Abby Weintraub: Hospital

A reporter spends a year as a fly on the wall at Maimonides Hospital in Brooklyn, and records a ton of insider observations, including the surprising difficulty of getting doctors to wash their hands.

Quite nice in person, the letters are glossy and embossed against a matte hospital green.

Evan Gaffney: The Planets

From Evan's interview with AIGA (this book is a winner of the 2005 50 Books/50 Covers competition):
"The Planets is the story of the solar system, told in chapters that merge the contemporary science and historical mythology of each planet. The jacket art, an engraving from the 17th century, is full of mysticism and wonder. The die­cut circle offers a peek onto the case art, a painting by illustrator Lynette Cook, which is a more factual rendering based on NASA documentation. "

Rodrigo Corral: Devil May Care

Top is Rodrigo's US version, bottom is the UK hardcover - designer unknown. If you look carefully at the flower stem in the UK version, you'll see a surprise! Bond actually wraps around the spine in the US version - a really fun touch, since he's only suggested on the cover. There's also a nice perspective grid pattern on the US version - I think it's glossy on a matte effect. The story involves an evil genius who develops some opiate-derivative drugs - I suppose that's what the flower represents. And here's another Bond-related cutie:

Penguin Boys' Own Books

A couple of gems from penguin's series of classic adventure paperbacks.

Keenan: Personal Days

Trade Paperback: my favorite part is the little bump on the "a novel" key - the same little bump that is on your "j" key.

"In an unnamed New York-based company, the employees are getting restless as everything around them unravels...On a Sunday, one of them is called at home. And the Firings begin.
Rich with Orwellian doublespeak, filled with sabotage and romance, this astonishing literary debut is at once a comic delight and a narrative tour de force. It’s a novel for anyone who has ever worked in an office and wondered: “Where does the time go? Where does the life go? And whose banana is in the fridge?”

Manuel Puig

Kiss of the Spider Woman is from Vintage. Pubis Angelical is from University of Minnesota Press. Two very different approaches, but both gorgeous.

Kiss is about the relationship of two prisoners who share a cell - one is a straight revolutionary and the other a cross-dressing gay man who lives in his cinematic dreams.

from Amazon: "In Pubis Angelical he interweaves three stories, the first about a beautiful Viennese actress held captive in a mysterious marriage to a World War II munitions maker. The second and most interesting story, since it encompasses a history of Peronism, concerns an Argentinian refugee, dying in a Mexico City hospital, and her conversations with an old friend and an old lover. The third narrative is a futuristic spy thriller about a secret agent called W218. The implication is that one of the three women is real, the others fantasies or projections."

The Boat

Beautiful, chilling cover to a collection of short stories. I love the sculptural quality of the waves. The title story takes place aboard a Vietnamese fishing trawler crowded with refugees, where a young woman's bond with a mother and her small son forces both women to a shattering decision. This is a Knopf book - anyone know who designed it?

Henry Sene Yee: Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

Original concept on top, final approved design below. I'm so sad the original idea was rejected! Check out Henry's blog for more.

Barcodes vs. Humanoids

A Jihad for Love

This is the poster for the new documentary produced by Sandi DuBowski, who made Trembling Before G-d. This time, it's about gays in the Muslim world.

Film Comment Fridays

The other day, I was singing in the shower and thinking, whatever happened to Baz Luhrman? Great typography is what happened! And Nicole Kidman and Hugh "the hottie" Jackman in a pre-WWII epic coming out this November. Here's the HD trailer:
http://movies.yahoo.com/feature/hdtrailers.html

Three Hundred Thursdays

An uncanny coincidence. To be perfectly fair, I think the 300 poster was inspired by a cell in the 300 graphic novel. Still, when I ran across Rob Roy by chance, I nearly fell off my chair. In Imax.

gray318: Netherland

Haven't seen this in person yet, but I can't wait to get a closer look. Anyone know who designed it? Who did the illustration? Lovely.

Totally Tuesdays: Justice DVNO

From Justice comes this latest 80s-inspired typographic xxxtravaganza (click to play). Thanks for the tip, Evan. And check out the video for Dance elsewhere on this blog, or right here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3b1c408gOM

Enlightenment

A mystery set in modern Turkey, where an American woman looks for her friend in a place where no one is who they say they are. I love the way the type has been incorporated so perfectly into the image. The way the star and crescent are placed on the title mirrors the birds. And who'd have thought to put that light shadow behind the type - it's like, awesome!

Does anyone know who the designer is? The publisher is Overlook Press.

Jason J. Heuer: American Nerd

Like a good nerd, this cover is prim and proper and perfectly ordered. The way the story begins on the cover and gets cropped off on the bottom reminds me of a nerd going on and on about something no one else is listening to. All in all, charming.

From Scribners:
Most people know a nerd when they see one but can't define just what a nerd is. American Nerd: The Story of My People gives us the history of the concept of nerdiness and of the subcultures we consider nerdy. What makes Dr. Frankenstein the archetypal nerd? Where did the modern jock come from? When and how did being a self-described nerd become trendy? As the nerd emerged, vaguely formed, in the nineteenth century, and popped up again and again in college humor journals and sketch comedy, our culture obsessed over the designation...

Milan Bozic: Shroom

From Booklist:
"One evening in 1916, "upright American surgeon" Beaman Douglass and his wife ate some "innocuous wild mushrooms . . . fried in butter and served on toast." En route to an evening of bridge, both experienced "preternatural waves of giddiness." After dizziness, hilarity, depression, and difficulty breathing, Mrs. Douglass required treatment with "atropine, morphine, and an arsenal of emetics." "She played cards badly that night," her husband noted. Writing later for a mycological journal, he found "no merit" in the experience and hoped to "prevent others from making similar foolish mistakes." It never occurred to him that people might deliberately seek what he chanced upon. The bulk of Letcher's text concerns people doing just that. From psychoactive mushroom usage by the Aztecs and Siberian tribesmen on, Letcher lays out the history of the use and suppression of psychedelic mushrooms and how they "went from being an obscure poison to being . . . hawked on street corners" and cultivated in cellars. Pretty much essential for popular recreational-drug-use book collections."

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."