Readerville

“Collections of Nothing” by William Davies King

Most Coveted Covers #181
By Karen Templer

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.

—Karen Templer is the founder and editor of Readerville. All she’s reading for the moment are programming tutorials.

[To view the Most Coveted Covers 2001-2007 click here.]

“The Melancholy of Anatomy” by Shelley Jackson

Most Coveted Covers #180
By D.G. Strong

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.

—D.G. Strong is a regular contributor to The Readerville Journal and Forum.

[To view the Most Coveted Covers 2001-2007 click here.]

“The Lemur” by Benjamin Black

Most Coveted Covers #179
By Karen Templer

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.

—Karen Templer is the founder and editor of Readerville.

[To view the Most Coveted Covers 2001-2007 click here.]

“The Murder” by John Steinbeck

Most Coveted Covers #178
By D.G. Strong

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.

—D.G. Strong is a regular contributor to The Readerville Journal and Forum.

[To view the Most Coveted Covers 2001-2007 click here.]

“The Proust Questionnaire”

Most Coveted Covers #177
By Karen Templer

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?

—Karen Templer is the founder and editor of Readerville. She’s now reading In Hovering Flight.

[To view the Most Coveted Covers 2001-2007 click here.]

“A Handful of Dust” by Evelyn Waugh and “The Day of the Locust” by Nathanael West

Most Coveted Covers #176
By D.G. Strong
[Part 3 of 3]

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 ...

—D.G. Strong is a regular contributor to The Readerville Journal and Forum.

[To view the Most Coveted Covers 2001-2007 click here.]

“The Pesthouse” by Jim Crace

Most Coveted Covers #175
By Karen Templer

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.

—Karen Templer is the founder and editor of Readerville. She’s savoring The French Lieutenant’s Woman.

[To view the Most Coveted Covers 2001-2007 click here.]

“Flowers of Evil” by Charles Baudelaire

Most Coveted Covers #174
By D.G. Strong
[Part 2 of 3]

Lucky you! This week you get another Alvin Lustig masterpiece. There are worse things to have to look at week after week, let me tell you. Like “Two and a Half Men,” for instance! But as the kids say ... anyway. Lustig’s 1951 cover for Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil is, as far as I’m concerned, one of his half-dozen best covers. But I admit it seems silly to try to rank them; they're all fantastic. Flowers of Evil is one of his more literal approaches — he usually abstracted (or ignored) the title almost to the point of absurdity, but he approaches this one pretty directly. The little blobs pretty much look like, well, evil flowers. You get the classic oddball Lustig color scheme that only a crazy person or a genius would think of ... the kind of colors that you're seeing all over the place these days in catalogs, only instead of orange and blue, they call them “tanned hide” and “sea glass.” One reason I like this so much is that it reminds me of other artists who preceded Lustig, as well as some who followed him. It could be a twittery Miro doodle or even a detail of the anxious lines of a Roz Chast cartoon. It's vintage and modern. Vintage-Modern! Someone should start that movement. Oh wait, nevermind. I forgot about Domino magazine. Wait, what was I talking about?

—D.G. Strong is a regular contributor to The Readerville Journal and Forum.

[To view the Most Coveted Covers 2001-2007 click here.]

“The End of the Jews” by Adam Mansbach

Most Coveted Covers #173
By Karen Templer

I don’t know what it is about books that use photos of some part of a book for their covers, but it bugs me. Routinely and reliably. And yet, I’m reasonably certain this is at least the second occasion I’ve had to lodge that complaint while Coveting a book that does that very thing. I guess it’s like Padma Lakshmi giving the Quickfire win to whoever it was that made a steak-and-eggs lover out of her: make me like a thing I’m already convinced I don’t, and I have to commend you doubly. In this case, it’s the cover for Adam Mansbach’s The End of the Jews, which I like better and better every time I see it. It’s credited to “Rodrigo Corral Design/Ben Wiseman,” which I take to mean Wiseman did it under Corral’s commission and direction. What they’ve done here is taken book cover imagery and mixed it all up, but in an amusing and (most important) understated way. The front is the spine (cracked apart at its center), and the flaps are the insides of the boards. But the kicker is the spine: the book’s title and the author’s name written out in magic marker on the fore edge of the pages. In truth it’s the spine I love best, or the little joke Wiseman and Corral seem to have struck on: Displayed face-out, what you see is still a spine, but shelved traditionally, the book’s actual spine holds more appeal than the average front cover.

—Karen Templer is the founder and editor of Readerville. Today is the day she'll be cracking open The French Lieutenant's Woman.

[To view the Most Coveted Covers 2001-2007 click here.]

