Or maybe just go back to bed…?
(From The New Yorker, of course…)
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Published May 4, 2020
The Casual Optimist Posts
Published April 30, 2020
A Slight Change in Emphasis
Published April 27, 2020
Book Covers of Note, April 2020
Hey. Here are the book covers that have caught my eye online this month. I hope that they bring a little joy in this very grim time.
If you have the means to buy books at the moment (and I appreciate that is not going to be the case for everyone), please consider supporting your local bookstore. I know a lot of stores are taking orders by email even if they are not answering the phone, and many are offering local delivery if curbside pick-up is not currently an option. The situation seems to be changing daily, so if a store wasn’t accepting orders yesterday, they might be today. We are all figuring this out on the fly.
If you are in the US and don’t have access to a local bookstore, there is Bookshop.org who are trying to provide some financial support to independents. If there are similar initiatives elsewhere, let me know — I’m happy to share the link.
Afterlife by Julia Alvarez; design by Jaya Miceli (Algonquin Books / April 2020)
Barn 8 by Deb Olin Unferth; design by Kimberly Glyder (Graywolf / March 2020)
The Beauty of Your Face by Sahat Mustafah; design by Grace Han (W.W. Norton / April 2020)
Becoming George Orwell by John Rodden; design by Monograph / Matt Avery; illustration by Lauren Nassef (Princeton University Press / February 2020)
I wonder where the eye — particularly the combination of the colour red and the eye — as a symbol of Orwell and Nineteen Eighty-Four originated? Does it go back to the 1960s and the Penguin paperback designed by Germano Facetti?
I understand that the eye is a short-hand for the surveillance state. But it is almost as if that is now considered the only element of the book worth visualizing (David Pearson’s cover is in an interesting exception in that it cleverly focuses on censorship rather than surveillance).
I haven’t read Nineteen Eighty-Four in years, but my memory is that the infamous “Big Brother is Watching You” poster is a face whose eyes seem to follow you when you move — something I think Matt’s cover above captures quite nicely — not an all-seeing, omniscient eye. The first time I read the novel, I imagined Big Brother looked something like Lord Kitchener / Uncle Sam in the recruitment posters. I was more traumatized by Room 101 to be honest… Has anyone put rats on the cover of Nineteen Eighty-Four?
The Book of Longings by Sue Monk Kidd; design by Sara Wood (Viking / April 2020)
Los Falcón by Melissa Rivero; design by Adalis Martinez (Vintage Espanol / April 2020)
The cover of the English-language US edition published by Ecco last year was designed by Allison Saltzman with lettering by Boyoun Kim.
Godshot by Chelsea Bieker; design by Nicole Caputo (Catapult / March 2020)
I actually read Godshot in manuscript form last year and liked it a lot. It is set in drought-stricken California, but I had Ry Cooder’s soundtrack to Paris, Texas playing in my head the whole time I was reading it.
I also wanted to give a quick shout-out to Nicole who was diagnosed with breast cancer at the end of last year and bravely shared her story on social media recently. Stay safe, and get well soon, Nicole. :-)
Grief by Svend Brinkmann; design by David A. Gee (Polity Press / April 2020)
David has designed the covers for a number of books by Svend Brinkmann, including Standpoints, which featured on the blog back in March 2018.
Hinton by Mark Blacklock; design by Jamie Keenan (Granta / April 2020)
Inkheart by Cornelia Funke; cover art by Karl J Mountford (Chicken House / April 2020)
Mountford has also created covers for the other two books in the series, Inkspell and Inkdeath. I love these.
A Luminous Republic by Andrés Barba; design by Mark R. Robinson; illustration by Carly Miller (Mariner Books / April 2020)
The cover of the UK edition of A Luminous Republic, which Granta is publishing in a couple of months, was designed by Luke Bird. It’s a really interesting contrast!
Misconduct of the Heart by Cordelia Strube; design by Michel Vrana (ECW Press / April 2020)
Sigh, Gone by Phuc Tran; design Henry Sene Yee (Flatiron Books / April 2020)
This is Shakespeare by Emma Smith; design by Linda Huang (Pantheon / March 2020)
Throat by Ellen van Neerven; by design by Design by Committee / Josh Durham (University of Queensland Press / April 2020)
2 Comments
Published April 17, 2020
Portrait of an Empty City
I’ve already posted a couple of magazine covers about the current crisis, and yet another one has caught my eye. The cover of the April 13-26 edition of New York magazine features an extraordinary photograph by Alexei Hay of all but deserted Times Square on the morning of Monday, March 30.
You can see more of Alexei Hay’s photographs of an eerily empty New York here.
(via Robert Newman)
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Published April 15, 2020
Tom Gauld’s Department of Mind-Blowing Theories
The New York Times interviews cartoonist Tom Gauld:
An inspiration for my drawing is my dad, who was an architect. As a kid, there was always paper around. I’d go and visit him in his office and see him drawing on the drawing board with a ruler and a pen. I think my cartooning is kind of like, I saw him drawing all day and thought, “That looks lovely,” and then I saw him go into a building site and arguing with a builder, and I thought, “That looks awful.” I basically wanted to find a job where I could do the drawing without having to shout at anybody.
