier, retro Penguin UK cover designed by Richard Bravery:
How to Set a Fire and Why by Jesse Ball; design by Kelly Blair (Pantheon / July 2016)
This struck me as something as quite a bold change of direction for the covers of Jesse Ball’s novels, which have often been quite minimal and typographic. It feel quite different to the recent paperback edition of A Cure for Suicide by Jesse Ball, designed by Helen Yentus and Jason Booher (Vintage / June 2016), for example:
In the Flow by Boris Groys; design by Everything Studio (Verso / March 2016)
Invincible Summer by Alice Adams; design by Lauren Harms (Little, Brown & Co. / June 2016)
The UK cover of Invincible Summer, designed by Justine Anweiler, was included in last month’s post.
Listen to Me by Hannah Pittard; design by Catherine Casalino (HMH / July 2016)
Multiple Choice by Alejandro Zambra; design by Nayon Cho (Penguin / July 2016)
Smoke by Dan Vyleta; design by Mark Swan (Weidenfeld & Nicolson / July 2016)
Storm and Steel by Ernst Jünger; design by Neil Gower (Penguin / May 2016)
Street Furniture Design by Eleanor Herring; design by Daniel Benneworth-Gray (Bloomsbury / July 2016)
The Sun in Your Eyes by Deborah Shapiro; design by Mumtaz Mustafa (HarperCollins / July 2016)
This Savage Song by Victoria Schwab; design Jenna Stempel (GreenWillow / July 2016)
Undying by Michel Faber; design by Rafi Romaya; art by Yehrin Tong (Canongate / July 2016)
The paperback of Michel Faber’s Some Rain Must Fall is out this month too. The cover is another Rafi Romaya / Yehrin Tong collaboration:
Vinegar Girl by Anne Tyler; design by Kris Potter (Hogarth / June 2016)
As I noted on Twitter earlier this week, this combination of type and overlapping floral image — lovely as it is — is becoming a bit of a thing…
If anyone has a good name (and/or pithy description) for this trend let me know. In the meantime, designer Dan Blackman pointed me to his beautiful poster designs for DelVal College from 2011, which are early examples of this idea…
What Language Do I Dream In by Elena Lappin; design by Gray318 (Virago / June 2016)
Who Will Catch Us As We Fall by Iman Verjee; design by James Paul Jones (Oneworld / July 2016)
Windows into the Soul by Gary T. Marx; design by Isaac Tobin (University of Chicago Press / July 2016)
Something of a bumper post this month, with lots of black and white covers for some reason. Perhaps it’s a thing…?
Addlands by Tom Bullough; design by Jenny Grigg (Granta / June 2016)
Barkskins by Annie Proulx; design Jaya Miceli (Scribner / June 2016)
The cover of the UK edition (Fourth Estate / June 2016), designed by Anna Morrison, is an interesting contrast:
A Boys Own Story by Edmund White; design by Ami Smithson (Picador / June 2016)
But What If We’re Wrong? by Chuck Klosterman; design by Paul Sahre (Blue Rider Press / June 2016)
The Chaplin Machine by Owen Hatherley; design by David Pearson (Pluto Press / June 2016)
The Crow Girl by Erik Axl Sund; design by Peter Mendelsund & Oliver Munday (Knopf / June 2016)
Death Confetti by Jennifer Robin; design by Jacob Covey (Feral House / June 2016)
The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry; design Peter Dyer (Serpent’s Tail / June 2016)
Fen by Daisy Johnson; design Suzanne Dean (Vintage / June 2016)
The Girls by Emma Cline; design Peter Mendelsund; lettering by Jenny Pouech (Random House / June 2016)
The cover of the UK edition (Chatto & Windus / June 2016), which makes intriguing use of ITC Avant Garde Gothic,1 was designed by Suzanne Dean:
Goldfish by Nat Luurtsema; design by Anna Booth (Feiwel & Friends / June 2016)
(This has a fancy spot gloss that makes the school of fish appear to shimmer)
How to Ruin Everything by George Watsky; design by Ben Denzer (Penguin / June 2016)
Human Acts by Han Kang; design by Tom Darracott (Portobello Books / January 2016)
