Jen Wang: The Angel Maker

Top is the final cover, bottom two are some first-round comps. The novel is inspired by Frankenstein, and deals with a scientist doing questionable genetic experiments in a European village. I love how all this is suggested by the final cover in the way the village houses drip into the gothic title like DNA strands. I also like how Jen places the Penguin logo. Gurl ain't afraid to slap it in da middle.

"The village of Wolfheim is a quiet little place until the geneticist Dr. Victor Hoppe returns after an absence of nearly twenty years. The doctor brings with him his infant children—three identical boys all sharing a disturbing disfigurement. He keeps them hidden away until Charlotte, the woman who is hired to care for them, begins to suspect that the triplets—and the good doctor— aren’t quite what they seem."(Penguin)

Spike Jonze: Where the Wild Things Are

The trailer is premiering on March 27 right before Monsters vs. Aliens. The film is directed by Spike Jonze. Stop reading now if you don't want to know what music will be performed in the trailer. I'm gonna tell you now. Arcade Fire's "Wake Up". Thank you Spike Jonze Fan Blog: http://s-jonze.blogspot.com/

Spotco: Gem of the Ocean

A theater poster design for the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis done by the NYC-based SpotCo. I think the giant figure in the water alludes to one of the characters being a former slave and the ship could be a slave ship.

Milan Bozic, Ervin Serrano, Keith Hayes: Sequels

Some new releases that aren't all sequels, but have all retained the same designer and look of the previous book.

Roberto de Vicq: Bonjour Tristesse

I've loved this cover for a while now. I pray it hasn't been featured on another blog. I would just DIE. Oh wait,
http://paper-kate.blogspot.com/2009/01/bonjour-tristesse.html

Jennifer Carrow: Security

I was at Books 192 this weekend and this book really stood out as one of the simplest and boldest designs of the season. And I couldn't help but smile at the comical eye image, which is a reference to the neiborhood watch signs you see in the suburbs; it also reminds me of the old Pink Panther movie titles. The story takes place in an affluent Massachusetts college town, where "...Edward Inman, owner of Stoneleigh Sentinel Security, gets a late-night alarm from the home of Doyle Cutler, one of his wealthiest clients. Edward thinks nothing of it—until a local student claims that she was sexually assaulted that same night at Cutler’s house."

Matte with spot gloss and emboss on the type.

Nina Paley: Sita Sings the Blues

Tonight on Reel 13, a cool animated film from Nina Paley:
"Sita is a goddess separated from her beloved Lord and husband Rama. Nina is an animator whose husband moves to India, then dumps her by e-mail. Three hilarious shadow puppets narrate both ancient tragedy and modern comedy in this beautifully animated interpretation of the Indian epic Ramayana, set to the 1920’s jazz vocals of Annette Hanshaw"

You can watch the entire film here:
http://www.thirteen.org/sites/reel13/this-week/current-indie/indie-sita-sings-the-blues/241/

Gaffney/Ferguson/Staehle/Gray: The Believers

Nice cover, and check out the list of all-stars who worked on it. Rather unusual to see an enormous list like this on a cover. The illustration is foil-stamped on tomahawk paper.

Jarrod Taylor: Wonderful World

Spotted this new jacket on Jarrod Taylor's design:related page. What a stunner!

Alison Forner: The Bomb

Bunny Forner kicks some major butt with this totally unexpected atom bomb book cover. Written by a former weapons designer at Los Alamos, the book "reveals how weapons work, the myths and realities of what happens after a nuclear explosion, and how our nuclear policy evolved to what it is today." New from Ecco. I would love to know what the finish is and what informed Bunny's design decisions. Bunnz?

Animal Collecitve: Merriweather Post Pavilion

Check out the ripple-y CD cover for Animal Collective's latest. Click to enlarge for an even trippier experience.

