We love book covers here at Flavorwire, and we especially love redesigns, not to mention pulp fiction, so we immediately fell in love with these awesome vintage-style redesigns of classic novels. We also fell into giggles at some of these taglines: “Lock up your daughters… Darcy’s in town!” Indeed. We spotted the redesigns over at Reddit, where one user commented, “More like Tess of the B’ubervilles.” Well, there’s nothing we can add to that. … Read More
Book Covers
33 Wonderful Fan-Designed Covers for Famous Novels
Here at Flavorwire, we’re suckers for a great book cover — even if that book cover never actually made it into production. After all, it’s not too much of a stretch to imagine that sometimes the best book covers come from those designing without the constraints of publicity departments or authorial preferences. To that end, after the jump you will find a collection of unofficial book covers for famous works — created by students, career designers, or mysterious people on the Internet — that we totally love. Publishing houses, take note: we would buy these if ever we saw them in the pulpy flesh. Did we miss your favorite (or your own)? Link us to more literary design goodness in the comments. … Read More
20 Embarrassingly Bad Book Covers for Classic Novels
This week, we spotted a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad book cover for Stephen King’s The Shining over at the Guardian. It seems especially unfair for such a modern classic to be saddled with such an ugly cover, and so we were inspired to search the Internet for the worst covers to ever sully the faces of great books, whether at home or… Read More
Judging 2012 Book Covers: US vs. UK
While paging through the Guardian‘s gallery of the 2013 Women’s Prize for Fiction longlist earlier this week, we were struck by how different many of the nominees’ covers are from the American ones we know and (sometimes) love. Of course we knew this already, but we were newly inspired to take a look at some of 2012′s best books, and judge them by their covers, both at home and abroad. A disclaimer: your literary editor has little in the way of formal design education, but is instead approaching these as a voracious reader and picker-upper of pretty things in bookstores. … Read More
10 Redesigned Book Covers That Are Actually Better Than the Iconic Versions
This week, we saw two alternate versions of Ray Bradbury’s classic novel Fahrenheit 451 pop up on the Internet: one meant to be burned, and one meant to withstand burning at all costs. Though the cover we all grew up with is undeniably great, we thought these ones raised the conceptual bar a little bit. Click through for ten redesigns of classic book jackets that are better, or at least more interesting, than the… Read More
Wonderfully Hectic Redesigns of Thomas Pynchon’s Backlist by Yuko Kondo
Okay, we admit it — we’ve been on a little bit of of Pynchon cover kick recently, what with our roundup of Gravity’s Rainbow covers to celebrate the novel’s 40th anniversary and all. But when we spotted the recent Vintage redesign of Pynchon’s backlist over at A Piece of Monologue, we just couldn’t resist. The crazy, pop culture-infused covers were created by London illustrator Yuko Kondo, who explains that his given task was “to choose random words from inside each novel and to draw these words.” And boy, has he drawn a lot of words. After the jump, check out six Pynchon novels as reimagined by Kondo, and let us know what you think in the comments. … Read More
40 Years of Covering Thomas Pynchon’s ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’
This week marks the 40th anniversary of the publication of Thomas Pynchon’s legendary postmodern tome Gravity’s Rainbow, a fact made doubly interesting (at least to us) in light of the recent details about the reclusive author’s forthcoming novel. Haven’t read his backlist? Now’s the time. In case you need a little inspiration, or just want to celebrate the book’s anniversary with us, click through to peek at our gallery of Gravity’s Rainbow cover art from home and abroad, from the very first edition to last year’s redesigns. … Read More
15 Movie Tie-In Book Covers That Make Us Sad
Yesterday, we spotted the cover for Scribner’s upcoming republication of The Great Gatsby, in concert with the film adaptation’s May release. The Great Gatsby is one of those books with a cover so iconic that any change to it offends our delicate sensibilities, but even with that self-awareness, the image got us thinking about other movie (and TV) tie-in editions of books, and how truly awful — not to mention unfaithful to the original text — they can be. That said, there’s no denying that movie tie-in editions sell books, so we guess there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. We just wish there were another way. … Read More
Peter Mendelsund’s 16 Favorite Book Covers of 2012
Recently, we polled book jacket designers on their favorite book covers of the year, and we were dazzled by what they came up with. But Peter Mendelsund (who happens to be one of our very favorites) had a bit more to say on the subject than we could fit into our other roundup. Here we give you his full report on the state of book jacket design (and his favorites of the year!) … Read More
A Collection of Suspiciously Similar Book Covers
Sometimes, while we’re browsing through book catalogues, or idly pulling things off the shelves in bookstores, as we often do, we are suddenly struck with a sense of deja vu. Haven’t we, um, seen this book before? Of course, there are thousands of examples of different books using the same clip art, which, while lazy, is probably unavoidable, but what about the more nebulous resemblances? After the jump, a few book covers and their suspiciously similar (we won’t say rip-offs, but we sometimes might imply it) pairs. Let us know what you think (or if we missed a particularly egregious one) in the comments! … Read More
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