John Gall: After Dark

Glossy trade paperback cover, with foil dots that shine in rainbow colors! Really yummy.

This novel intercuts three stories that all take place at an all-night Denny's in Tokyo, where Hall & Oates plays in the background.

The Big Girls

Paperback (top) designed by Helen Yentus. Hardcover is published by Knopf (Carol Devine Carson?). I love the placement of "a novel" in the paperback - so unexpected and off the grid! I guess in a super-symmetric design, it's always nice to stray from the symmetry a little. Note also that the author wrote In The Cut - which I assume was later made into a movie starring a naked Meg Ryan! The keys at the top, I'm assuming, signify the keys to the prison doors (see below) or the key to the mind. The same reference to the mystery of the mind is made in the paperback.

The story (from the New Yorker):
Set in a women’s prison on the Hudson River, Moore’s sixth novel chronicles the aftermath of a highly publicized murder and its impact on four intertwined lives. The story is told in the alternating voices of Helen, who has long suffered terrifying schizophrenic hallucinations and is serving a life sentence for killing her two small children; Helen’s psychiatrist, a single mother who came to work at the prison out of guilt over a patient’s suicide; a corrections officer who becomes involved with the psychiatrist; and an ambitious Hollywood star whom Helen believes to be her sister. Moore gradually probes Helen’s psychosis to its horrifying origins, while also delivering a nuanced and devastating account of the fights, rapes, and alliances built from necessity that constitute prison life.

Rodrigo Corral: The End of the Jews

....and the spine features a photo of pages, as if the spine were actually the open side of the book. There's also a golden silhouette of a face on the cover.

The duality of the cover seems to relate to a plot that tells the story of a Jewish man in the 1930s and a Czech Photographer in the 1980s.

Carol Devine Carson and Barbara Walters

To a performer, the word "audition" is one of the most powerful, hopeful, and scary words. As Barbara's golden name rises like a curtain above it, I get a sense of tension, like the intake of breath right before something big is about to happen. Of course, Barbara's name is powerful in its own right. I'm just glad there isn't a photo on this cover.

I immediately remembered Gore Vidal's Lincoln cover, from the early 80s. Some words are just so evocative, they speak louder without an image to back them up. Lincoln was a big, fat paperback with a creamy, glossy cover. I never read it, but it looked so yummy dripping from the bookshelf when I was a kid.

Susan Mitchell (?) The Story of a Marriage

There's a cool line pattern, like an etching, on top of this image - I wonder how they made it. All in all, the book looks great in the bookstore, and the type treatment reminds me of those old Douglas Sirk melodramas.

In San Francisco in 1953, narrator Pearlie relates the circumstances of her marriage to Holland Cook, her childhood sweetheart. Pearlie's sacrifices for Holland begin when they are teenagers and continue when the two reunite a few years later, marry and have an adored son. The reappearance in Holland's life of his former boss and lover, Buzz Drumer, propels them into a triangular relationship of agonizing decisions. Greer expertly uses his setting as historical and cultural counterpoint to a story that hinges on racial and sexual issues and a climate of fear and repression.

Flashback Fridays: A Portrait of the Artist

Wow. I think this cover dates back to 1964. I remember "reading" this book in honors English class, grade 10. We had a great teacher named Mr. Blouin, who taught us how to read critically by asking tough questions and then jumping up on his desk and screaming "There's so much bullshit in this room there's nowhere left to stand!". Oh wait, no, we read this senior year. Anyway, the book was published in 1916, and tells the story of a writer who is the alter ego of James Joyce. This cover seems so rooted in 60s psychedelia, and I respect it for that, in part because it looks like nothing I would expect. But if the design was transported to today's design aesthetic, what would it look like? And would a publisher allow the design to look modern, or would they want a hint of the time the novel takes place in, namely a hundred years ago?

Designer ? : Child 44

Thank you, Caterina von Catherine, for tipping us off to this rather cool cover. This is a thriller that takes place in the former Soviet Union in 1953, during the last years of Stalin's regime. At a time when "murder" as a concept did not exist in the Soviet lexicon, only "enemies of the state", a detective investigates the murder of a child. I love the incorporation of the geometric red shape to the sparse, graphic photograph. The red shape could be the slope of a snowy hill against a red sky or a guillotine. I also can't help thinking this cover reminds me of a box of Marlboros. In a good way.

