book covers
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Great Book, Amateur Cover
Some of the best self-published books end up with amateur covers. While professional publishers consider every detail of book’s cover, like whether a font should be sans-serif or not base on genre, independent authors lack the experience to do the same. The…
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Seeing Literature
In the New Yorker, Peter Mendelsund talks about designing book covers for iconic works of literature. The thing that surprised me was how dogmatic people were. They felt that when they read a book they loved, they saw every aspect…
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Never Judge a Book by Its Blurb
Book blurbs are the new books covers. And at the Guardian, Nathan Filer says you shouldn’t judge a book by either: Cover blurbs aren’t reviews. They’re advertisements. No space for balanced, nuanced positivity. Nothing can be interesting; it must be…
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Cover Paintings
Artist Mike Stilkey has abandoned the canvas and is painting on old book covers instead. Mashable has a selection of his work, which was recently on display at The Frostig Collection in Santa Monica.
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The Cover Design Exams
A heart, the source of empathy, or at least what we use as a visual for love, was an initial starting point. As a nod to the medical part of the essay, a graphic illustration of a heart is used.…
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Books by Their Covers
London-based artist Jamie Kennan has designed covers for books by Franz Kafka, T.S. Eliot, and Vladimir Nabokov. In an interview with It’s Nice That, Kennan talks about why he loves designing book covers: Designing a book cover is great because…
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American Book Cover in Paris (and Lots of Other Foreign Places)
SF Gate has a neato slideshow comparing American book covers to their foreign editions. Sometimes they change barely at all (Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones), while sometimes they’re unrecognizable—Maggie Shipstead’s Seating Arrangements gets not only a visual redesign but a whole new…
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Coverflip: If Books By Men Were By Women
As Elissa Bassist’s recent Funny Women column “The Next Great American Woman’s Novel” reminded us, books by women tend to get treated a little…differently from books by men. What would it look like if male authors’ novels were treated like Bassist’s…
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The Rumpus Books Sunday Supplement
It’s Sunday, which means it’s Rumpus Books supplement time. Below the fold, an interview, lots of excellent reviews and more.
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Morning Coffee
Propeller Mag has been collecting the various terrible covers for Karel Capek‘s super great War With the Newts. An affront to human decency: proper nouns to be allowed in Scrabble. Fascinating lost turn of the century female sex study. Behold…
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Book Cover Missed Connections
“Such encounters are becoming increasingly difficult. With a growing number of people turning to Kindles and other electronic readers, and with the Apple iPad arriving on Saturday, it is not always possible to see what others are reading or to…
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Milton Glaser Remembers Nabokov
Shortly after I posted a story about an author’s experience of book design, I accidentally opened my copy of McSweeney’s 4, which consisted of a box of pamphlets, and I found that one pamphlet comprised an essay by Paul Maliszewski,…