Book Cover Archive blog

The immensely talented Chin-Yee Lai has a new portfolio site. Expect to see a bunch of her stuff added to the Archive in the coming weeks.

I think I like her email announcement as much as I like her work, which is saying a lot.

Good morning Tuesday. Slightly old but stuck in my head:

Moby-Dick was a real whale. In the nineteenth century sailors were in the habit of giving names to individual whales who were particularly dangerous or unkillable; among them were ‘Timor Jack’ and ‘New Zealand Tom’.

Great blog on how famous books got their titles, written for The Sunday Telegraph by Gary Dexter.

Book cover designer Kimberly Glyder has started an excellent new blog dedicated to Shelved Books. Concepts and comps that never made it to the store. Great work and an interesting read.

I love this unused design for The Error World:

[The Book Cover Archive's] creators have a discerning palate, and feast exclusively on beautiful covers.

Damn skippy.

Nice writeup of Megan Wilson‘s cover for Jane Eyre: A recent favorite: Vintage’s redesign of “Jane Eyre,” featuring Katherine Wollkoff’s dark photograph of a woman’s silhouette. The image alludes to the novel’s time period, when the silhouette was a form of portraiture. But it’s not a stiff, formal portrait: the woman’s hair is in slight disarray, and her facial features recede in the deep shadows of the photograph. It’s intriguing without giving away the story; to fill in what Jane looks like, you have to read the book.

Well here’s an unexpected theme for a book cover blog: erotica authors Mathilde Madden and Kristina Lloyd are dismayed by the contradictory double-standard of erotic books written for (straight) women being wrapped with depictions of nude and semiclothed women.

(pictured: a rare instance of a male on a cover. Or possibly a chicken wing. In case you haven’t guessed, most of the rest of the site is not at all safe for work.)

We think their mission misses the mark, though; equal representation of men and women on book covers simply leads to equally bad book covers. Metaphor! Symbolism! Design! Forever!

via Slog

The most recently posted book on the front page of the Archive is now called out a bit more from the others. The idea being to call more attention to new entries instead of throwing new work into the abyss and hoping someone notices. It’s a design decision I stole from my old blog that I’ve been meaning to implement for a while now.

Big thanks to Yentus for reminding me that our current design was lacking.

Also note that if you guys have any thoughts or feedback on other design improvements we can be making, we’d love to hear them. Either email me (ben [at] general-projects.com) or feel free to comment below.

Are we tired of classics repackaged in carefully defined series by designers with clear thematic vision? No not quite yet. This new line of “Crime Classics” from Atlantic Books looks as if it was designed in anticipation of the retro book-cover remix fad that’s all the craze with the hep cats.

These books — mixed in with some other seasonal selections from Atlantic — can be found here. Rob of The Fiction Desk also has some comments on the “curation” of these books. (btw, anyone know which designer is responsible for these?)

A side project by designer Wilhelm Staehle.

(I initially thought these actually were pulished covers, especially with die-cuts and meta-book-images being so in vogue these days.)

New York was great. Had a bunch of meetings, got a ton of work done. Met everyone at Knopf which was an honor but didn’t take any pictures because I didn’t want to be that guy.

I saw this outside Design Within Reach in SoHo and threw up a little in my mouth.

The Archive is gonna be a bit silent while Eric and I hit New York through the weekend.
I’ve got some good stuff lined up for next week so stay tuned.

..by Luke Drozd.
(“Drozd”? Really? What a rad name.)

The AAUP book, jacket, & journal show winners have been announced.
But they don’t post any images, so it’s sort of hard to care, honestly.

Edit: FaceOut Books has a handful of the winning designs posted. Thanks Jason!

Cool shirt. Available here.