From Barnes & Noble: Tom Rob Smith is a screenwriter and novelist whose literary debut, 2008's Child 44, inspired an intense bidding war at the London Book Fair. The well-received thriller was subsequently optioned by film director Ridley Scott.

Gabriele Wilson: A Blue Hand

Printed on what feels like watercolor paper, with a gorgeous wash of colors.

Publisher's Description:
In 1961, Allen Ginsberg left New York by boat for Bombay, India. He brought with him his troubled lover, Peter Orlovsky, and a plan to meet up with poets Gary Snyder and Joanne Kyger. He left behind not only fellow Beats Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, and William Burroughs, but also the relentless notoriety that followed his publication of Howl, the epic work that branded him the voice of a generation.

Drawing from extensive research in India, undiscovered letters, journals, and memoirs, acclaimed biographer Deborah Baker has woven a many layered literary mystery out of Ginsberg's odyssey. A Blue Hand follows him and his companions as they travel from the ashrams of the Himalayan foothills to Delhi opium dens and the burning pyres of Benares. They encounter an India of charlatans and saints, a country of spectacular beauty and spiritual promise and of devastating poverty and political unease. In Calcutta, Ginsberg discovers a circle of hungry young writers whose outrageousness and genius are uncannily reminiscent of his own past. Finally, Ginsberg searches for Hope Savage, the mysterious and beautiful girl whose path, before she disappeared, had crossed his own in Greenwich Village, San Francisco, and Paris.

In their restless, comic and oftimes tortured search for meaning, the Beats looked to India for answers while India looked to the West. A Blue Hand is the story of their search for God, for love, and for peace in the shadow of the atomic bomb. It is also a story of India-its gods and its poets, its politics and its place in the American imagination.

Megan Wilson: The Pusuit of Love

The girl in me totally loves this. Looks even prettier in person.

The Mitford sisters were notorious English aristocrats in the years between the world wars. Two were fascists (one was even friends with Hitler) while another two became a muckraking journalist and a social stirist.

"The Radletts of Alconleigh occupy the heights of genteel eccentricity, from terrifying Lord Alconleigh (who, like Mitford's father, used to hunt his children with bloodhounds when foxes were not available), to his gentle wife, Sadie, their wayward daughter Linda, and the other six lively Radlett children. Mitford's wickedly funny prose follows these characters through misguided marriages and dramatic love affairs, as the shadow of World War II begins to close in on their rapidly vanishing world."

New Criterion DVDs

Our reader, Gould, pointed us to these gorgeous new DVD packages from Criterion. Thank you, Gould!

Vampyr, a 1932 film by Carl Theodor Dreyer, concerns an occult student assailed by various supernatural haunts and local evildoers at an inn outside Paris. A host of stunning camera and editing tricks and densely layered sounds create a mood of dreamlike terror. With its roiling fogs, ominous scythes, and foreboding echoes, Vampyr is one of cinema's great nightmares.

High and Low is a 1962 Akira Kurosawa film adaptied frrom Ed McBain's detective novel King's Ransom. Kurosawa moves effortlessly from compelling race-against-time thriller to exacting social commentary, creating a diabolical treatise on class and contemporary Japanese society.

Trafic, a 1971 film by Jacques Tati, is the final Monsieur Hulot film. It is a masterful demonstration of the comic genius’s expert timing and sidesplitting visual gags, and a bemused last look at technology run amok.

Summaries adapted from Criterion.

Gabriele Wilson: The Pieces from Berlin

Lucia Muller-Ross is an outsider living in Berlin during WWII. She helps Jews by smuggling their valuables abroad. Anticipating that the owners will not survive the war, Lucia sets up shop in Switerland and amasses a fortune selling her treasures. Fifty years later, a Holocaust survivor named Sarah sees her family's antique table in Lucia's shop window...

Stock Photos of the Day

Pizza is the new black.

Thank you, Corbis!

Milan Bozic: Day In Day Out

There's a wonderful texture to the paper this is printed on (click to enlarge). It is the story of a young Balkan man traveling through "the newly multicultural Europe...and an exploration of a deeply disturbed individual." Interestingly, "...the book's take on being gay doesn't have much in common with U.S. norms or conflicts."

