Books, Design and Culture
“She sees you seeing her. The hand on the hip is not passive, her gaze is not passive. She looks strong!…I wanted this image to stand as a piece of inspiration to keep fighting for justice for her. When I look at the dress, it…reminds me of Lady Justice.”
Artist Amy Sherald, who painted Michelle Obama for the National Portrait Gallery in 2018, talks about her portrait of Breonna Taylor for Vanity Fair‘s September issue, ‘The Great Fire’, guest-edited by Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Comments closedA quick update for August…
All Men Want to Know by Nina Bouraoui; design by Holly Ovenden (Viking / August 2020)
Analogia by George Dyson; design by Tom Etherington; illustration by Andy Bridge (Allen Lane / August 2020)
The Death of Vivek Oji by Akwaeke Emezi; design by Grace Han (Riverhead / August 2020)
Must I Go by Yiyun Li; design by Gray318 and Richard Bravery (Hamish Hamilton / August 2020)
The Last Great Road Bum by Héctor Tobar; design by Rodrigo Corral; illustration by Matt Buck (MCD / August 2020)
Life of a Klansman; design by Rodrigo Corral (Farrar, Straus and Giroux / August 2020)
I believe this illustration is also by Matt Buck.
Luster by Raven Leilani; design by Na Kim (Farrar, Straus and Giroux / August 2020)
Moss by Klaus Modick; design by Alban Fischer (Bellevue Literary Press / August 2020)
The New American by Micheline Aharonian Marcom; design Dave Litman (Simon & Schuster / August 2020)
Scabby Queen by Kirstin Innes; design by Jack Smyth (Fourth Estate / July 2020)
Sisters by Daisy Johnson; design by Suzanne Dean; photograph Simon Kerola (Jonathan Cape / August 2020)
The cover of the US edition of Sisters, published by Riverhead this month, was designed by Jaya Miceli. The painting is by Jeremy Olson. (Thank you to the folks on Twitter who helped me with this!)
You Will Never Be Forgotten by Mary South; design by Jamie Keenan (Picador / August
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Tom Gauld has drawn a new cartoon for the New York Times Books section.
This is probably my favourite panel…
David Pearson has designed three new covers for the Penguin editions of Albert Camus’ novels The Plague, The Outsider, and The Fall. The typeface is apparently Portrait, designed by Berton Hasebe for Commercial Type, and the covers are printed on Colorplan Dapple embossed paper from G. F. Smith. The new editions were published July 30, 2020.
And here we are… This month’s collection of book covers and occasional notes…
Antkind by Charlie Kaufman; design by Jack Smyth (Fourth Estate / July 2020)
The cover of the US edition of Antkind, published by Random House this month, was designed by Tyler Comrie.
In the Beggarly Style of Imitation by Jean Marc Ah-Sen; design by Charlotte Gray; photograph by Ally Schmaling (Nightwood Editions / April 2020)
(Because I am of a certain age, this cover immediately made me think of Lady Miss Kier and her shoes in the video for ‘Groove is in the Heart’)
Beyond the Sea by Paul Lynch; design by Janet Hansen (Farrar, Straus and Giroux / March 2020)
The End of Everything by Katie Mack; design by Tom Etherington (Allen Lane / July 2020)
The Englishman by David Gilman; design by Ben Prior (Head of Zeus / July 2020)
Fraternity by Benjamin Nugent; design by Rodrigo Corral; lettering by Michael Schmelling (Farrar, Straus and Giroux / July 2020)
Lampedusa by Steven Price; design by Ami Smithson (Picador / February 2020)
Last One Out Shut Off the Lights by Stephanie Soileau; design by Lucy Kim; photograph by Marc St. Gil (Little Brown & Co / July 2020)
Maybe someone has done this before and I didn’t notice (or, more likely forgotten), but it’s great to see a photograph from the EPA’s remarkable DOCUMERICA Project — available through the US National Archives on Flickr — on a book cover.