Infomocracy by Malka Older; design by Will Staehle (Tor Books / June 2016)
Ink and Bone by Lisa Unger; design by Ervin Serrano (Touchstone / June 2016)
In the Dark in the Woods by Eliza Wass; design by Kate Gaughran (Quercus / April 2016)
Is That Kafka? 99 Finds by Reiner Stach; design by Erik Carter (New Directions / April 2016)
Invincible Summer by Alice Adams; design by Justine Anweiler (Picador / June 2016)
The Lost Time Accidents by John Wray; design by Peter Adlington (Canongate / June 2016)
The cover of the US edition (Farrar, Straus & Giroux / February 2016), designed by Janet Hansen, is another fascinating contrast:
The Muse by Jessie Burton; design by Ami Smithson, cover art by Lisa Perrin (Picador / June 2016)
Naked Diplomacy by Tom Fletcher; cover design by Jonathan Pelham (William Collins / June 2016)
Nitro Mountain by Lee Clay Johnson; design by Oliver Munday (Knopf / May 2016)
The Panama Papers by Bastian Obermayer and Frederik Obermaier; design by James Paul Jones (Oneworld / June 2016)
Rasputin and Other Ironies by Teffi; design by Eleanor Crow; cover art by Ed Kluz (Pushkin Press / May 2016)
Scar by J. Albert Mann; design by Christopher Silas Neal (Calkins Creek / April 2016)
Sex Object by Jessica Valenti; design by Lynn Buckley (Dey Street / June 2016)
White Sands by Geoff Dyer; design by Peter Adlington (Canongate / June 2016)
6 Comments
In this profile of Peter Mendelsund in the June issue of Rhapsody Magazine, there is a lovely bit about the designer’s architect-artist father:
Comments closedIn the living room of Knopf associate art director Peter Mendelsund’s Upper Manhattan apartment, inspiration is everywhere: a battered, sea-green first edition of Ulysses; a toy version of the rocket Tintin takes to the moon; the vertebra of a blue whale; and, on top of his baby grand piano, a wooden model of a convention center made by his father, in the mid-’70s, when he worked for a New York architecture firm. It was never built, because the firm didn’t win the competition (Renzo Piano did), nor were any of his other models, because, in his late 30s, Benjamin Mendelsund was diagnosed with a brain tumor and devoted the rest of his life—he died at 48—to sculpture and painting. “He cut out all the bureaucracy of architecture,” Mendelsund says, “and turned to this.” He points to a small canvas painted entirely black except for two rectangles—two faded photos of a barn’s loft, its window open to the bright of day.
That image of a window onto a window is central to the signature style that’s made Mendelsund one of our preeminent book jacket designers: geometric, fascinated with negative space, striving to capture infinity through simplicity. You see the painting echoed in his cover for Martin Amis’s 2006 novel, House of Meetings, for which he photographed a tiny simulacrum of a room, its perspective slanting toward a miniature door. You see it in his many book jackets with drop-cuts—holes carved out of an image—like the diamond torn from a woman’s face on an early cover for The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, back in 2005 when it was called The Man Who Hated Women. And you see it in his May 11, 2015, New Yorker cover, which features an American flag smashed like a storefront window, a single star-shaped hole evoking the myriad emotions of last year’s civil unrest in Baltimore.
His father’s second act as an artist also helps explain how, at 33, Mendelsund had the confidence to abandon his career as a classical pianist (“Eventually, I realized that I’d never truly be world class”) and reinvent himself. His wife suggested he try something visual—he was always drawing; he had designed their wedding invitation. “Sometimes the obvious things take a long time to see.”
