More Best Covers: The Book Design Review Poll Begins
We're not the only ones taking votes on the best covers of the year. As I mentioned before, Joseph Sullivan at the Book Design Review, venerable year-round commenter in this field (we're just amateurs sneaking in during the holidays), has done a poll of his favorite covers in each of the past few years, and this year he is opening the process to three booksellers as well. He posted the first list yesterday, a top 14 from the staff at WORD in Brooklyn that's heavy on the paperbacks, both new ones and classics reimagined. They agree on one of our nominees (Never Smile at a Monkey), and they chose one of the other Ruben Toledo Penguin Deluxe Classics (Wuthering Heights; we went with Pride and Prejudice). Here are a few of my other favorites on their list:
That's The Sickness Unto Death by Soren Kierkegaard, The Book of Fathers by Miklos Vamos, and The Children's Book by A.S. Byatt (which really does get better the more you look at it). Vote there, and don't forget to vote here too. --Tom
Brian - Kafkacotton on December 02, 2009 at 06:26 PM
Book covers are wonderful - thanks for highlighting these. It's a difficult task to evoke the text with a single image (something we're working on - with shirts - at Kafkacotton).
I love the story about how F. Scott Fitzgerald was so impressed with the Francis Cugat's cover for The Great Gatsby that he effectively wrote the floating, disembodied face into the book.