"Final cover to be revealed" strikes me as a promise of something truly striking. And then today I pick this up via an email from Doubleday:
It's fine. Absolutely fine. I appreciate the simplicity, the use of contrast, and will enjoy seeing if the paper is as heavily textured as the image seems to promise. But just fine. It will have no bearing on whether or not I read the novel. I always hungrily await a new Ian McEwan novel. But I felt more was coming with that type of buildup.
Via the Penguin UK blog from a new exhibition celebrating the art of the book cover. Just love this!
Via Caustic Cover Critic from yesterday. Designer Amy Fleisher having a little fun revamping classic Penguin covers for the 75th Anniversary. If only this stuff was real. Or could it be? If they thought people would buy it? As I, of course, would.
And I might want these plush for some little ones.
And who would pass up a Frankenstein Penguin USB drive? Click on over to Amy Fleisher's site to see that one. So cute. So playful. Laughed out loud a little.
"We want people to have a centre, a history, an account that makes sense. We want to be able to say This is what he did and Here's why. It forms a lock against oblivion. Does it?" Anne Carson
The most lovely book just arrived in the mail today. I know, I know, I say this all the time. My bookish infatuations are numerous and intense. But Nox by Anne Carson, due out later this month from New Directions, is breathtaking. I can't put it down. After leafing through an arc some time back, I already knew how special the content is here. A moving eulogy for Carson's brother. But until I actually opened this "book in a box" today in its finished form, it did not wield its full impact upon me.
So you open the book (the box) like this.
And then the pages unfold before you much as the narrative thread does. One piece at a time accordion style. Like the pieces of a life that march through a sequence but remain joined, intact. Indivisible from the whole story.
The scrapbook effect of personal artefacts, photos, notes, collage, sketches tell the story of Carson's brother's life in a visually arresting way before you ever get to the words. Will be back soon with my account of those words. Still reading the visual story.
It's Saturday. We shouldn't have to think that hard. And yesterday's post invited some strong reactions to UK versus US cover designs so let's see (and judge) just a few more. Now many of you know that I live in the US but am constantly lusting after UK designs. Especially from those occasionally infuriating Penguin people who have reserved most of their best design efforts for friends across the pond. So I get many of your comments yesterday that said you liked that particular US cover better but usually pick the UK option.I picked a few titles today that seem to be on many to-be-read or just reviewed lists. UK on the left, US on the right. What do you think? Any other book comparisons we should see?
And at Lizzy Siddal's suggestion:
Have you ever really loved a book design for the hardcover of a book, and then had an "Oh my god, what were they thinking?" moment when the paperback comes out dressed in something far less satisfying? Disappointing isn't it? But today was not one of those days. The paperback of The Manual of Detection comes out this month, and a copy arrived in my mail slot today. And it is most satisfying as was its hardcover parent.
Do you have a hardcover to paperback happy ending? Or tale of the tragic stepchild?
Do you see these gorgeous new Penguin Hardback Classics designed by Coralie Bickford-Smith? They are due to be released on October 5 in the UK, and I will be first in line. Some of you may remember my love affair with the first set of releases last year as I blogged about it here? Once I received them for Christmas, I began waiting for the next cloth-bound beauties. I have gestated that love some 9+ months, and now the babies are coming home from the book hospital.
But friends, you know how busy I am. So I want one of you to take one of my children. Any one from the cradle above. Just pick the one that suits your fancy. I can't possibly care for all of them. I will ship it to your house in a mailer just like Flat Stanley travels.
But in order to get an entry into my little competition, I want you to do something that will put us all in the proper frame of mind for Banned Books Week. Look at the titles above - The Hound of the Baskervilles, Oliver Twist, Emma, The Odyssey, The Woman in White, Treasure Island, The Sonnets and A Lover's Complaint (Shakespeare), Lady Chatterley's Lover, Little Women, and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - and take a guess as to which two have not been challenged or banned in some well-documented way. Don't look it up. Just guess. You get an entry no matter what - right or wrong.
Take a guess by close of day this Sunday, October 4. Win a beauty of your choice. Then let's all meet up here next week, and challenge some of our assumptions?
"Set in Troy, New York, this linked collection follows a quirky and resilient family of women throughout the twentieth century.
In 1908, Mamie Garrahan faces childbirth aided by her arsenic-eating sister-in-law Kitty, a nun who grows opium poppies, and a doctor who prescribes Bayer Heroin. “In the twentieth century, I believe there are no saints left,” Mamie remarks. But her daughters and granddaughter test this notion with far-reaching consequences. Kitty’s arsenic reappears sixty years later in the hands of her distraught niece. A schoolgirl’s passion for the Beatles and Melville—a passion both lonely and funny—shapes her life. Each decade is illuminated by endearingly eccentric characters: an anorexic waitress falls for a wealthy college boy in the jazz age ... an exuberant young nurse questions science during the Depression ... a homely seamstress designs a scandalous dress in the 1950s.
The Nightingales of Troy, the first fiction collection by an acclaimed American poet, creates a vividly palpable sense of time and place. Alice Fulton’s memorable characters confront the deepest dilemmas with bravery and abiding love." (from the publisher)
Just updated my book design blogroll again. As to not forget the beautiful designs that cover beautiful words. It is over there in the right sidebar under the heading "judge by its cover." And am happy to have a found a few new friends. Tal Designz featured the book cover you see above as most recent post. And I said "Oooo!" Checked it out here and there. Need to read it. More later on the Lost in Translation challenge page. For now, I will just look at the cover, and ponder a line from the book.
"I was raised among books," writes Daniel Sempere, "making invisible friends in pages that seemed cast from dust and whose smell I carry on my hands to this day."