Tom’s new book Department of Mind-Blowing Theories, which collects his cartoons for New Scientist magazine is available now.
Published April 9, 2020
Coralie Bickford Smith: How To Become An Illustrator
In this really lovely video, designer, author and artist Coralie Bickford-Smith explains how to become an illustrator (even if you are shy!):
Coralie’s latest book, The Song of the Tree, was published in the UK last month.
Published April 3, 2020
Christoph Niemann’s “Critical Mass”
After posting Chris Ware’s pandemic cover for The New Yorker earlier this week, I remembered I had also meant to post Christoph Niemann’s “Critical Mass” cover from two weeks ago. It may not pull at your heart strings the way Ware’s cover does, but it’s a brilliant and prescient illustration of the pandemic.
Comments closedI believe that the best concepts develop in the process of drawing. I don’t usually have ideas pop in my head fully formed when I’m not at my desk. Yet the genesis for this image, the idea of a sneezing domino standing on top of a globe packed with other domino pieces, came to me when I was lying in bed, trying to fall asleep… I got up again and sketched down the idea. Only the next day, when I sat down to turn the concept into a proper art work, did I realize that the globe and the pieces actually resemble a virus. In the end, it still proves my theory that all decent ideas come together when you actually draw them.
Published April 1, 2020
Chris Ware’s “Bedtime”
“As a procrastination tactic, I sometimes ask my fifteen-year-old daughter what the comic strip or drawing I’m working on should be about—not only because it gets me away from my drawing table but because, like most kids of her generation, she pays attention to the world. So, while sketching the cover of this Health Issue, I asked her.
“ ‘Make sure it’s about how most doctors have children and families of their own,’ she said.
Chris Ware’s heartbreaking cover for the New Yorker‘s Health Issue arrives in the midst of the covid-19 pandemic.
I was reminded of his 2009(!) cover for the New Yorker‘s from Halloween edition in which parents all look at their phones while their kids trick-or-treat. It’s an interesting contrast…
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Published March 27, 2020
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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Published March 20, 2020
Chip Kidd: Why Books Are Here to Stay
Here’s designer Chip Kidd talking about the enduring appeal of books for TED’s Small Thing Big Idea series:
I posted Chip’s 2012 TED Talk on book design here. But apparently he also did a talk on “the art of first impressions” in 2015 that I missed somehow:
Published February 28, 2020
BOOKFACE | Corpus Libris
If you’re a fan of #bookfacefriday on Instagram, you will likely enjoy this short film made in collaboration with the public library in the German city of Erlangen…
Published February 26, 2020
Book Covers of Note, February 2020
Meh. February. At least it’s almost over (and the book covers are good).
The Bear by Andrew Krivak; design by Alban Fischer (Bellevue Literary Press / February 2020)
(I read an ARC of The Bear last year (full disclosure: the folks that pay me distribute Bellevue Literary Press in Canada), and haven’t really stopped talking about it since, so I may as well mention here too. It’s very sincere, and reminiscent of the kind of Cold War science fiction in which war and environmental catastrophe have led to the end of civilization. It is not dystopian though. It reads rather like beautiful melancholy fable. I liked it a lot.)
Black Sunday by Tola Rotimi Abraham; design Nicole Caputo (Catapult / February 2020
Losing Eden by Lucy Jones; design by Tom Etherington (Allen Lane / February 2020)
The Lost Book of Adana Moreau by Michael Zapata; design by John Gall (Hanover Square Press / February 2020)
One for the meta-covers list (and does the use of Lydian on the cover of a book on the cover of book count as ironic?)
The Mercies by Kiran Millwood Hargrave; design by Lucy Kim (Little Brown & Co / February 2020)
The cover of the UK edition published by Picador was designed by Katie Tooke I believe (and if anyone can tell me who the did the illustration — based on traditional Norwegian folk art rosemaling — I would be grateful!)
Minor Feelings by Cathy Park Hong; design by Na Kim (One World / February 2020)
The cover of UK edition, which Profile Books is publishing next month, was designed by Steve Panton:
Pallbearing Stories by Michael Melgaard; design by Alysia Shewchuk (House of Anansi / February 2020)
Rendang by Will Harris; design by David Pearson (Granta / February 2020)
A Tall History of Sugar by Curdella Forbes; design by Gill Heeley (Canongate / February 2020)
The cover of the US edition, published last year by Akashic Books, was designed by Christian Fuenfhausen…
This Brilliant Darkness by Jeff Sharlet; design by Sarahmay Wilkinson (W.W. Norton / February 2020)
Too Much by Rachel Vorona Cote; design by Jennifer Carrow (Grand Central / February 2020)
Verge by Lidia Yuknavitch; design by Rachel Willey (Riverhead / February 2020)
Whistleblower by Susan Fowler; design by Catherine Casalino (Viking / February 2020)
Nice type.
Weather by Jenny Offill; design by John Gall (Knopf / February 2020)
There haven’t been very many John Gall covers on the blog recently, so it’s a delight to post two in the same month. And this really is a most Gallian of John Gall covers.
The cover of the UK edition of Weather, published by Granta, was designed by Gray318…
