Peter Mendelsund

  • Notable Online: 2/7–2/13

    Notable Online: 2/7–2/13

    Literary events taking place virtually this week!

  • Notable NYC: 2/2–2/8

    Notable NYC: 2/2–2/8

    Saturday 2/2: Chia-Lun Chang and Lonely Christopher join the Segue Series. Zinc Bar, $4:30 p.m., $5. Monday 2/4: Shomari Wills presents Black Fortunes: The Story of the First Six African Americans Who Survived Slavery and Became Millionaires, and talks with Samuel…

  • Weimar’s Book Jacket Renaissance

    In a fascinating article for the Design Observer Group, Steven Heller shares some beautiful book jackets from the Weimar Republic: a veritable outpouring of artistry backed by young liberals pushing the boundaries of acceptability to look for art wholly original.…

  • Judging by the Cover

    Covers not only stage an interaction between word and image, printed matter and visual representation, they also broker various connections among reader, designer, editor, publisher, and bookseller. Using Peter Mendelsund’s amazing books Cover and What We See When We Read…

  • The Rumpus Interview with Peter Mendelsund

    The Rumpus Interview with Peter Mendelsund

    Writer, designer, and thinker Peter Mendelsund talks about book design, the tangled process of reading and perception, and his two new books, Cover and What We See When We Read.

  • Sometimes Judge A Book By Its Cover

    Cover designer Peter Mendelsund has released two new books about cover design. Cover collects many of the images Mendelsund has designed over his career and What We See When We Read explores the relationship between cover art and the books…

  • What Does Anna Karenina Look Like?

    The Paris Review has an excerpt from Peter Mendelsund’s book What We See When We Read that questions what we think we know about characters. Mendelsund points out that many of us feel like we know our favorite characters intimately, but when…

  • Seeing is Reading

    For those of us who haven’t glanced at e.e. cummings since high school, it’s easy to forget that literature is a visual medium. When we think about reading, our minds often go straight to content. But rockstar cover designer Peter…

  • 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…

  • Notable NYC: 8/2–8/8

    Saturday 8/2: Najee Omar, Joseph Riipi, Lauren Gordon, and more read at the Boog City Small, Small Press Fair. Unnameable Books (PDF), 11 a.m. to 6:30 p.m., $5 suggested. Sunday 8/3: Elizabeth Little reads Dear Daughter, a novel about a…