Book, er, Magazine Covers I Have Loved: Lucky Peach #7

What my feelings about Lucky Peach lack in articulation, they make up for in volume. I love food, and writing, so you know I must love food writing - and yet Lucky Peach often seems of a piece with the bro-ified food culture that's developed over the past few years, a culture nourished in a petri dish of social media and an available all-caps key. I have never properly recovered from an early roundtable, which featured Anthony Bourdain and a few other food bros having a dick-swinging contest about "craft." 

But maybe this cover (credit: Christopher Boffoli), and the promise of a feature on curry 'round the world, will bring me back. Nearly white covers are always striking on a crowded newsstand, and the miniature boat in a sea of milk and Lucky Charms is witty and, well, charming. 

Book Covers I Have Loved: Algoma, Dani Couture

I have a mad crush on Invisible Publishing and their covers. It's a smaller Canadian publishing house, but I think their design work can easily stand with anything the big guys are putting out these days. For example, this lovely, stark cover for Dani Couture's Algoma. In spite of the unity of its colour palette, there's something unsettling about the whole. Maybe it's the shakiness of the font. All I know is that I want to order this. And Jonah Campbell's Food and Trembling. Actually, why not throw in this sinister cover for kevin mcpherson eckhoff's Forge and make it a triad? Judging from this Chronicle Herald story (worth reading just to have Invisible's founder, Robbie MacGregor, make you feel really lazy), design credit should go to Megan Fildes.

Book Covers I Have Loved: Butterfly in the Typewriter

Biography covers can be so dull. They all use the same portraits of major subjects, whether painted or photographed, and use a tasteful serif typeface. So I appreciate something different. Here's a cheeky take on the profile photo for Cory MacLauchlin's Butterfly in the Typewriter (designer currently unknown.) Take an image of a famous author, and paste in cutouts of the accoutrements of his most notable character. John Kennedy Toole meets Ignatius Reilly's hat, mustache, and yes- hot dog. It highlights the autobiographical relation between text and author, while pointing out that they're not homogenous. They just relate through sticky bonds.

Paperback Hater: My Reply to Emily Keeler

Have book covers become too pretty? Look at books like The Eat-Clean Diet: Fast Fat-loss That Lasts Forever! and you might say no, but that doesn't stop Emily Keeler from saying yes in a recent article for the Toronto Standard. Two series in particular are too sexy for her bookshelf: Jillian Tamaki's Threads collection, and Coralie Bickford-Smith's redesigned Fitzgeralds, both produced for Penguin. I read the article reluctantly, ready to be offended. If you're a longtime reader of my blog (I think there may be six of you by now!) you probably know that I like book covers. I like them a lot. I'll point out ones I think are particularly pretty on a semi-regular basis, and Bickford-Smith's work has appeared twice. So I tried to strain the petty bitterness out of any meaningful critique I could offer on Keeler's piece, but by the end my most coherent thought was still "GIRL, PLEASE." Time has cooled my ire, though, and allowed me to expand on that emotion.

My first issue is Keeler's apparent belief that the book as design object, or even a marker of taste, dates to Penguin hiring Tamaki. But the book as fetish object has a longer history than the book as utilitarian good. The latter needed several factors to appear and collide for it to become a phenomenon. Mass production, greater literacy and more disposable income, among others. Before, people who learned to read, then found time to do so regularly were generally either religious or rather rich. Sometimes, they even farmed out the pages to professional bookbinders, who returned beautifully tooled and gilded pieces of art. This process persisted even past the automation of bookbinding. If Keeler believes The Last Tycoon is overdesigned, she may want to avert her eyes from this pyrotechnic book cover, circa 1900. And when it comes to taste, as Bourdieu said, "Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier." He also said this in 1984, 27 years before the "beautiful books" which Keeler sees as becoming "consumable objects that describe the taste of the reader who proudly, tastefully, displays them" were getting laid out in InDesign.

