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.

Oliver Munday: The Last Skin

Three beautiful covers for a poetry book, with the final cover at the bottom. Here is a bit of back story from Oliver:

"I worked with Maggie Payette (Penguin's poetry series AD) on this cover. She told me upfront that the author had a piece of art that she wanted to use on the cover, but that I could try some ideas based on my interpretation of the poetry anyway. The poetry dealt with the ideas of death, beauty, fragility, time and loss. I chose to try and cover all of these themes and visually summarize them by using the idea of a flower shedding its petals, or skin as I interpreted it.

The next cover idea came directly from a poem. There was an image of a jar from the poet's past in one of the works, which really stuck out to me. I thought it was an interesting metaphor for dealing with memories/keeping them safe and also their fragility.

The cover chosen was the one with the piece of art that the author chose. But, I was happy to have the comps in the old 'folio.

Both covers were shot by Ramell Ross: ramellross.com

And Check out more of Oliver's amazing work at: olivermunday.com

Megan Wilson/Carol Carson: The Letters of Noel Coward

The new paperback, designed by Megan Wilson, and the original hardcover, designed by Carol Carson. Have a smokin' holiday everyone!

Paul Buckley/Ken Garduno: Light Boxes

"The inhabitants of a closely-knit town are experiencing perpetual February after a vengeful god-like spirit punishes them for flying. The sun becomes a distant memory, the ground is blanketed in snow, children go missing, and more and more adults become catatonic with depression. But others find the strength to fight back..." A Penguin original coming in June. Spike Jonz has optioned the film rights, and 24-year old music video director Ray Tintori is rumored to direct. He's the director of the MGMT video "Time to Pretend."

Correx: here is the illustrator's website. Thanks, Paul!

Jaya Miceli: Short Girls

The story of two Vietnamese-American sisters visiting their father, an "...enthusiastic inventor of devices to improve the lives of short people." Jaya says: "...they were having trouble with the repackage.....went many rounds in many directions. Deadline was upon me and I found this image that simply reiterated the meaning in the title." I find this image to be hilarious and perfect. (Penguin, Summer 2010)

Rob Grom: John Dies @ the End

A wonderful treat came upon me at the bookstore last week, when I saw this book brazenly staring at me from across the room. WTF, I asked myself. Then I picked it up and turned it over. SCORE!! Here is designer Rob Grom's description of how it came to be:

"This is one of my personal favorites. This project was given to me as a rush assignment, so I knew very little about the story...it was described to me as an Evil Dead/Matrix/Big Lebowski type story. The cover is just a blatant interpretation of the
title, John Dies at the End, but the real pay off is the back cover...Finally, some real gore for once! Geoff Spear photographed and retouched the image beautifully. I kind of felt a bad for the hand/arm model, but it was well worth it : )"