Ben Pierrat: The Fourth Realm Trilogy

Cool paperback series design at top...I also love the hardcover of the latest book, The Golden City, on the bottom. Not sure who the hardcover deigner is yet. This is a sci-fi/fantasy series where a Big Brother-like corporation watches every person and controls everything without anyone's knowledge. Two brothers, who can both travel around different levels of consciousness, figure out what's going on but become enemies when one of them decides to join the evil company in his quest for power.

Peter Brown: The Curious Garden

Finally got my hands on a copy of this beautiful book, which always stopped me in my tracks when I saw it in a shop window. "One day, a curious boy named Liam is out exploring his drab, gray city when he comes across a struggling garden. He decides to help the plants grow, never imagining what he is starting...""

Gray318: Scarlett Thomas Novels

I saw these magnificent paperbacks in London. They sound like academic fantasy-adventure novels. In Mr Y, the heroine reads a cursed book and can then enter people's consciousnesses undetected. In Tragic Universe, which comes to the US in September, the heroine is asked to review a book that promises eternal life. And in Popco, the earliest to be published, the heroine, a brilliant puzzle-solving toy inventor, attempts to create a new toy craze for teenage girls while trying to solve a centuries-old puzzle left in a locket by her grandfather.

Will Staehle: The Disappearing Spoon

Holy Mother of God! Printed on uncoated paper. The book's core is the periodic table and the history of its elements and the scientists who discovered them. The title refers to gallium (Ga, 31), which melts at 84°F, prompting a practical joke among "chemical cognoscenti": shape gallium into spoons, "serve them with tea, and watch as your guests recoil when their Earl Grey ‘eats’ their utensils." We also learn that "Marie Curie used to provoke jealousy in colleagues' wives when she'd invite them into closets to see her glow-in-the-dark experiments." And that "Lewis and Clark swallowed mercury capsules across the country and their campsites are still detectable by the poison in the ground." (from the product description and PW)

Nathan Burton: English Journeys

OMG! Utterly beautiful small paperbacks printed on uncoated paper. I ran into A Shropshire Lad while I was hanging out in my friend's Lewisham bathroom. It was arranged in a neat pile along with his boyfriend's comic books and Popular Science magazines. It was the most beautiful book I saw on my trip. When I asked Vestal about the author, A.E. Houseman, he said he came from rural Worcestershire, a place of gardens, streams and woods. He attended Oxford, where he met his one and only love, a straight, beefy rowing jock named Moses Jackson. Houseman became a famous poet and Latinist. In 1896, he published A Shropshire Lad, a book of sixty three poems speaking of loss and loneliness, Redcoats, hangings and ale. Nathan Burton has designed at least twenty books in the English Journeys series.

London Calling: The Wild Things

Ahhhh, just returned from a WONDERFUL trip to London. Whilst walking down a street in Holland Park, the posh neighborhood where Absolutely Fabulous is set, I chanced upon this glorious UK edition of this book! Isn't it rad? Here are the US covers to the hardcover and paperback, both outrageously awesome in their own right. The hardcover is by Dave Eggers, paperback on the bottom is John Gall. Not sure who the UK designer is...but wanna find out!

Gregg Kulick: Queer

The narrative recounts the hallucinatory life of William Lee, an American in Mexico City in the 1940s and his journey to Ecuador with his reluctant lover, Eugene Allerton, in search of the drug Yage. Great illustration by the illustrious Kulick. To be released in September.

Life During Wartime

Lovez it. Have a great weekend everybody!

Evan Gaffney: The Same River Twice

New from Knopf, printed on gritty matte, with a great bright PMS orangey-pink on the smaller type. I love the big book feel of this, and the positioning of the author name is supah doopah funky fresh.

Alison Forner: One More Theory About Happiness

New from Ecco. It's cool how Alison is developing the author's look, which she established with his last book. "Paul Guest was twelve years old, racing down a hill on a too big, ancient bicycle, when he discovered he had no brakes. Steering into anything that would slow down the bike, he hit a ditch, was thrown over the handlebars, and broke his neck."