I'm also not sure that "The lush redesigns fetishize these books, render them décor rather than literature." Do they? Really? Are publishers the new authors, back when it was assumed that the author packed meaning into the text, which readers then decoded to find the One True Interpretation? A company may say a book's collectible in the copy, but that doesn't guarantee that it will never be read. Books are multi-functional that way. They'll always be "literature" if they can be opened, contain words, and if you're not using the highest-browed meaning of the term. The only guaranteed way of turning books from literature to décor is to strip the covers and sew the pages together in a stack, which is exactly what Restoration Hardware did in 2010, but isn't what Penguin did here. Michael Maranda might know a little something about décor though. Keeler likes his work on Selected Business Correspondence, where a "whole sheaf of letters is bound and placed in an embossed manilla folder." That sounds like an object guaranteed to become décor, if only because once you've spent $40 on it, you'll want to limit your chances of bending the letters or tearing the envelope as you stuff them back in. Perhaps it's better just to click through the free PDF online.

For the record, each of the Fitzgerald redesigns costs less than $30, and all of them will survive a few readings out here in the physical world.

Book Covers I Have Loved: Eat Me, Kenny Shopsin

This is one of my favourite cookbooks, and it has one of my favourite covers. But Eat Me is not the book I cook from the most. Of its 288 pages, I have made only three recipes. But it changed my life. In a world of tomes about El Bulli and Pollan-penned tracts about our diets, I was beginning to stress out about dinner. A casserole? Laziness! Buying pre-made kimchi instead of fermenting it myself? Shameful! But Kenny Shopsin, the foul-mouthed, philosophic cook, showed me the light with four letter words. You make good food, don't use shitty ingredients, find some shortcuts and don't give a fuck about the fat content.

He also came up with the idea of mac and cheese pancakes, so he's clearly a genius. And his daughter, Tamara Shopsin, shows that it's in the genes with this beautiful cover. The perfect, bright colours, the fun font, and the cut-out egg with the pull tab. It tells you not to pull, but of course Kenny would and you should too. Instead of the title and author info, you'll see a plate of breakfast.

Book Covers I Have Loved, Liked and Loathed: Wuthering Heights

Realities may be plural and meaning may be fluid... but anybody who goes about thinking Wuthering Heights is a template for true love is a stone-cold idiot. Postmodernism can only take you so far. Of course, the actual content of the book hasn't stopped legions of hormone-addled folks (and some older people who should know better) from taking Heathcliff to be the dreamiest of dreamboats to ever sail, or at least stalk, the moors. Thus, a certain kind of terrible cover could be expected for Wuthering Heights. Bare, yearning, extremely buff chests. Terrible Twilight tie-ins, even. But I sure wasn't expecting this:


I couldn't bring myself to open the book, although I'm sure Heathcliff exhuming Cathy's corpse was rendered with the same kind of apple-cheeked wholesomeness. I understand that this is part of a series of classic stories and novels digested for the children. And because of that, some darker elements would have to be left in the original text. But this is more than missing the mark. This is aiming for Wuthering Heights and landing somewhere deep in Magic Treehouse land. Perhaps writers, librarians, parents and anyone else who cares about kids should stop presenting pulverized classics and give children good, original works instead. It seems more likely to create dedicated readers who'll find the real Wuthering Heights (and Jane Eyre, and heck, Agnes Grey) on their own.


This next cover (for the complete text) would definitely appeal to those kids, particularly those tormented souls who are simultaneously going through a Tim Burton phase. The cover is by Ruben Toledo, and it's part of a set of three Deluxe Classics he illustrated for Penguin. I can't decide whether I like it or not. Sometimes I think it has the right mix of superficial prettiness and barely hidden rot. Other times, I find it irritatingly gothy-cute, with Catherine looking like a consumptive Hello Kitty.

(Photo from Etsy seller CalloohCallay)

But I would love to track down a copy of this Wuthering Heights, which features woodcuts by Fritz Eichenberg. Published as a box set with Jane Eyre in 1943, I think it's just about perfect, with the emphasis being as much on the environment and atmosphere of its setting than Heathcliff himself, looking here- unlike that awful Real Reads cover- like a real adult.

