Well this is certainly a tale of two book covers, isn’t it? I came this close to Officially Coveting the hardcover edition of Aoibheann Sweeney’s Among Other Things, I’ve Taken Up Smoking when it first came out, but other covers jumped ahead of it in the queue. But I still love it, and I regret not singling it out at the time because jeeeeezus, look what they’ve done to the poor thing for the paperback edition! It went from mysterious and clever and elegant to just plain terrible. The novel is set in Maine and New York City and is about the gulf between them, all of which gets expertly handled by the hardcover designer. The paperback designer seems to think it’s a book about, well, taking up smoking. It’s such a tired approach it almost makes me mad. Or sad. Or something. Either way, I need a cigarette myself.

Not only is this the third Coveted in a row from yours truly, but here I go again with my signature rant: pretty stock photo + white letterspaced all-caps title + scrolly stuff and/or label borders = genre formula, literary fiction division. I really am profoundly eager for us to evolve away from this, so why am I writing about Tethered for Most Coveted Covers? Look at that photo! When was the last time you saw an image so alarmingly beautiful and deliciously creepy at the same time? It’s obviously reminiscent of Eva Moves the Furniture but this is the opposite side of that coin, in several ways. Shot from below, that incredible light, the question of whether this woman is breathing, that disturbing murk in the pool. (I mean, what has gone on in that pool?) I started to say I only wish designer Whitney Cookman had done something more original with the type and ornament, but in fact I can’t imagine a more perfect complement to the image. So it’s official: Whitney Cookman wins the category. Time for everyone else to try something new.

I do like a good words-only cover, whether that means a thing like this or like this. And so I’m naturally taken with British designer-artist Daniel Eatock’s cover for his own new monograph, appropriately titled Imprint. Inspired by a fellow student’s work from his art school days — a response to an assignment to do a typographic self-portrait — he’s taken the requisite “statement of purpose” and organized it into a thumbprint, scaled to fit the front of the oversized book. It’s a smart solution, as presence of hand is a big part of the book’s concept, packaging and promotion: bound randomly into each volume is a sheet of paper on which Eatock has hand-drawn a circle (he’s on a quest to create the perfect hand-drawn circle), and he also stood in the warehouse with an ink pad and made a thumbprint on each and every spine. Get it? Every one is unique.

Is it all a bit much? Yes. In fact, there’s a lot more I won’t go into. But I admire his wish for every reader to get a book on which he’s made a mark, given his way of being in and responding to the world, and I admire how distilled the finished cover is.

When this cover popped up in our Judging a Book discussion last week, I’m pretty sure I let out a little gasp. Without a clue what it was about, I was immediately seduced by the orderly rows of patterned scrap, arranged on a piece of notebook paper and accented with a little bird. So pretty. As it turns out, I’m coveting it for more reasons than just Jill Shimabukuro’s lovely design. “I am a collector, something a lot of people can understand. My being a collector of nothing will require explanation,” writes William Davies King in the opening passage of Collections of Nothing. What he collects is more everything than nothing, but the sorts of things many people would think of as nothing (or certainly nothing collectible). The book is described as “part memoir, part reflection on the mania of acquisition” on the publisher’s website, where you’ll also find an excerpt and an essay by the author. If the book is half as good as it promises — or half as good as its cover — I’ll be thrilled.

John Gall’s cover for Shelley Jackson’s The Melancholy of Anatomy presses a lot of my personal design buttons: medical illustration, images turned sideways, type on a label, and a combination of a sans-serif typeface and a serif one. What I like best about it is that there’s a whole lot of possible creepy going on (the disembodied eyeballs on the spine would probably be a dealbreaker for a lot of people) but Gall somehow reins it all in so that it looks more like a museum display than a horror show. I think it’s the label that does it, and the slightly modern sans-serif typeface used for Stories and the author’s name. I would have been tempted to slide that author name over to line up with the right end of Stories, but Gall keeps it modern and throws off your expectation by aligning those two elements differently, centering Jackson’s name beneath the label. It’s an unusual, subtle choice, and it pays off. The whole package is a winner.

