This week, the always excellent Everyman’s Library released a gorgeous new printing of Phillip Pullman’s epic fantasy trilogy, His Dark Materials. Not only is it a beautiful edition, but it’s the first time that the three books have been published in one volume, so it is quite a neat little package. Inspired by Pullman’s wonderfully evocative new cover, we’ve collected a few other utterly gorgeous book cover redesigns for your viewing pleasure. Many of these are full backlist redesigns — after all, there’s something magical about a set of books designed to be together — but all of them are, we think, rather glorious. Click through to feast your eyes on these redesigned books, and let us know if we’re missed any of your favorites in the comments! Read More »
By now, most of you probably know about NaNoWriMo, the annual month of writing sponsored by nonprofit the Office of Letters and Light. What you may not know is that every year 30 novels-in-progress being written through NaNoWriMo are chosen to receive the full cover design treatment, courtesy of a team of professional designers organized by the mega-talented John Gall. Each designer is given the title and synopsis of three novels, and must pick one and design a cover for it in a mere 24 hours. Though many of them are top-notch, there are, of course, some that really stand out — we made our choices based on originality, skill, and which covers would make us pick the book off the shelf. Click through to see our ten favorite cover designs from the 30 Covers in 30 Days project, then check out the rest of the designs over at the Office of Letters and Light blog, and let us know whether you agree with our picks in the comments! Read More »
It’s summer, which means we’re doing more than our usual amount of bookstore browsing in the many air-conditioned shops in the greater New York area. Of course, half the fun of browsing is coming across books you’ve never heard of and picking them up, usually solely based on the covers, and for some reason we’ve noticed that we’ve been picking up a lot of big blue eyes recently. If eyes are the windows to the soul, as many people with eye tattoos have told us, does that mean we can see a book’s soul through them too? Or is that our own soul being reflected back to us? Maybe neither, but at the very least, we find book covers with eyes rather, okay, eye-catching, which is in many ways the goal of a well-designed jacket. So click through to see 25 well-designed book covers, new and old, that draw us in with their stares, and let us know if we’ve missed any of your favorites in the comments!
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When you’re dealing with the release of a high-profile book, the stakes are high, so it can take an insane number of drafts to get the cover just right for everyone involved. To that point, last week the Sunday Book Review ran a feature on book covers that “got away”; we’ve selected a handful of our favorites from their roundup, and paired them with the covers that ended up making the cut. Click through and let us know in the comments in which cases you agree with the publishers’ decisions.
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If there’s anything we love (nearly) as much as beautiful book covers, it’s pretty ladies in colorful ensembles. Enter ex-pat fashion blogger Sera Hur, who has paired John Gall’s wonderful cover designs for Haruki Murakami’s entire catalog with lovely street style images from the Sartorialist, carefully choosing companion images that match each other in color and tone. We don’t know what it is about these mash-ups that’s so compelling — but whether it’s finding a true thread connecting chronically separate universes, or just the delight of seeing a beloved book represented in the skirt of a girl on the street, we’re hooked. Click through for more images, and get inspired to dress a little better — or at least to read more, in your normal clothes.
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As a race, we’re totally obsessed with ourselves. Much of our art is about introspection, self-discovery, and self-expression, and we ascribe human characteristics to anything we can — cars, clocks, can openers — whenever we can. So then, to complement what may be the most stereotypically introspective art form — the written word — it makes some amount of sense that graphic designers and artists would go to the body. After all, the more easily and immediately we can subconsciously see ourselves in something, the more we love it (just ask Scott McCloud). But there’s nothing wrong with that. We’re a narcissistic species, and hey, it’s been working for us. Check out our collection of gorgeously designed book covers featuring body parts and revel in your humanity for a while.
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