Over at The Book Design Review, Joseph Sullivan’s always interesting blog, they’re starting to count down the year’s best. He’ll publish his own favorites soon. But for now, Mr. Sullivan has asked the staffs of three independent bookstores for their picks. Here are selections from WORD, a Brooklyn bookstore:
From The Book Design Review Selections from Book Design Review’s “Favorite Book Covers of 2009.” From left: “Wuthering Heights,” designed by Ruben Toledo; “The Book of Fathers,” designed by John Gall, collage by Nicole Natri; “The End of Food,” designed by Mark Robinson; and “The Most Beautiful Book in the World,” designed by Emanuele Ragnisco.
From Print magazine Selections from Vintage Book’s new series of Nabokov covers. From left, “Speak, Memory,” designed by Michael Bierut; “Despair,” designed by Jason Fulford and Tamara Shopsin; “King, Queen, Knave,” designed by Peter Mendelsund; and “The Enchanter,” designed by Megan Wilson and Duncan Hannah.
Gall gave the designers one stipulation: each cover would be a photograph of a specimen box, a nod to Nabokov’s passion for butterfly collecting. Within the framework of the box, and using layers of paper and insect pins, the designers were free to create more or less what they wished.The results are striking. One might say about these covers what Humbert Humbert said in “Lolita”: “It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight.”