Klaus Haapaniemi/Big Active: Perfume and The Pigeon

I was having a ball on the Big Active website when these came up. Seems like they've just been released in the UK. Klaus is a Finnish-born, London-based illustrator. I wish I could find larger jpegs, but these will have to do for now.

Gabriele Wilson: The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson

Startingly spare, beautifully executed. I chuckled when I saw it in the bookstore. Looking at the silhouette of the inner Emily Dickinson, I wonder...are we seeing what women wore under their dresses in the 1800s? It looks really modern, but at the same time, those boots look both rocker-chic and Masterpiece-Theater-y. Here's the description: "What if the old maid of Amherst wasn’t an old maid at all? Her older brother, Austin, spoke of Emily as his “wild sister.” Jerome Charyn, continuing his exploration of American history through fiction, has written a startling novel about Emily Dickinson in her own voice, with all its characteristic modulations that he learned from her letters and poems." Out in February from WW Norton.

Jaya Miceli: All Other Nights

A beautiful cover from Jaya, just in time for Passover! I didn't realize, but I think the title actually refers to the Passover song that asks the Four Questions. This is a Civil War spy thriller/romance. Jacob, a Jewish man, enlists in the Union army and becomes a spy. Turns out the Jews are united in faith, but divided in loyalties to the Union and Confederacy. His first mission: assasinate his Confederate uncle during Passover! Jacob later must marry a Confederate spy as part of another mission...and love begins to bloom. Jaya's done an amazing job combining minimal symbols to create an atmospheric, historic, and original design. The stars (of David) are gold foil. New in paperback from Norton (this is slightly cropped in the thumbnail. Please click to reveal the full glory). And I just remembered! Jaya did another awesome cover for the Jews: People of the Book! Big up, girl. You do my peeps proud.

Keenan: The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ

Philip Pullman, famously atheist author of the fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials (The Golden Compass books) has a new novel out in May from Canongate - a retelling of Jesus's life. This seems to be a pick-up from the UK edition, which comes in a white background as well...unless that's the back cover. The plot begins with a "...naive young Mary giving birth to twins after a visit by a mysterious stranger claiming to be an angel. The babies grow up into the physically robust, straight-talking, straightforward Jesus and the bookish, calculating, often morally tortured Christ." It's already out in the UK and is positioned at #9 on the UK Amazon sales ranking. Matte with embossed gold foil type.

Dan Funderburgh/Gray318: Legend of a Suicide

Printed on gritty matte. The type is by Gray318, and the illustration is by Dan Funderburgh. Check out the tiny guns inside the fish! The book includes five stories and a novella, all revolving around a boy's perspective of his father - who shoots himself on the deck of his fishing boat in Alaska.

Ben Wiseman/Rodrigo Corral/Steven Attardo: Tell-All

Coming out May 4 from Doubleday. Ben Wiseman designed the cover and lettering under Rodrigo's art direction. Steven Attardo then created the collage which was turned into a varnish that will be printed on top of the jacket. The book, "...written in a style meant to evoke the boldface breathlessness of celebrity scandal sheets" tells the story of an aging Golden-Age Hollywood star, her affair with an younger man, and her maid's "increasingly desperate attempts to manage her mistress’ life." The type comically evokes the lettering on old movie marquees, and the cover makes a great follow-up to Palahniuk's last novel, Pygmy, also designed/art directed by Ben and Rodrigo.

Sabine Dowek/Rodrigo Corral Design: Latina Cover

 Gorgeous cover for the November 2009 issue of Latina. Sabine illustrated and designed the cover, art directed by Rodrigo. Not only am I getting a whole new love for the Sign Painter font, not only is the illustration astounding, but check out those tiny icons! You can see more of her work at http://www.sabinedowek.com

Michael Windsor: Once A Spy & A Week In December

Two new hardcovers from Doubleday. Once A Spy is a satirical thriller in which a young man realizes that his 67-year-old father, a laundry machine salesman, is actually a spy wanted by the CIA, setting off a cross-country chase. Matte with spot gloss, possibly holographic bubbles.  A Week In December, by the same novelist of our last posting, Devil May Care, is set in London, where seven unrelated characters careen into each other's lives. One of them is a Tube driver, perhaps explaining the map. Printed on matte, the dots are spot gloss. I love the 3-D effect on the cityscape.

Devil May Care: Hardcover, Trade, Mass Market

Hardcover by Rodrigo Corral for Doubleday. Trade paperback for Vintage (designer?) Mass Market also for Vintage. This is almost like watching a short movie. There is a little cropping going on so you may have to click on the image to see it whole. Just testing some new Blogger features.