Back in 2014, there were signs that book cover design was maybe, just maybe, having a moment. Suzanne Dean was on the BBC. Peter Mendelsund was on… well, everything. But if 2015 has felt a little quiet by comparison, there were still plenty of reasons to be cheerful. This year’s list includes over 120 covers by 60 designers, and there is little doubt in my mind that this really is a golden time for book design.
Thank you to all the art directors, designers, and publicists who have supported the blog this year, and who make posts like this possible. Thanks too, to my local bookstore TYPE for letting me browse their shelves.
Act of God by Jill Ciment; design by Janet Hansen (Pantheon / March 2015 )
Also designed by Janet Hansen:
Almost Famous Women by Megan Mayhew Bergman; design by Na Kim (Scribner / July 2015)
Angry Youth Comix by Johnny Ryan; design by Keeli McCarthy (Fantagraphics / February 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)
Boo by Neil Smith; design by Isabel Urbina Peña (Vintage / May 2015)
Book of Numbers by Joshua Cohen; design by design Suzanne Dean; illustration Carnovsky (Harvill Secker / June 2015)
(Oliver Munday’s cover design for the US edition of the Book of Numbers published by Random House is also great.)
Also designed by Suzanne Dean:
Boring Girls by Sara Taylor; design by David A. Gee (ECW Press / April 2015)
Also designed by David A. Gee:
Bream Gives Me Hiccups design by Jean Jullien (Grove Atlantic / September 2015)
The Capitalist Unconscious: Marx and Lacan by Samo Tomšič; design Keetra Dean Dixon (Verso / December 2015)
The Complete Stories by Clarice Lispector; design by Paul Sahre (New Directions / August 2015)
Curiosity by Alberto Manguel; design by Sonia Shannon (Yale University Press / March 2015)
Dismantling by Brian DeLeeuw; design by Zoe Norvell (Plume / April 2015)
Also designed by Zoe Norvell:
Drinking in America by Susan Cheever; design by Rex Bonomelli (Twelve Books / October 2015)
The Double Life of Liliane by Lily Tuck; design by Abby Weintraub (Grove Atlantic / September 2015)
Early Stories of Truman Capote; design by David Pearson (Penguin / November 2015)
Also designed by David Pearson:
Etta and Otto and Russell and James by Emma Hooper; design by Gray318 (Penguin / January 2015)
Also designed by Gray318:
Fear of Dying by Erica Jong; design by Olga Grlic (St. Martin’s Press / September 2015)
Field Notes from a Catastrophe by Elizabeth Kolbert; design by Patti Ratchford; illustration by Eric Nyquist (Bloomsbury / February 2015)
Eric’s illustrated cover for The Best American Non-Required Reading 2015 is also spectacular.
The First Book by Jesse Zuba; design by Amanda Weiss (Princeton University Press / November 2015)
Also designed by Amanda Weiss:
The Fox and the Star, written, illustrated and designed by Coralie Bickford-Smith (Particular Books / August 2015)
Also designed by Coralie Bickford-Smith:
Generation by Paula McGrath; design by Harriet Sleigh (JM Originals / July 2015)
Hall of Small Mammals by Thomas Pierce; design by Grace Han; cover art by Kate Bergin (Riverhead / January 2015)
Hausfrau by Jill Alexander Essbaum; design by Gabrielle Bordwin (Random House / March 2015)
Hotels of North America by Rick Moody; design by Keith Hayes (Little, Brown & Co. / November 2015)
How to Run a Government by Michael Barber; design by Barnbrook (Allen Lane / March 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)
Also designed by Peter Mendelsund:
The Italians by John Hooper; design by Nicholas Misani (Viking / January 2015)
Also designed by Nick Misani:
KL by Nikolaus Wachsmann; design by Alex Merto (Farrar, Straus & Giroux / April 2015)
Also designed by Alex Merto:
A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin; design by Justine Anweiler; photography Jonathan Simpson (Picador UK / September 2015)
Also designed by Justine Anweiler:
The Mare by Mary Gaitskill; design by Oliver Munday (Pantheon / November 2015)
Also designed by Oliver Munday:
Mislaid by Nell Zink; design by Allison Saltzman (Ecco / May 2015)
Modern Romance by Aziz Ansari; design by Jay Shaw; photograph by Ruvan Wijesooriya (Penguin / June 2015)
Motorcycles I’ve Loved by Lily Brooks-Dalton; design by Rachel Willey (Riverhead / April 2015)
Also designed by Rachel Willey:
Munich Airport by Greg Baxter; design by Anne Twomey (Twelve Books / January 2015)
Muse by Jonathan Galassi; design by Gabriele Wilson (Knopf / June 2015)
The Musical Brain by César Aira; design by Rodrigo Corral and Zak Tebbal (New Directions / March 2015)
This is actually a rather special lenticular cover that imitates the effect of flashing neon.
