Book Cover Archive blog

Cover design for The Derrida-Harris reader by Natalie F. Smith.
Album cover on the right for Portishead’s Third.

Cover design for When Gravity Fails by Howard Grossman.
Observation by HeadOrange.

A quick headsup – We’ve consolidated the two RSS feeds into one. So now those of you who were subscribed to the Archive will receive our blog posts, and vice-versa. This is fairly important since often times we’ll be posting additional information about new additions. Apologies for the initial redundancy.

If your feed seems funky or you notice any other issues, be sure and let us know.

edit: We were having some issues with this.
I’ve bumped it to the top of the pile just in case it got ignored by your respective feeds.

Earlier today we posted work from Gollancz‘s new Sci-Fi series, Space Operas; a follow-up to the equally awesome Future Classics.

Series designer Sanda Zahirovic was kind enough to send over a bit of back story behind the work:

I’m a graphic design graduate from Kingston University in London and my designs were chosen through the Student D&AD Awards where they were nominated for a D&AD Pencil.

The covers are photographs of constructed paper, there are no silly photoshop effects. The idea was to connect the traditional book with it’s futuristic content, by manipulating the paper in to a new form that is relevant to the story. And to encourage the SF readers to be proud of what they are reading.

View the full series here.

It’s at times like these that I miss living in NYC.

A Designer and His Problems will be a once-in-a-lifetime inspirational journey through one designer’s typos, questionable color choices and poor font selection. A Designer and His Problems deals with the feeling that we all have from time to time: that something is wrong but we don’t know quite what. Or maybe we do know, but it’s too late to do anything about it. Heartwarming and refreshingly honest, Paul Sahre identifies problems in all their different forms and urges us to accept them, nurture them, caress them.
- – - -
Friday 6 February 2009
6:30–8:30PM
Katie Murphy Amphitheater
Fashion Institute of Technology
Building D
27th Street and Seventh Avenue

More information and registration details at AIGANY

Illustration by Leanne Shapton

Photographer and fine artist Marc Yankus is a serious talent. His work has been seen on any number of book covers, a few of which we’ve just added to the archive.

We’re excited to announce that the Book Cover Archive is partnering with Stephen Coles, type director at FontShop and editor of Typographica, in an ongoing effort to identify all the fonts used in the archive. In the coming weeks you should start noticing some changes and additions around the site to that effect, so stay tuned.

Also note that the bets are on as to what percentage of the covers make use of Trade Gothic, (I’m going to go out on a limb here and say 20%).

You’ve probably seen and drooled over the Penguin Great Ideas books. Penguin has so far published three series of twenty books each.

Jeff Vandermeer — a luminary in the newly monikered “New Weird” genre — has embarked on reading and reviewing one book from the series every day for the next two months!

Artist Phil Buehler is selling a nifty reproduction of “Jack Torrance”‘s book from Steven King’s The Shining. It comes in two versions, okay cover and craptacular cover.

Hey guys, we had some unexpected trouble with our email server. If you’ve tried to email us at the info@general-projects.com address and it was returned to you, try again because everything is up and working now.

Sorry about that.

We’re proud to announce that the new Book Cover Archive is now live and fully operational.

Featuring…
• 800+ books and 180+ designers
• Cross-indexed meta data
• Custom comments system
• Fully browseable master list of all content
• Smart URLs
• Smart keyword searches

The real strength of the site lays in the cross-indexed meta data. Click on an author’s name and see any other books they have in the archive. Click on a designers name and see all work by that designer. More often than not, a single person will have multiple instances of meta data associated with their name. For instance, Chip Kidd (unsurprisingly) has the unique honor of being the only person in the archive with every possible attribution filled: Author, Designer, Art Director, Photographer, and Illustrator.

Speaking of which, we have made a significant effort to try and track down as many Photographer, Illustrator and Art Director credits as possible. We are undoubtedly missing a good number of them, however, so do us a favor and use the email link on each cover’s page to let us know when we’ve come up short.

A couple other favorite entries:
• Publisher:The Penguin Great Ideas series
• Genre: Science Fiction
• Designer: Paul Sahre
• Photographer: Jason Fulford

We’re invested in this thing for the long haul, so check back often for a steady stream of improvements and additions. We look forward to any feedback, suggestions or submissions you may have.

J. Kingston Pierce of The Rap Sheet has an ongoing series on “copycat covers,” books which (usually coincidentally, perhaps occasionally not) wind up using the same stock art and photography.

I imagine that, for an author, seeing ones book here would feel like showing up at a party in the same dress as another attendant.

The Kansas City Library parking garage:

(via The Denver Egotist)

I’m obsessed with the Gollancz/Orion “Future Classics” collection. UK SF Book News has an interview with Gollancz editor Simon Spanton on the series.

I’ve had no luck figuring out who exactly was behind these covers (beyond “the Orion Books Art Department”). Can any UK readers who have gotten their filthy mitts on them help?

A similar Space Opera collection is coming out sometime in 2009! I’ve got space-ants in my space-pants.

These Awesome Tapes of Africa look like something that would go well with a Sedaris or McSweeney’s collection. (Via Draplin)

They also remind us quite a bit of the Going On video for Gnarls Barkley.