I believe the name Keith Hayes is new to Most Coveted Covers, but he joins the list with bravado. I speak, of course, of his cover for The Lemur, by Benjamin Black (aka John Banville). Yes it is another example of great use of a stock photo. And yes it does remind me, in a way, of Never Drank the Kool-Aid. But this is so beautifully bold and simple: just a square-jawed man in a white shirt against a black ground; a pure white puff of smoke; a little bit of light on his black hair. Hayes had the good sense to drop those exquisite black letterforms onto the smoke, and some white type lower down. So the only color is the man’s lips and skin. It’s sort of smelly and scintillating at the same time, isn’t it? It also benefits from being a slender paperback with deckled edges and French flaps. The spine is white with black pinstripes, the back is black with white type, and the insides of the cover (where endpapers would be were it hardcover) is also flooded black, with the PicadorCrime logo dropped out of it. If they treat all their books this way, I may have to start paying closer attention. Because I’m not generally a crime fan, but I’m taking this gent to bed with me tonight.

I have a minor obsession with the boxed set of Penguin 70s available in the UK. Released in 2005 to celebrate Penguin’s 70th anniversary, each little paperback volume contains an obscure short piece by an esteemed author. Some are contemporary (Foer, Hornby, Dunmore); some are not (Flaubert, Nabokov, Fitzgerald). Each one has a cover designed specifically for the series. Of the few I’ve seen so far, my favorite is the cover designed by Jon Gray for John Steinbeck’s The Murder. I love the simplicity of it (I always love a silhouette!) and the juxtaposition of two completely different things: a gun target and a rocking chair. How do they connect? It’s very mysterious. It’s also unusual for a Steinbeck title; it has none of the visual tropes usually associated with his work. If you ever get to England, feel free to pick up the whole set and ship it right to me. I won’t complain.

You’ve heard of the Proust Questionnaire: “Since July 1993, the back page of Vanity Fair has been devoted to the Proust Questionnaire, in which a noteworthy person answers a series of personal questions. The questionnaire has its origins in a parlor game popularized (though not devised) by Marcel Proust (1871–1922), the French essayist and novelist, who believed that, in answering these questions, an individual reveals his or her true nature.” But had you heard about the book? I somehow had not. Assouline, maker of high-end coffee table books, has packaged the archives up in a slender folio: a mere 96 pages, but oversized and wrapped in gold foil-stamped bookcloth. No designer is credited. It’s the sort of totally frivolous book I nevertheless have a hard time resisting when it’s so beautifully produced. But were I to buy it, how would I choose between the blue, the orange, the hot pink and the red?

Anyone who has ever taken even the most basic design class has probably heard the following criticism: don’t be so literal. Meaning that if a book is called The History of Cats, you don’t necessarily have to put a cat on it. It’s a philosophy I generally agree with; a little mystery in design is almost always a good thing. But! Sometimes the literal way to go is the only way, as evidenced by these two covers for New Directions by Alvin Lustig. The 1945 edition of A Handful of Dust and the 1950 edition of The Day of the Locust are almost laughably obvious — seriously, if you had told me that anyone could illustrate the cover of A Handful of Dust with, well, a handful of dust, I would have laughed in your face. Ask anyone who’s read it what The Day of the Locust is about and the first thing they say is “Hollywood.” So Lustig thought for what, five seconds? before glitzing up a few simple building shapes and then putting a swarm of locusts up there behind the light-bulb letters. It’s a sneaky decision on Lustig’s part because they’re borderline deceptive. Someone might pick up this edition of Locust and think, “oh, this should be glitzy and fun!” and then of course the opposite ends up being the case — it’s pretty much a stomach-punch of a book. 

I think it takes a lot of confidence to design this way, so openly and illustratively. It’s almost the way a child would interpret the actual titles, only with an added veneer of sophistication. Like almost every project Alvin Lustig touched, the result seems almost inarguable — as tends to be the case with perfection.

Note: If you’re interested in seeing a wide range of Lustig’s work, this archive is essential. And will probably end up being the guidebook for the collection you’re no doubt about to start ...

I know, I know. If I’m not chastising people for the pretty-stock-photo-and-letterspaced-white-type approach, I’m praising them for it. What do you want from me? The fact is, it’s become a cliché because when it’s good, it’s really good. That doesn’t make it any less of a cliché! Anyway, The Pesthouse. The hardcover didn’t do much for me. It was literary, sure — it was also rather inscrutable. And though it tried not to be, it was a little pretty. All in all, a bit of a snore. The paperback, designed by Helen Yentus, may not be the most dynamic cover we’ve seen lately, but it gets the book exactly right. Where the other one was a tiny bit pretty, this one’s a tiny bit spooky. There’s no bird scene in the book, that I recall, but you can’t look at this and not wonder if something’s gone wrong, and if so what. Which is pretty much the book in a nutshell. The type is tasteful and confident; the embossed title is crisp in that way that requires you to run your fingers across it. I’m not sure it will find the book a flood of new readers, but a girl can hope.