Book Covers I Have Loved: Graham Greene's The Power And The Glory

There are a few topics I'm passionate about, or at least a few topics that make me corner people at parties in order to delivery a lecture. Often that lecture is incoherent and drunken, but whatever. I'm that way about my hatred of Ben Stein, my love of Roadhouse and my quest for the perfect hamburger.

And book design. I'm not a designer. I have more professional training about the content of a book than its packaging. But as the daughter of two librarians who spends more on books than food - and who actually sniffs them in a semi-creepy way - I feel I'm qualified to judge. Or at least rant.

Cover Illustrations: Richard Kenworthy

I still have the book that made me realize that sometimes you can judge a book by its cover. Here's an edition of Graham Greene's "The Power And The Glory" I bought when I was sixteen just because I was fascinated by the way it looked. All this pure space broken up by a busy, scrawled crucifix. The choice of fonts for the title, a retro-looking script, let me date the story without making it seem dated. Compare it with this edition of Sarah Waters' The Night Watch. While it's perfectly tuned to the period of the story, it makes this 2006 book seem fussy.

I took a chance, hoping that anything with a cover like that would be interesting. In a month, Graham Greene was my favorite author, I had The Third Man on reserve at the library, and I was stalking bookstores hoping to collect all of these editions. I'm still working on that project, but I'm hoping this post will be the start of a new one. Every two weeks I'll post a book cover I like, whether it's something I own or something I've furtively photographed in a store. I'll babble about why I like it, and I'll make sure there's no Chip Kidd allowed. Or at least as little as possible, because I swear a lot of his stuff's for people who like Sony Stores.*


*Okay, I'm being mean. But still.