Catherine Casalino: Procession of the Dead

New from Grand Central. From the credits, it seems Catherine built a model and photographed it to create this fascinating cover. This is the first in a post-apocalyptic thriller trilogy. A man appears in a city without remembering anything that came before that and meets The Cardinal, the city's monstrous absolute ruler.

Albert Tang: Theodore Roosevelt's History of the United States

New from Smithsonian. I think this might be uncoated. Really beautiful mix of typefaces, stars and a great image. "Theodore Roosevelt's ideas about the nation's early days and his own times can be found sprinkled throughout his volu-minous writings, but these "pearls of thought" (as one of his book reviewers described them in 1888) have never before been pulled together into one volume. Now, through the skillful editing of Daniel Ruddy, Theodore Roosevelt's History of the United States provides readers with Roosevelt's unique view of American history from the Revolution to the beginning of the twentieth century."

Yentus & Booher: Little Fingers

Made from real cut paper! "In a little town in Romania, a mass grave is discovered near the excavations of a Roman fort. Are the dead the victims of a medieval plague or, perhaps, of a Communist firing squad? And why are finger bones disappearing from the pit each night? Petrus, a young archaeologist, decides to do some investigating of his own." Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009.

Matt Dorfman: The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest

Evil Genius Matt Dorfman strikes again with this front-page graphic in Sunday's New York Times Book Review. Check out his other versions here: http://metalmother.com/motherboard/index.php/2010/06/ A terrific new spin on Peter Mendelsund's fantastic cover, which is all silver foil!

Ben Wiseman: Elliot Alagash

New from Random House.  Elliot Allagash is an evil teeange billionaire who befriends Seymour, a chubby outsider at a Manhattan prep school. In exchange for doing whatever Elliot tells him, Seymore becomes a Harvard-bound, straight-A class president. The author, Simon Rich, is a 25-year old writer for SNL.

Elsa Chiao: A Thread of Sky

New from Penguin Press, printed on gritty matte. The story follows six Chinese-American women, three sisters, their mother, her sister and their grandmother, who tour China and in the process come to terms with their personal problems and a dark family secret.

Rodrigo Corral Design: No Longer Human and She Devil in the Mirror

Beautiful paperbacks for New Directions. The handwriting on She-Devil is by Jennifer van Dalsen. Both are uncoated. In She-Devil, an unreliable narrator delivers a feverish monologue about the murder of her best friend, both upper-class women from El Salvador. In No Longer Human, a Japanese man is incapable of feeling a part of or operating in a human society. This was originally published in 1973.

Roy Kuhlman: Nadja

 

Roy Kuhlman designed over 700 at Grove Press starting in 1951. This is a re-issue of an original design, currently in stores. Here's an interesting paragraph from an AIGA biography:
While Kuhlman generally did not read the books, he did attempt to convey the message of the title. That approach coupled with his abstract style seems to make the covers appear to be arbitrarily executed. But, in fact, his work is the result of exacting visual decisions. He worked in a pure, visual language, moving elements around on a page until they “felt right.” This created a loose connection between the literature and the covers but it was subliminal—the covers did not literally express the content but announced that both were “avant-garde.”

Gray318 and Keenan: The Lonely Polygamist and Die Radleys

Two wonderful covers shown on Wednesday's AIGA Small Talks starring Jonathan Gray and Jamie Keenan. The Lonely Polygamist is about a polygamist Mormon with four wives and 28 children who becomes increasingly isolated from his massive family. Die Radleys is the German edition of a novel about a family of vampires, published in the UK as The Radleys, and coming to the US in December.

Patrick Barry: Strip

Very fun cover that looks great in the store - printed on what appears to be metallic paper, since the wave pattern is all foil and remains foil from front to back. I like how the waves make the man look like he's flying around in mid air hanging on to dear life. The story takes place in LA, where a young couple robs a badass mobster strip-club owner, who exacts his revenge on the wrong man, leading the couple to try to rob him again, all while a bigamous police lieutenant takes charge of the increasingly violent case. New from Houghton Mifflin.