Natural History by Carlos Fonseca; design by Pablo Delcan (Farrar, Straus and Giroux / July 2020)
I love this cover. It reminded me Peter Mendelsund’s bonkers cover for C by Tom McCarthy:
On Nostalgia by David Berry; design by Raymond Biesinger (Coach House Books / July 2020)
The Party Upstairs by Lee Conell; design by Stephanie Ross (Penguin Press / July 2020)
The Pull of the Stars by Emma Donoghue; design by Sara Wood (Little Brown & Co / July 2020)
The cover of the UK edition, published this month by Picador, was designed by Ami Smithson:
Putin’s People by Catherine Belton; design by Chris Allen (Farrar, Straus and Giroux / June 2020)1
Rodham by Curtis Sittenfeld; design by Jo Thomson (Doubleday / July 2020)
It’s interesting that the US cover of Rodham is essentially the same as the UK one. I would’ve thought for sure that they would take different approaches.
Sensation Machines by Adam Wilson; design by David Litman (Soho Press / July 2020)
1 CommentFor Vox, Estelle Caswell talks to Steven Heller and Bethany Heck about the history of Cooper Black and why it’s been pop culture’s favorite font for so long.
(via Kottke)
1 CommentArtist Stanley Donwood talks about his artwork for Radiohead, his collaboration with author Robert MacFarlane on Ness, and his own book Bad Island, published earlier this year by Hamish Hamilton (and slated to be published in the US by W.W. Norton this fall).
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After Australia edited by Michael Mohammed Ahmad; design by Design by Committee (Affirm Press / May 2020)
A Burning by Megha Majumdar; design by Tyler Comrie (Knopf / June 2020)
The cover of the UK edition, which will not be published until 2021(!), was designed by Craig Fraser. It has a very vintage Faber feel… maybe it’s just the type?
The Dragons, the Giant, and the Women by Wayétu Moore; design by Kimberly Glyder (Graywolf / June 2020)
Inner Coast by Donovan Hohn; design by Sarahmay Wilkinson (W.W. Norton / June 2020)
The Margot Affair by Sanaë Lemoine; design by Elena Giavaldi (Hogarth / June 2020)
The Myth of the American Dream by D. L. Mayfield; design by David Fassett (IVP / May 2020)
News Parade by Jospeh Clark; design by Matt Avery (University of Minnesota Press / May 2020)
Night, Sleep, Death, the Stars by Joyce Carol Oates; design by Jamie Keenan (Fourth Estate / June 2020)
The cover of the US edition, published by Ecco, was designed by Sara Wood:
Nothing is Wrong and Here is Why by Alexandra Petri; design by Jim Tierney (W.W. Norton / June 2020)
(I really don’t know how I feel about this cover)
The Prettiest Star by Carter Sickels; design by Luke Bird (Hub City Press / May 2020)
Luke wrote about the design process behind the cover at Literary Hub.
Real Queer America by Samantha Allen; design by Lucy Kim (Back Bay Books / June 2020)
The Second Home by Christina Clancy; design Olga Grlic; art by Elizabeth Lennie (St. Martin’s Press / June 2020)
Set the Night on Fire by Mike Davis & Jon Wiener; design by Matt Dorfman (Verso / April 2020)
Soot by Dan Vyleta; design by Mark Swan (Weidenfeld & Nicolson / February 2020)
Soot is the sequel to Dan’s novel Smoke (which I liked a lot). The cover of the UK edition was also designed by Mark:
Surviving Autocracy by Masha Gessen; design by Jason Booher (Riverhead Books / June 2020)
This reminded me of the cover of the similarly themed American Manifesto by Bob Garfield, designed by Richard Ljoenes and published earlier this year by Counterpoint….
The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett; design by Lauren Peters-Collaer (Riverhead / June 2020)
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I love this illustration for the June 29 issue of The New Yorker magazine by Matt Willey. It accompanies ‘The Rescue Will Begin in Its Own Time‘, a series of short pieces by Franz Kafka that have not been published in English before, and that will appear this fall in the New Directions book The Lost Writings.
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Inspired by Eugène Delacroix’s ‘Liberty Leading the People’, artist Kadir Nelson explains how he illustrated the July 2020 cover of Rolling Stone to accompany Jamil Smith’s cover story on Black Lives Matter.