Jeff Kleinsmith: The Shining

Jeff Kleinsmith is the art director at SubPop records. There's an interview with him here:
http://www.filter-mag.com/index.php?c=2&id=13874

This poster was commisioned for a special screening of The Shining at the Timberland Lodge in Oregon, where the film was shot.

Abby Weintraub: College Girl

smoke some and look at this cover while listening to trippy electronica.

New from Riverhead.

Rex Bonomelli: Just After Sunset

Cool new cover for a new short story collection "...culled almost entirely from leading mainstream periodicals." The cover is printed on holographic paper that shows a spectrum pattern when the book is handled. The word "stories" is deliciously tiny. And the motion blurring is interesting. There are actually two radial blurs - one at the top half (author name) and one at the bottom half (title). They center on the N of "KING" and the S of "JUST". And yet if you look at it quickly, reading from top to bottom, it looks like just one radial blur centred on "stories". Whack!

Barbara de Wilde: In Other Rooms, Other Wonders

Norton, Feb 2009. I'm curious to see this cover in person. It looks like the type is gold foil, and the silhouette is die cut, with an illustration on the case. The book is a collection of interconnected stories about Pakistan's dissolving social-class system. It's based on the author's experience of returning to Pakistan to wrest control of his family farm from local thieves (GQ).

Jason Booher: Spade and Archer

Beautiful cover for the prequel to The Maltese Falcon. I'm guessing the inspiration comes from black and white thriller movie titles, like The 39 Steps. I wonder if this was completely digital or if some parts were photographed.


Incidentally, the titles for The Maltese Falcon aren't too shabby either:

Charlotte Strick: Ark of the Liberties

I've had a crush on this book since it came out in June. The photo shows the statue of liberty during its construction in Paris - the dislocation and extreme cyanotype quality of the image makes it look like a glimpse of a parallel universe. The cover is gritty matte with gold foil. It's a great image considering the subject of the book:

"This fascinating and sometimes ambiguous book is a history of United States foreign policy told from the point of view of the ideas that motivated it – or rather, not the ideas but the ideal that motivated it: the great ideal of liberty. For Ted Widmer sees the American millennial dream as having at its heart the idea that Americans are the new chosen people, tasked by God to bring liberty to the whole world." - Product Description.

Phaidon: Lewis Carroll

This is a gorgeous collection of some of Lewis Carroll's 3000 photographs taken during the mid-late 1800s. The photographs are mostly portraits of children and prominent Victorian figures like Lord Tennyson - turns out Carroll, apart from being a mathematician and writer, is considered one of the greatest Victorian photographers. The interior is set very nicely with a lot of white space - one photo per right hand page with an accompanying text on the left. The cover is a trip. Taking a part of the text of Alice in Wonderland, the designer has picked out the letters spelling Lewis Carroll. Info to come (I think the designer's first name is Sonya).

David High: Less Than Zero

Trade paperback - saw this Christ Mas Eve in the Union Square Barnes & Schnoble's (which was absolutely MOBBED by the way - I guess people are STILL buying books!). The title, which is practically white-on-white toward the middle, is the only part of the cover that is embossed - and everything is matte. Makes me want to read the book. The city is a smoggy LA, where the story takes place in the 80s. I wonder if the white-on-white embossed title alludes to the mountains of cocaine the characters snort.

Aesthetic Apparatus: The Crying of Lot 49

Kewl kover from AA. This is the story of a woman who acquires her dead boyfriend's estate, which includes a stamp collection, and later discovers a renegade postal service. I love that font for the number 49. I wonder what it references.

Broadway Melodie of 2008: Part Un

Yes, I'm a theater fag. I've been listening to a lot of Playbill Radio lately, and one thing lead to another, and before long I was looking back at my years of theaterfandom, much of which was due largely to the amazing posters of yesteryear. There is certainly some good work being done in the field nowadays, mostly by SpotCo, who created the posters for Rent, Chicago and Avenue Q. But for me, there is an iconic quality to this old stuff that rocks my pants.