Will Staehle: Divine Misfortune

Ever have one of those days? I think this is matte with metallic ink...another fantastic illustration and design by the super amazing Will Staehle. This novel is about a couple who hires a minor deity, who happens to be a racoon, to help their lives run better. Incidentally, the author's previous novel, Monster, also looked great - could it have been Mr. Staehle's work?

Christopher Brand: The Thieves of Manhattan

Art direction by Greg Mollica - Random House 7/10. The synopsis sounds hilarious - four writers and a publisher are pitted against each other with competing memoirs, some of which are may be fake, and some of which may be intentionally fake in order to take down the possible fakes. I love the Saul Bass feel of this cover - the type dances and the eyes are hilaire.

Rodrigo Corral: Super Sad True Love Story

New from Random House, July 2010. This is a comic love story that takes place in the near future. The hero, Lenny works at a company called "Post-Human Services, which attempts to provide immortality for its super-rich clientele". His love interest is "Eunice Park, an impossibly cute and impossibly cruel twenty-four-year-old Korean American woman who just graduated from Elderbird College with a major in Images and a minor in Assertiveness." Soon, "...the country is crushed by a credit crisis, riots break out in New York’s Central Park, the city’s streets are lined with National Guard tanks on every corner, the dollar is so over, and our patient Chinese creditors may just be ready to foreclose on the whole mess."

Klaus Haapaniemi/Big Active: Perfume and The Pigeon

I was having a ball on the Big Active website when these came up. Seems like they've just been released in the UK. Klaus is a Finnish-born, London-based illustrator. I wish I could find larger jpegs, but these will have to do for now.

Gabriele Wilson: The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson

Startingly spare, beautifully executed. I chuckled when I saw it in the bookstore. Looking at the silhouette of the inner Emily Dickinson, I wonder...are we seeing what women wore under their dresses in the 1800s? It looks really modern, but at the same time, those boots look both rocker-chic and Masterpiece-Theater-y. Here's the description: "What if the old maid of Amherst wasn’t an old maid at all? Her older brother, Austin, spoke of Emily as his “wild sister.” Jerome Charyn, continuing his exploration of American history through fiction, has written a startling novel about Emily Dickinson in her own voice, with all its characteristic modulations that he learned from her letters and poems." Out in February from WW Norton.

Jaya Miceli: All Other Nights

A beautiful cover from Jaya, just in time for Passover! I didn't realize, but I think the title actually refers to the Passover song that asks the Four Questions. This is a Civil War spy thriller/romance. Jacob, a Jewish man, enlists in the Union army and becomes a spy. Turns out the Jews are united in faith, but divided in loyalties to the Union and Confederacy. His first mission: assasinate his Confederate uncle during Passover! Jacob later must marry a Confederate spy as part of another mission...and love begins to bloom. Jaya's done an amazing job combining minimal symbols to create an atmospheric, historic, and original design. The stars (of David) are gold foil. New in paperback from Norton (this is slightly cropped in the thumbnail. Please click to reveal the full glory). And I just remembered! Jaya did another awesome cover for the Jews: People of the Book! Big up, girl. You do my peeps proud.

Keenan: The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ

Philip Pullman, famously atheist author of the fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials (The Golden Compass books) has a new novel out in May from Canongate - a retelling of Jesus's life. This seems to be a pick-up from the UK edition, which comes in a white background as well...unless that's the back cover. The plot begins with a "...naive young Mary giving birth to twins after a visit by a mysterious stranger claiming to be an angel. The babies grow up into the physically robust, straight-talking, straightforward Jesus and the bookish, calculating, often morally tortured Christ." It's already out in the UK and is positioned at #9 on the UK Amazon sales ranking. Matte with embossed gold foil type.

Dan Funderburgh/Gray318: Legend of a Suicide

Printed on gritty matte. The type is by Gray318, and the illustration is by Dan Funderburgh. Check out the tiny guns inside the fish! The book includes five stories and a novella, all revolving around a boy's perspective of his father - who shoots himself on the deck of his fishing boat in Alaska.

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.