Nelson also illustrated the cover of June 22 issue of The New Yorker. The magazine has an interactive version of the cover, entitled “Say Their Names”, on their site.
A quick update this month. Enjoy…
The Book of Eels by Patrick Svensson; design by Grady McFerrin (Ecco / May 2020)
Broadway for Paul by Vincent Katz; design by Janet Hansen; photograph by Beat Streuli (Knopf / April 2020)
Brown Album by Porochista Khakpour; design by Joan Wong (Vintage / May 2020)
This cover immediately reminded me of Helen Crawford-White’s cover A Half-Baked Idea by Olivia Potts published last year…
And then I thought maybe it was a nod to the cover of The White Album by Joan Didion, published in 1979 (the reissue below uses the original cover), and which Fonts in Use informs me uses the typeface Pistilli Roman. But maybe I am over thinking it…?
I was also reminded of these two recent covers, so maybe it is just a thing…?
A Children’s Bible by Lydia Millet; design by David High (W. W. Norton / May 2020)
Lydian for Lydia…
The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio; design by Matthew Flute (McClelland & Stewart / April 2020)
I believe this is only available as an ebook, which seems a bit of shame. It would be nice to see in print. The cover does remind me of something else though. I can’t think what exactly. The best I could come up with was Tyler Comrie‘s cover for The Unwanted by Michael Dobbs. But I feel like there is cover that does something similar with a painting as a background? Possibly I’m just imagining it.
Oh and for those of you who are interested, the design team at Penguin Random House Canada have started posting their work to Instagram as one_last_tweak.
Fracture by André Neuman; design by June Park (Farrar Straus & Giroux / May 2020)
Hood Feminism by Mikki Kendall; design by Lynn Buckley (Viking / February 2020)
Minor Detail by Adania Shibli; design by Oliver Munday (New Directions / May 2020)
Out of the Shadows by Walt Odets; design by Tom Etherington; photograph by Wolfgang Tillmans (Penguin / May 2020)
I love this image. I believe it was used on the cover of the hardcover in the UK too.
Pelosi by Molly Ball; design by Adalis Martinez (Henry Holt & Co / May 2020)
Pew by Catherine Lacey; design by Luke Bird (Granta / May 2020)
Pew and Pelosi make lovely use of white space…
A Registry of My Passage Upon The Earth by Daniel Mason; design by Gregg Kulick (Little, Brown & Co / May 2020)
Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory by Raphael Bob-Waksberg; design by Linda Huang (Vintage / May 2020)
The cover of the hardcover was designed by Tyler Comrie, with an illustration by Justin Metz
Very Important People by Ashley Mears; design by Amanda Weiss (Princeton University Press / May 2020)
Walking One Step at a Time by Erling Kagge; design by Linda Huang and Oliver Munday (Vintage / April 2020)
This reminded me Gerhard Richter’s blurry landscape paintings.
The hardcover was designed by Jenny Carrow.
Wicked Enchantment by Wanda Coleman; design by Rachel Willey (Black Sparrow Press / April 2020)
“Having lived in Chicago for thirty years, I’ve only ever been a visitor to New York, but I love it like no other city. Teeming with unpredictable people and unimaginable places and unforeseeable moments, life there is measured not in hours but in densely packed minutes that can fill up a day with a year’s worth of life. Lately, however, closed up in our homes against a worldwide terror, time everywhere has seemed to slur, to become almost Groundhog Day-ish, forced into a sort of present-perfect tense—or, as my fellow New Yorker contributor Masha Gessen more precisely put it, ‘loopy, dotted, and sometimes perpendicular to itself.’ But disaster can also have a recalibrating quality. It reminds us that the real things of life (breakfast, grass, spouse) can, in normal times, become clotted over by anxieties and nonsense.”
Chris Ware has created another brilliant cover for The New Yorker to illustrate April 15th, 2020, “a kaleidoscopic account of a single day in New York” during the pandemic.
Its densely packed grid and the juxtaposition of mundane, ‘snapshots’ reminds me — perhaps more than some of his other covers for the magazine — of Ware’s comics.
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