Book Covers I Have Loved: A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens

The hardback Penguin Classics, designed by the eerily talented Coralie Bickford-Smith, have been celebrated ever since the first set was released. And yes, they're lovely, but they're also a pretty cover on a cheap binding. Stiff and prone to cracking, I would wager that a standard paperback Penguin Classic would hold up better than their clothbound cousins. But I will make an exception for their version of A Tale of Two Cities.

Blame the knitting. Yes, I've actually read A Tale of Two Cities, so I know that knitting doesn't have the most positive connotation in the novel. But you can blame the knitting and my Madame Defarge-like vengeful streak for not really caring. This book cover is amazing, touching upon the passage of time, guillotine blades, doubles, and my favourite fibre art, all at once.

Book Covers I Have Loved: Cheers! by Nicholas Pashley

Don't worry. Unless you're seeing four noble Mounties (those proud inheritors of tradition/purveyors of police brutality) on your monitor, you're still sober.

This cover is cheeky and perfect for a book on Canadian beer history, although perhaps a little expected. Still, considering that it avoids the maple leaf/hockey skate/beer bottle troika of clichés, I believe it deserves our appreciation. And maybe a round of drinks.

Cheers! A History of Beer in Canada, by Nicholas Pashley

Book Covers I Have Loved: Sleepless by Jo Anne Metsch

This cover might not be particularly powerful on its own, but consider the fact that it's a mystery. Then consider what that fact would shelve it next to: a whole lot of dark, busy covers. You know, blood splatters, shattered fonts and "The Next Steig Larsson" taglines. I know when I saw this on a table of mysteries in a bookstore, bright, crisp and very white, I wanted to read it- even if I could barely make out the title.

The copyright page says the book designer is Jo Anne Metsch, so I'll assume she was responsible for the cover as well.

Book Covers I Have Loved: The Information, Cover by Peter Mendelsund

I thought this cover was a little dull at first. White space, serif type and two columns? Lucky they didn't put three on there, that would have really angered up the blood. But I kept on returning to this, even though it was on a shelf with more superficially interesting covers. And that's when its cleverness started to grow on me. Although the title, the author and one of his other credits are highlighted in red, the subtitle is not. The only thing that makes the words "A History, A Theory, A Flood" stand out is their singularity, so my brain was scanning and sorting information, even before I could start reading a book about the same.

Correction of the Correction: I thought I found the credit for the designer on the author's blog, then I thought I hadn't, but now it seems like it really is Peter Mendelsund's work. Oh God, the information!! It's too much for me!

Book Covers I Have Loved: What To Cook And How To Cook It

Thanks to my new job, I've learned that designing a cookbook is hard. Each page has a dozen bits of information, from ingredients to cooking times, that must be communicated clearly to a reader who is similarly doing a dozen things at once trying to make that page into a meal.

However, I don't much care whether the inside of What To Cook and How To Cook It is easy to use, because the outside is certainly nice to look at. There's no creepy, branded photo of a celebrity chef with their signature scrawled across their own face, like you would get with your David Ramsays. Or a bunch of boring text that marks kitchen classics like The Joy of Cooking and How To Cook Everything.

There's just a few illustrations, including a fish who is so cute, I could eat him up. Literally. Like, with tartar sauce.

Book Covers I Have Not Loved: Room

If I could justify the purchase of a new hardcover book, I would have bought Emma Donoghue's Room a long time ago. It's received stellar reviews everywhere, including from a much-respected professor, and its subject matter is right up my true-crime inspired alley.

I would have even ignored its unfortunate cover.
You know what this looks like?
The poster for Jack, that's what. And if I'm going to be reading one of the best books of 2010, I don't want to also be reminded of a Robin Williams schmaltzfest.

Book Covers I Have Loved: Put Out More Flags, Evelyn Waugh

I think my apartment hates British literature. I bought a copy of Brideshead Revisited so I could do a cover post on it, but the book's been missing for the past month. Wait a minute- Brideshead Revisited? Could my apartment be a homophobe? Well, I never.