Also from Rodrigo Corral:
Of Beards and Men by Christopher Oldstone-Moore; design Isaac Tobin (University of Chicago Press / December 2015)
One Day in the Life of the English Language by Frank L. Cioffi; design by Chris Ferrante (Princeton University Press / March 2015)
The Only Street in Paris by Elaine Schiolino; design by Strick&Williams (W.W. Norton / November 2015)
Also from Strick&Williams:
On the Way by Cyn Vargas; design by Alban Fischer (Curbside Splendor / April 2015)
Also designed by Alban Fischer:
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 )
Also designed by Kimberly Glyder:
The Poser by Jacob Rubin; design by Will Staehle (Viking / March 2015)
Also designed by Will Staehle:
Pretty Is by Maggie Mitchell; design by Lucy Kim (Henry Holt / July 2015)
Real Life Rock by Greil Marcus; design by Rich Black (Yale University Press / October 2015)
Racism by Mike Cole; design by Daniel Benneworth-Gray (Pluto Press / November 2015)
The Racer by David Millar; design by James Paul Jones; photograph by Nadav Kander (Yellow Jersey / October 2015)
Also designed by James Paul Jones:
The Secret Chord by Geraldine Brooks; design by Jaya Miceli (Viking / October 2015)
So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson; design by Matt Dorfman (Riverhead / March 2015)
The Sphinx by Anne Garréta; design by Anna Zylicz (Deep Vellum / May 2015)
Also designed by Anna Zylicz:
Syriza: Inside the Labyrinth by Kevin Ovenden; design by Jamie Keenan (Pluto Press / September 2015)
Also designed by Jamie Keenan:
Trans by Juliet Jacques; Design and illustration by Joanna Walsh (Verso / September 2015)
The Utopia of Rules by David Graeber; design by Christopher Brian King (Melville House / February 2015)
The Vegetarian by Han Kang; design by Tom Darracott (Portobello / January 2015)
The Veiled Sun by Paul Schaffer; design by David Drummond (Véhicule Press / January 2015)
Also designed by David Drummond:
Weathering by Lucy Wood; design by Greg Heinimann (Bloomsbury / January 2015)
Also designed by Greg Heinimann:
Whisky Tango Foxtrot by David Shafer; design by Richard Bravery (Penguin / June 2015)
Richard’s white, black, and orange cover for London Overground by Iain Sinclair published by Hamish Hamilton is also fun.
The Woman Who Read Too Much by Bahiyyih Nakhjavani; design by Anne Jordan & Mitch Goldstein (Stanford University Press / April 2015)
Also designed by Anne Jordan & Mitch Goldstein:
Why Information Grows by Cesar Hidalgo; design by Richard Green (Allen Lane / June 2015)
Next month I’ll say goodbye to 2015 with my annual list of my favourite covers of the year. Until then, here’s November’s book covers of note, my last monthly covers post for the 2015:
Baddeley Brothers by The Gentle Author; design David Pearson (October 2015)
The Big Green Tent by Ludmila Ulitskaya; design by Devin Washburn (FSG / November 2015)
(I previously included Devin’s cover in my November 2014 post before discovering that publication had been postponed until 2015. It’s so good that I figure it deserved a second shot now the book is finally coming out this month.)
