Stock Photo of the Day

This one is for Miss Jennifer Fiore. Thanks, SuperStock!

Archie Ferguson: Plague of Doves

I love the combination of images here. Plus, I think this does a great job of featuring big type without ruining the design. Beautiful!

Mary Schuck: The Bell Jar

I absolutely love this cover. I have a thing for geometrical shapes paired with photos, the way Paul Rand, Saul Bass and the other designers of that time did things. Since this book takes place in the 50s, this design convention is perfect, and the broken collection of shapes and colors may also signify the author/protagonist's deteriorating sanity. And.....it's letterpressed!

Helen Mirra: Cloud, the, 3

I saw this book late at night in the window of Books 192, a Chelsea bookstore near the galleries. After some hunting around, I uncovered the title and author. Helen Mirra is an artist who works in a variety of media, including the writing of books in the form of indexes - this one "tracks words and ideas through John Dewey's Reconstruction in Philosophy (1920)." I don't know what that means, but I had some fun finding the title in that aesthetically pleasing jumble of letters.

Rodrigo Corral: Man Walks Into A Room

This is the story of a man who loses all his memory beyond the age of 12. Much of the novel takes place in the desert, where the man participates in a research experiment where other people's memories are grafted to his. I think the blank slate of lost memory fits nicely with this spare treatment. This is Nicole Krauss's first novel. She is the author of The History of Love.

Old School and School's Out

It's girls vs. boys. There's a nice similarity in the classic containment devices for both titles, while the girls punk it out and the boys keep it serious.

Old School is about a New England prep school in the 60s, where the boys compete in a writing competitions to grant them an audience with the great writers of the day.

School's Out is a retelling of Lord of the Flies where the island is actually the classroom of a middle school. After a teacher commits suicide, the substitute teacher slowly comes to realize his class is a creepy gang that all the other teachers are terrified of.

Unknown: The Society of Others

I really dig the juxtaposition of type, and that funky torn geometric containment unit for the author's name. This is an existential novel by the screenwriter of Gladiator (!) about an English teenager who ends up in a totalitarian country with a small band of revolutionary poets.