Anyway, this was a Penguin edition of the title, designed in the 1970s by Bentley/Farrell/Burnett. However, I didn't like it nearly as much as this cover for Put Out More Flags, so maybe misplacing the book isn't such a bad thing.


Just like Graham Greene, I ended up reading Waugh because of a cover. This one in particular, which cuts the whimsy with something sinister. I also like the barely maintained tension between the 20s-style font and the purely 70s illustration. It makes Waugh's work seem timeless in a way the actual content often is not.

This didn't end up being my favorite Waugh novel - that's totally the Loved One - but it's still my favorite cover.

Next week: I try and bring this back to regular feature-dom with a more current cover. Wish me luck.

Book Covers I Have Loved: Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy

Designer: David Pearson, for Picador UK. Buy here.

I'm not Cormac McCarthy's biggest fan, to be diplomatic about it. I find him at once terse and overwritten, pretentious and abrupt. I just want him to decide once and for all if his characters are supposed to be plain-speaking cowboys or walking, talking Rogets.

I do love this new cover for Blood Meridian though. It looks just enough like wanted posters from the Old West to recall the time period, but the fill on the font looks like burned-out film stock, so we already know we're in for a more modern and unpleasant take on the Western than a nostalgic trip out West.

It's part of a series of re-designs of McCarthy's entire work by David Pearson, which I first saw on the delightful Caustic Cover Critic. You can see the rest there. I don't think they all work. For example, as the CC pointed out, The Road looks a lot like Pearson's Kierkegaard cover - to my mind, too much. But I love this. Maybe it's time to give McCarthy another shot.

On a related note: check out my pal Max's thoughts on the book to film adaptation of The Road.

Book Covers I Have... Found Interesting

Due to technical difficulties, the already-delayed cover post will be delayed even further. Until then, I want to talk about something I noticed while book shopping.

If you're a woman of a particular socioeconomic background, you might have noticed that a little movie called Julie and Julia came out over the summer. Sure, it didn't make bank the way Transformers 2 did, but it had decent legs, a lower overhead and at least 100% less Shia LaBoeuf. It had hardback copies of Mastering The Art of French Cooking selling like hot brioche and people - often mother-daughter combos - lining up for tickets.

The critical response was pretty harsh on the Julie side of the equation. They found her whiny and narcissistic, which made me feel bad for Julie Powell. Sure, she's guilty as charged, but so would anyone be if you compared them to Julia Child. And, unlike many of us, Powell brings some self-deprecation and occasionally witty writing to the modern condition of chronic navel gazing.

Now she's got another book out, all about how she learned to be a butcher while... cheating on her husband, last seen being canonized as the saintly eater and cleaner of the earlier book. Speaking of moms and movies, you should have seen my Mom's face fall when, after we had just finished taking a screening in, I told her what Powell's latest book was all about. And while the butchery might sound suitably Child-esque, let's just say that some S&M and rough sex makes it in. I don't think that was ever a chapter in Mastering The Art of French Cooking.

So, how do you sell a book that trades in the cheerful self-fulfillment of the first, successful book for something much darker? Let's see:Wait a minute, that looks curiously familiar:Okay, so it's more of a similar colour scheme thing, but don't tell me there isn't a resemblence. Check it: the fleur-de-lys motif of the cookbook and the hearts at the corner of the memoir. I guess the answer is "Make it look as similar to what inspired the first book as possible, and just hope that people get really confused."

An interesting thing to note though. The styling of Powell's book is more self-consciously retro than the older cookbook. Maybe that's to provide a visual cue that the monogamous, heterosexual couple will be comfortably repaired to 50s sitcom perfection, a conclusion the book apparently avoids.

Book Covers I Have Loved: The Unwritten, Mike Carey and Peter Gross

I was all set to write about certain Bukowski covers, when I made a trip to the comic book store. Well I thought, holding a stack, don't comic books come with covers? By God, there's even book in the name. And to make a more salient point, there's one reason why I keep on buying issues of The Unwritten: the covers!