Ervin Serrano: The Dream of Perpetual Motion

Printed on metallic paper. A steampunk novel loosely based on Shakespeare's The Tempest, set in an alternate-reality 20th-Century. It appears that the type alludes to the mechanical men who people the book.

High Design: Union Atlantic

I've been fascinated by this cover for a while. Finally saw it in the store yesterday - printed on uncoated stock with foil and emboss on the type. The novel pits a successful Boston banker against a retired history teacher who resists his building a mansion on property her grandfather donated to the town, while a high school senior with a crush on the banker has the power to upset their war game. The birds seem an interesting choice here.

Darren Haggar: The Room and the Chair

Cool new cover from Knopf that reminds me of a Saul Bass thriller with a contemporary touch. And there's pretty amazing detail in the cuts. The novel tells of "a fighter pilot downed over the Potomac as part of a covert program and a nuclear spy trying to get out of Iran, while star journalists and rookie reporters try to connect the dots." Printed matte with spot gloss and emboss on the shapes.

Michaela Sullivan: A Dead Hand

Printed entirely on metallic paper. I find it interesting that "A Crime In Calcutta" appears before "A Novel" - don't usually see that in fiction. The story follows a writer living in Calcutta who becomes involved with a cult of Kali worshipers who are up to no good.

Font-tastic! Jessica Hische

For those of you who haven't seen this yet, feast your eyes on this excellent flow chart from Jessica Hische. Girl's not afraid to admit she used Curlz!

Matt Dorfman: Blessed Unrest

Recently saw Matt Dorfman's amazing book Work/Play which led me to his amazing website: http://metalmother.com/ This cover was rejected, but whenever I see it I want to rip it off. Art directed by Roseanne Serra.

Chin Yee Lai: The Lost Books of the Odyssey

Printed on uncoated stock with a pearlescent coating on the "o"s (which I've attempted to reproduce rather roughly). From FSG. "The Lost Books of the Odyssey, reimagines Homer’s classic story of the hero Odysseus and his long journey home after the fall of Troy. With brilliant prose, terrific imagination, and dazzling literary skill, Mason creates alternative episodes, fragments, and revisions of Homer’s original that taken together open up this classic Greek myth to endless reverberating interpretations."

Rex Bonomelli: Happy

The black portion of the cover is actually the jacket - a bellyband. The yellow portion is printed directly on the case. This is a memoir by a star college baseball player nicknamed Happy who suddenly gets a stroke and two subsequent brain bleeds. As he endures depression, self-destructive behavior, and the wreckage of his own body, he is nursed back to health by his free-spirited artist mother. I don't know anything else about the book, but I love the pink brain bleed/painterly quality of the bellyband art.

Gray318: Ghosts and Lightening

"On the death of his mother, 26-year-old Denny Cullen comes home to a small, “disgraceful fuckin kip” in Dublin's sprawl, where dwells his quite alive and quite drunk lesbian sister, Paula. She claims there's a gender-bending ghost hiding under the bed, so their friend and methadone-addicted spiritual adviser, Pajo, conducts a kitchen-table séance that prompts Denny to find meaning and purpose in his own life." (PW) Printed on gritty matte, from Knopf Doubleday.

Unknown Designer: Metropole

This one really snuck in on me during an Amazon search. Originally published in Hungary in the 1970s, it seems to be little known in the US. In addition to the cover being fantastic, the plot does too, especially after watching last night's Lost:

From an Amazon review: "Metropole depicts a waking nightmare. A Hungarian linguist named Budai boards a plane to travel to a linguistics conference in Helskinki. He falls asleep in flight and wakes up when the passengers are deplaned in a strange city. Not Helsinki. The passengers are taken to a hotel where the protagonist, depite knowing ten languages, cannot make any sense of the spoken or written language. Nor can he find anyone who speaks any of the languages he does. They don't use Roman letters but luckily they use Arabic numerals. At the registration desk they take his passport, and they can't understand a word he says when he asks for it back. Budai is given a room and some local currency in exchange for what cash he has and the story begins."

Helen Yentus: The Boy Who Couldn't Sleep And Never Had To

This just came out yesterday from Vintage! Truly a phenomenal sight to behold. The spine and back ad appear to be set in Miller, but Yentus has doodled around the title and various words in the blurbs to great comic effect. The drawings on the cover are by the author, DC Pierson, and it looks like Yentus has figured out a cool way to show them using a paper sculpture. The book tells the story of a high school geek whose life becomes a sci-fi adventure after he reveals a secret about one of his friends - that he cannot sleep and never had to. Kirkus says: “Funny as hell. . . . The ribald humor of a Judd Apatow movie married to a science-fiction-fantasy spectacle.”