A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James (Special Edition); design James Paul Jones (Oneworld / November 2015)
The Book of Magic by Brian Copenhaver; design Matthew Young (Penguin / November 2015)
Don’t Suck, Don’t Die: Giving Up Vic Chesnutt by Kristin Hersh; design by Lindsay Starr (University of Texas; October 2015)
Drinking in America by Susan Cheever; design by Rex Bonomelli (Twelve Books / October 2015)
Early Stories of Truman Capote; design by David Pearson (Penguin / November 2015)
The Eternal Zero Naoki Hyakuta; design by Peter Mendelsund (Vertical / November 2015)
Hausfrau by Jill Alexander Essbaum; design by Gabrielle Bordwin; Photographer Mihaela Ninic (Random House / August 2015)
Home is Burning by Dan Marshall; design by Rodrigo Corral (Flatiron / October 2015)
Just an Ordinary Day by Shirley Jackson; design Edel Rodriguez (Random House / August 2015?)1
Let Me Tell You by Shirley Jackson; design by Edel Rodriguez (Random House / August 2015)
The Mare by Mary Gaitskill; design by Oliver Munday (Pantheon / November 2015)
Mass Disruption by John Stackhouse; design by Scott Richardson (Random House Canada / October 2015)
Norwegian Wood by Lars Mytting; design by John Gall (Abrams / October 2015)
The Only Street in Paris by Elaine Schiolino; design by Strick & Williams (W.W. Norton / November 2015)
The Reflection by Hugo Wilcken; design by Adly Elewa (Melville House / September 2015)
Some Recollections of a Busy Life by T.S. Hawkins; design by Jessica Hische; illustration by Wesley Allsbrook (McSweeney’s / November 2015)
Souffles-Anfas edited by Olivia C. Harrison and Teresa Villa-Ignacio; design Anne Jordan and Mitch Goldstein (Stanford University Press / November 2015)
Southern Insurgency by Immanuel Ness; design by Jamie Keenan (Pluto Press / November 2015)
Trace by Lauret Savory; design by Debbie Berne (Counterpoint / November 2015)
Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink by Elvis Costello; design by Spencer Kimble (Blue Rider Press / October 2015)
A 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)
The entire book industry isn’t on vacation. It only seems that way. 1 Here’s August’s book covers of note…
The Aesthetics of Middlebrow Fiction by Tom Perrin; design Palgrave Macmillan (Palgrave Macmillan / August 2016)
Ally Hughes Has Sex Sometimes by Jules Moulin; design by Darren Booth (Dutton / August 2015)
Almost Famous Women by Megan Mayhew Bergman; design by Na Kim (Scribner / July 2015)
Among the Ten Thousand Things by Julia Pierpoint; design by Strick&Williams (Random House / July 2015)
Barbara the Slut by Lauren Holmes; design by Rachel Willey (Riverhead / August 2015)
Barbarian Days by William Finnegan; design by Darren Haggar (Penguin / July 2015)
Black Hole by Bucky Sinister; design by Matt Dorfman (Soft Skull / August 2015)
Capitalism in the Web of Life by Jason W. Moore; design by Anne Jordan and Mitch Goldstein (Verso / August 2015)
Death by Video Game by Simon Parkin; design by Steve Panton (Serpent’s Tail / August 2015)
The Dust That Falls From Dreams by Louis de Bernières; design by Oliver Munday (Pantheon / August 2015)
Genghis Khan by Frank McLynn; design by James Paul Jones (Bodley Head / July 2015)
And because it’s always interesting to see US and UK covers side by side…
Infinite Home by Kathleen Alcott; design by Alex Merto (Riverhead / August 2015)
Infinite Home by Kathleen Alcott; design by Stuart Bache (Borough Press / July 2015)
Katrina by Gary Rivlin; design by Julius Reyes (Simon & Schuster / August 2015)
Landline by Rainbow Rowell; design by Olga Grlic; hand-lettering by Jim Tierney (St. Martin’s Press / July 2015)
Memoirs of a Dipper by Nell Leyshon; design by Gray318 (Fig Tree / June 2015)
Narcisa by Jonathan Shaw; design Milan Bozic (Harpercollins / March 2015)
New American Stories edited by Ben Marcus; design by Peter Mendelsund (Vintage / July 2015)
Street Poison by Justin Gifford; design by Michael J. Windsor (Doubleday / August 2015)
The Vegetarian by Han Kang; design by Tom Darracott (Portobello / January 2015)
Wicked and Weird by Rich Terfry; design by Scott Richardson (Doubleday Canada / August 2015)