The Unwritten 4-7. Written by Mike Carey, Illustrated by Peter Gross and with covers by Yuko Shimizu.

Sure, the story's not bad either. However, parts of it have a warmed-over Gaiman feel, and I'm a little done with meta-fiction and po-mo legends for the... mo'. But the covers by Yuko Shimizu are superb. I almost want to have them framed, but that wouldn't be too useful for the "book" part of the equation.

They are the photo negatives of our favorite childhood illustrations. The lines and shading are conventionally darker than the fill, but that's not the case here and it fits in with a story where the writing process is always on display. I just love them.

Book Covers I Have Loved: Clea By Lawrence Durrell

The last post about the Graham Greene cover got me thinking about vintage covers. From the Night Watch cover I mentioned there, to the hardcover edition of Philip Roth's Indignation, printing a pastiche seems to be the way to go for period books.

And I understand the appeal. Sure, I could bullshit some reason about how mid-century literature represented a peculiar confluence of critical taste and popular appeal that has polarized since, where being middlebrow wasn't a bad thing and Norman Mailer was writing in Playboy, and we're all a little nostalgic for a time when the bestsellers weren't just Twilight and whatever Glenn Beck barfed up on paper. Actually, I'm not so sure that reason is total bullshit, but I'll admit that my personal reason boils down to "They look classy."

No designer credit, circa 1960

Which brings me to this cover for Lawrence Durrell's Clea. My Dad gave me the 75% of the Alexandrine Quartet he owns and I've been trying to make my way through them ever since. The problem is, Durrell knows he can write but he doesn't know where to stop. Still, if I'm not in love with the contents, I'm very fond of the covers. All of the titles share the same font and image of a hand, but come in different colours. I took a picture of Clea only because it happens to be the one I'm reading now and it's in the best shape. The others have all been living pretty rough lives in my backpack.

The fonts used on the cover almost look the same, but they aren't. The slight differences actually end up making the cover look more unified, because using the exact same one would have been noticeable in its banality. It's interesting how the imprint on the side doesn't throw the book out of balance, but keeps it from becoming too open and plain. With too many new books, that just becomes another distraction in an already busy design.

You can't see it in the photo, but the handprint is pretty detailed. You can even see bits of the whorl of skin, a nice human touch. This cover is spare, elegant and perfectly edited. It's what I wish the book inside could be.

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.

The Collector (With Apologies to John Fowles)

You know where this poster would look amazing? In my life.

I have the collector's compulsion to both uniformity and completion. This is an unfortunate characteristic currently at odds with the economic climate and my line of credit. It's worst with books. Intellectually, I know that that injunction not to judge a book but its cover has some merit, or else it wouldn't be so annoyingly clichéd. So, whether it comes in a brittle and dog-eared Signet Classic from the used book store, or behind a delightfully revolting and anatomically perfect Charles Burns cover, the provenance of my copy of The Jungle shouldn't matter. But, it does! Knowledge can be bought cheaply, I guess, but pleasure takes more coin. aAd feels better. So, I want to buy the Burns, and hopefully will before it's out of print. But then I'll want the Seth-covered Portable Dorothy Parker, the Ware-designed Candide, and the Spiegelman-drawn New York Trilogy to match. A uniform set! Almost complete.

I managed to buy most of Graham Greene's novels in their old Vintage covers before they were re-designed. But, as much as The Heart of the Matter has given me, it still bothers me that it's Penguin cover looks ugly and ungainly next to the sleek Vintages. And it bothers me still more that I'm missing so many volumes I'll probably now never track down.

So, the only thing left to comfort the wounded collector in me is the Penguin Gothic Reds series. 10 delightful covers, 10 hilariously oversimmered books. The Haunted Hotel comes highly recommended, particularly if you're a big fan of decapitation and Victorian home decor. And they're recent publications, so I have a much better chance of getting them all. Because anything else but the bile and blue cover of The Dunwich Horror would just be a load of tentacles.