John Gall: God Lives in St. Petersburg

The clouds at the top section are illustrated. This is a collection of six stories about Americans running into trouble in central Asia, "emotionally and literally stranded in alien circumstances they struggle to comprehend". I love the colors here as they play against the black and white photo - and the many typefaces (I count at least four) all work together beautifully.

The Band

Ummm..how seriously cool are these CD covers?

Kelly Blair, Jane Austen, and Charled Dickens

Two beautiful designs from Kelly Blair. The first is "Two Histories of England", the second "Jane Austen: The Complete Novels". I love the illicit romance behind the wallpaper. Check out her revamped website: http://www.kellyblair.com

A Flock of Penguins

Gorgeous upcoming books from Penguin and its imprints.

The Terror

Just finished this MAMMOTH book, designed by Mario J. Pulice. I never thought I could get through 760 pages of a historical novel about the lost Franklin Expedition to find the Northwest Passage in 1845. But I did. It helped there was a monster on the ice killing off the sailors. The book was fantastic, but I'm still marinating on it. The CD cover shows exactly what the ice surrounding the ship looked like.

Found these other equally lovely graphics - one for the CD by The Islands, and the last, a poster for The Decemberists designed by Jason Munn of The Small Stakes. He loves ships. Check out his unbelievable website: http://www.thesmallstakes.com

Grand Archives - CD Cover

Infected!!!!!

Run for your lives!!!!!!!

"Across America a mysterious disease is turning ordinary people into raving, paranoid murderers who inflict brutal horrors on strangers, themselves, and even their own families." Now, "The fate of the human race may well depend on the bloody war [an ex-football star] must wage with his own body, because the parasites want something from him, something that goes beyond mere murder. "

Alison Forner: The Ghost Soldiers

This was obviously a ton of fun to do, and it looks awesome. Maybe it's the fact that many of the poems deal with the enigma of the current war that explains the fighting men, the soldier, the guns, and the postage-stamp feel of the dotted lines. I love following the birds from the bottom as they turn into micro-organisms and then fly off the top again.

From Ecco: "...[Tate's] seemingly simple and macabre stories are layered with broad and trenchant meaning. His characters are often lost or confused, his settings bizarre, his scenarios brilliantly surreal. Opaque, inscrutable people float through a dreamlike world where nothing is as it seems. "

Special Orders

The tiny type says "poems". Click to enlarge.

This is Knopf book - I'm still not sure of the designer. Anyone know?

I like the fact that this is a cardboard box, but the designer has done something unconventional with it. The box isn't open or cut in the usual way, which makes it enigmatic.

Stock Photo of the Day

Thanks istock! Photo by Morkeman.

More Vintage Classics

More intriguing covers from the UK Vintage Classics series.

Suspension

Absolutely Fabulous! Not sure who the designer is...is it Robin Bilardello? Milan Bozic? Greg Kulick?

Glamazon says:
For years it's been Andy Green's job to stump students nationwide by coming up with the wrong answers for their multiple-choice tests. Recently, however, his own life has become overwhelmed by wrong choices. When a love affair is mysteriously ended by a Post-it note and followed up by a random street assault, Andy locks himself in his Hell's Kitchen apartment. In solitude, he thinks, he might be able to get a grip on his life. But when he is forced to reemerge six months after the attacks of September 11, the city awaiting him is more bewildering than ever and all the people in his world seem to be part of a vast conspiracy.

Equal parts noir, French farce, and homage to New York, Suspension is a surprisingly heartfelt novel about learning to live in a world where nearly everything is decided behind our backs.

Greatest Book Ever

Men in Top Hats

Which is your favorite?

Evan Gaffney: The Swarm!!!

This is a massive, 900-page sci-fi/horror epic that was an international bestseller starting in Germany. Evan, who often works on sophisticated literary books, has no qualms switching gears here to get the job done. Whereas this cover looks right at home in its genre, it kicks it up a notch and gives us more than would otherwise be sufficient and boring. The title, by the way, was made using magnetic filings, but the crazy Photoshopping is all "a gaussian blur" says Evan.

Couldn't Resist