Gray318: Free Agent Paperback

Like, OMG! Drop date June 2010. Here's the plot summary from the creator of Rambo, David Morrell:
"Because the fine points of the "spy game" took place during the Cold War, Duns’s cleverly sets Free Agent in that period, specifically 1969, when British Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, visited Nigeria during its harrowing civil war. East and West governments vied for control of the region. Espionage schemes were rampant. The main thrust of Duns' novel is an assassination plot against the prime minister, so if you're an action fan, you'll find plenty to your liking, but for my money, it's the true espionage details that kept me turning the pages of this remarkable novel."

Gregg Kulick: The Breaking of Eggs

Abba-solutely stunning, Penguin paperback, Summer 2010. A communist curmudgeon who writes travel guides to countries behind the iron curtain is forced to travel to the US in 1991, and awaken from a self-imposed exile into a changed world.

New Stuff

Yo, some new books that will be coming out between now and May. The Unnamed is the new novel by the author of Then We Came to the End - supposedly quite different from that office tragicomedy, about a successful lawyer with a bad obsessive compulsive problem. Then we have the new Stieg Larsen, and I must say, this might be my favorite of the series so far. I have a feeling Firefly Brothers will have cool effects - the story follows a pair of depression-era bank robbers. And the Point Omega photo reminds me of the colors on the new Stephen King - the novel involves looking through binoculars at the desert...plus some other factors which I'm sure informed the infinity symbol.

Krazy Science!!!!

There's some great stuff going on here - I love the way the title looks in script and the shattered glass works well with it. The author, whose previous book was about the Iraq War, discovers "worldwide criminal operations" in butterfly poaching and smuggling (in which driving species to near extinction is a standard practice for pushing up specimen prices). There is also amazing information about metamorphosis: what goes on in the chrysalis, in which every cell of the caterpillar's body liquefies before reconstituting into a butterfly, might as well be magic.

And let's not forget about Wicked Plants! This cover was highly acclaimed last year, so you may have seen it before:


It’s an A to Z of plants that kill, maim, intoxicate, and otherwise offend. A tree that sheds poison daggers; a glistening red seed that stops the heart; a shrub that causes paralysis; a vine that strangles; and a leaf that triggered a war. In Wicked Plants, Stewart takes on over two hundred of Mother Nature’s most appalling creations. (text adapted from product descriptions)

Stock Photo(s) of the Day

Comes with or without explosion. Thanks, GalleryStock!
PS I wonder if this is a preview for Season 6 of Lost...

Happy Nude Year: Phaidon

Some great new books from Phaidon. The top three are large hardcovers, the last three are small paperbacks, uncoated covers with French flaps. Futuretainment's arrow is die-cut. Painting today is printed directly on the case. Have a great 2010, kiddies. It's the year we make contact!

Jennifer Carrow: The Sky Below

This is quite stunning - the photo, and I suppose the model of the box, was taken by Jennifer Carrow as well.

Catherine Casalino: The Groucho Letters

Chappy Chanukah! We made it through yet another miraculous eight days. This awesome paperback was published by Simon and Schuster in Aug 2007. I asked Catherine how she found the illustration and this was her response:

"I drew the illustration myself— it's based on a famous photo of Groucho. I had looked at a lot of past Groucho books and they either used caricatures or black & white photos/stills from his movies. He's such an icon, that I thought creating a graphic portrait of him was appropriate— and I swapped out his cigar for a pencil. The word Groucho is his actual signature. I found it by chance! It was stamped on the case of the earlier edition from the 1960s."

Keenan: Love in Infant Monkeys

The title of this book is printed on a small sticker affixed to the banana. It's a real sticker you can peel off. Amazing! Here's the description:

"Lions, rabbits, monkeys, pheasants—all have shared the spotlight and tabloid headlines with famous men and women. Sharon Stone’s husband’s run-in with a Komodo dragon, Thomas Edison’s filming of an elephant’s electrocution and David Hasselhoff’s dogwalker all find a home in Love in Infant Monkeys. At the rare intersections of wilderness and celebrity, Lydia Millet hilariously tweaks these unholy communions to run a stake through the heart of our fascination with pop icons and the culture of human self-worship." (soft skull press)

Isaac Tobin: Everything Matters!

"In infancy, Junior Thibodeaux is encoded with a prophecy: a comet will obliterate life on Earth in thirty-six years. Alone in this knowledge, he comes of age in rural Maine grappling with the question: Does anything I do matter?" I love all the comets hurtling towards the title, and check out the quotes in each comet! Pretty rad.