Nine: 1982, The Rink: 1982, How to Succeed (How awesome is it that they shortened it to H2S) 1994, Anything Goes (revival with Patti LuPone - poster by the amazing illustrator James McMullen) 1988, Dreamgirlz - original cast 1982, And the best poster ever, A Chorus Line: 1975!! More great posters to come.

Scott Levine: The Woman and the Ape

Photo by Cary Wolinsky. This one speaks for itself.

Digging to America

I'll admit I have a thing for saturated colors and tiny star motifs, so perhaps I'm biased, but I love this jacket. This one harkens back to 2006...it's from Knopf, but does anyone know who designed it?

From Amazon: In what is perhaps her richest and most deeply searching novel, Anne Tyler gives us a story about what it is to be an American, and about Maryam Yazdan, who after Thirty-five years in this country must finally come to terms with her “outsiderness.”

Two families, who would otherwise never have come together, meet by chance at the Baltimore airport—the Donaldsons, a very American couple, and the Yazdans, Maryam’s fully assimilated son and his attractive Iranian American wife. Each couple is awaiting the arrival of an adopted infant daughter from Korea. After the babies from distant Asia are delivered, Bitsy Donaldson impulsively invites the Yazdans to celebrate with an “arrival party,” an event that is repeated every year as the two families become more deeply intertwined.

Even independent-minded Maryam is drawn in. But only up to a point. When she finds herself being courted by one of the Donaldson clan, a good-hearted man of her vintage, recently widowed and still recovering from his wife’s death, suddenly all the values she cherishes—her traditions, her privacy, her otherness—are threatened. Somehow this big American takes up so much space that the orderly boundaries of her life feel invaded.

A luminous novel brimming with subtle, funny, and tender observations that cast a penetrating light on the American way as seen from two perspectives, those who are born here and those who are still struggling to fit in.

Herb Thornby: A Student of Living Things

Intriguing cover from May, 2006. It's nice and creepy that the labels for the title and author replicate the labels on the specimen jars. It all of a sudden makes me feel like I'm in a bigger jar too. The story is a family drama/thriller about a near-future Washington D.C. where the Department of Homeland Security has been growing in power. A biology P.hD. watches as her brother is gunned down at their university, and sets out to find his killer - only to discover her family's dark secrets. Photo entitled "Perfect Frogs" by Justine Cooper.

Gregg Kulick: Down Town

Top is the final cover, bottom is an earlier comp that Gregg submitted - note how the red letters spell Down and the black letters spell Town, so that the title actually appears twice! Gregg tried to hire an illustrator for this project but ended up knocking out this illustration himself in a few days. The novel tells the history of a small southern town from the mid-nineteenth century through modern times.

Breakfast at Tiffany's

Top is the new 50th Anniversary Edition from Vintage. Bottom is the first edition from Random House. Designer info to come. There is something very Paul Rand-ish about the script in the new edition. Maybe the ripping apart of the black is supposed to evoke Holly Golightly's power to transform seemingly nothing into something grand. Or allude to her exposure.

Jaya Miceli: Justinian's Flea

I saw this in the bookstore this weekend and was instantly drawn to it. A skull and a mosaic - you immejately know what this book's about. It might look morbid, but there's something undeniably fun about it at the same time that brings a smile to my face. Maybe the skull is smiling...it's also nice to see a skull in profile for a change.

Product Description: "During the golden age of the Roman Empire, Emperor Justinian reigned over a territory that stretched from Italy to North Africa. It was the zenith of his achievements and the last of them. In 542 AD, the bubonic plague struck. In weeks, the glorious classical world of Justinian had been plunged into the medieval and modern Europe was born.

At its height, five thousand people died every day in Constantinople. Cities were completely depopulated. It was the first pandemic the world had ever known and it left its indelible mark: when the plague finally ended, more than 25 million people were dead. Weaving together history, microbiology, ecology, jurisprudence, theology, and epidemiology, Justinian’s Flea is a unique and sweeping account of the little known event that changed the course of a continent."