At BOMB Magazine, writer Tim Park discusses his new book Where I’m Reading From, a collection of his essays from the NYRB Blog, with Scott Esposito (co-author of The End of Oulipo):
In a way, this book is an autobiography of someone brought up with a very particular relation to books, in a religious family, in an English literary tradition, who on becoming an adult, for private personal reasons, set himself literary goals that were gradually revealed as spurious. Also, it’s about a person from the literary center—English, London— who has spent more than thirty years in another country, Italy, that is out of the literary mainstream. And a writer who also, by chance, became a translator and went on to teach translation. My life has been a long process of awakening to the reality, the changing reality, of the contemporary book world, which is a million miles from the naïve vision I had when I started writing books at twenty-two. Since it is in the publishers’ interests, and indeed the University’s, to sustain a false picture of what the book world is like and what the contemporary experience of books amounts to, my articles were a response to this, and an attempt to get my own head straight about what I’m really doing and the environment I move in. One is seeking at last to be unblinkered about it all.
And, if you missed it, Park reviewed What We See When Read by designer Peter Mendelsund on the NYRB Blog earlier this month:
One of the pleasures of his book is his honesty and perplexity at the discovery that every account he offers of the process of visualization very quickly falls apart under pressure. We do not really “see” characters such as Anna Karenina or Captain Ahab, he concludes, or indeed the places described in novels, and insofar as we do perhaps see or glimpse them, what we are seeing is something we have imagined, not what the author saw. Even when there are illustrations, as in many nineteenth-century novels, they only impose their view of the characters very briefly. A couple of pages later they have become as fluid and vague as so much of visual memory. At one point Mendelsund posits the idea that perhaps we read in order not to be oppressed by the visual, in order not to see.
(Pictured above is the cover of the UK edition, published by Harvill Secker in December last year, of Where I’m Reading From designed by James Paul Jones. The US edition, which has a more utilitarian cover, was just published by New York Review of Books)
Comments closed
Olivia Laing whose new book The Lonely City is out in 2016, has a personal essay on loneliness and technology in The Guardian that, like her books To the River and The Trip to Echo Spring, weaves a lot of surprisingly disparate threads together into fascinating meditation on art, literature and place:
At the end of last winter, a gigantic billboard advertising Android, Google’s operating system, appeared over Times Square in New York. In a lower-case sans serif font – corporate code for friendly – it declared: “be together. not the same.” This erratically punctuated mantra sums up the web’s most magical proposition – its existence as a space in which no one need ever suffer the pang of loneliness, in which friendship, sex and love are never more than a click away, and difference is a source of glamour, not of shame.
As with the city itself, the promise of the internet is contact. It seems to offer an antidote to loneliness, trumping even the most utopian urban environment by enabling strangers to develop relationships along shared lines of interest, no matter how shy or isolated they might be in their own physical lives.
But proximity, as city dwellers know, does not necessarily mean intimacy. Access to other people is not by itself enough to dispel the gloom of internal isolation. Loneliness can be most acute in a crowd.
Coincidentally, Laing’s piece is illustrated with photographs from Gail Albert Halaban‘s series Out My Window — one of which was used on the cover of My Salinger Year by Joanna Rackoff, designed by Peter Mendelsund and Oliver Munday.
Comments closed