"Siddhartha" by Hermann Hesse

Most Coveted Covers #172
By D.G. Strong
[Part 1 of 3]

Alvin Lustig, who has previously been Coveted for his A Streetcar Named Desire cover, was probably the greatest book jacket designer of the Modernist era. He had an innate sensibility that allowed him to boil down the essence of a book into a few very simple shapes, along with an uncanny sense of how to place type in a way that both conveys information and creates visual tension. It's the Holy Grail of design, this idea of not sacrificing a great layout in the service of having to actually, you know market. Take a look at his 1951 cover for Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha. The design is ludicrously abstract: it tells you nothing about the book, unless it's about an amorphously shaped eyeball, or a birds'-eye view of an island in a river. Either of which it might be — I've blocked out all the Hesse I ever had to read, or felt compelled to read in my clove-cigarette-and-beret phase. To paraphrase Laurie Anderson, "Hermann Hesse, you are not my favorite author ... by a long shot." But it's hard to not want this book in my collection, simply because it's almost impossibly beautiful. It's one of those covers, though, that wouldn't work if Lustig had had to blurb it up. He had one thing on his side: he was pre-blurb. "This book made me cry! And not in a good way!" — Michiko Kakutani. "The political, social and economic ramifications of this novel really make me want to vomit!" — Gore Vidal. You see? Where would he put those? The best thing about Lustig's covers is that New Directions let him do it his way, and they left him alone. They are little works of art, every one of them.

—D.G. Strong is a regular contributor to The Readerville Journal and Forum.

[To view the Most Coveted Covers 2001-2007 click here.]

"The Second Plane" by Martin Amis

Most Coveted Covers #171
By Karen Templer

You're standing at the new releases table, running your eyes across the rows of stacks, when your attention is halted by a petite volume in graphic glassy black and matte blue. For a split second you wonder if it's a bow tie but then you notice the little puff of cloud at the left edge and, instantly, you locate yourself at ground level between two very tall, very shiny buildings. As you look "up," you see not a plane but The Second Plane: September 11: Terror and Boredom by Martin Amis, floating there eerily and quietly in the sky. The book may be getting wildly mixed reviews, but the cover, credited to Peter Mendelsund and Chip Kidd, is magic.

—Karen Templer is the founder and editor of Readerville. Any day now, she'll be cracking open The French Lieutenant's Woman.

[To view the Most Coveted Covers 2001-2007 click here.]

"Panic" by Helen McCloy

Most Coveted Covers #170
By D.G. Strong

Look, I'll admit it: I don't know who Helen McCloy is. I've never read this book. But she has the type of name that makes me think of that particular kind of author who came to New York City and got wooed by a 1950s publishing house and then published a fabulously successful novel and upon seeing where she was on the bestseller list, went down to 21 to have a steak and a martini. Or ... she ended up a waitress at a midtown coffee shop where one might order a tuna melt and a chocolate malt. But whatever. She's also an author whose Panic is one of those great paperback covers that everyone cites as the sort of thing they love. But why is that? Let's look. You get that groovy hand-drawn title type, with the P casting a slight shadow on the following A. You get that giant hand shadow that seems to be menacing the tiny lady (wearing one of those I Love Lucy cocktail cloak/peg pants combos) in distress. And best of all, you get the phrase "A pretty girl faces unknown peril in stormy woods ..." That sure beats the current ubiquitous "a novel" as far as I'm concerned! So take that to heart, modern novelists. We know you write novels! What we really want to know is: how many of your characters are facing unknown peril in the woods? In peg pants?

—D.G. Strong is a regular contributor to The Readerville Journal and Forum.

[To view the Most Coveted Covers 2001-2007 click here.]

"Florence Broadhurst" by Helen O'Neill

Most Coveted Covers #169
By Karen Templer

It's not so much that I covet this book as that I have a minor (and growing) obsession with it. What is it? Helen O'Neill's Florence Broadhurst: Her Secret & Extraordinary Lives. Who designed it? I wish I knew. (I would ask the editor but she would definitely get the idea I'm breathing down her neck about the book.) I'd never heard of Florence Broadhurst before seeing this written up in some shelter mag a few months ago, and it was the gorgeous cover that caught my eye. I've not had as good a look at it as I'd like, but Broadhurst was a pattern designer famous for her wallpapers, and she was also mysteriously murdered. So the book is some sort of crazy cross between a wallpaper catalog and a murder mystery — and I'm quite certain I've never encountered a book that meets that description before. (Who knew that description could be so enticing?) Between the set-up and the captivating red-patterned cloth cover (with unapologetically disposable wrapround band), what's not to covet? Every day I have to live without it I want it even more.

—Karen Templer is the founder and editor of Readerville, who is still reading Richard Russo.

[To view the Most Coveted Covers 2001-2007 click here.]

Modern Library Pictorials

Most Coveted Covers #168
By D.G. Strong

If you've ever had the inclination to start collecting vintage Modern Library books — and face it, you know you have — that impulse was probably triggered by what are called Pictorials in Modern Library parlance. Usually two-color designs, most of them were created from 1932-1938 (though there are a few that predate that period) and almost all of them are witty, creative solutions within the confinements of a two-color job. Most of them follow the templates you see here, with the stripes at the top and bottom and the author's name in the same place on every one. Various illustrators were used, but the use of the strict template helps group them as a series and makes them instantly identifiable as part of the Modern Library. Some are evocative, minimal little masterpieces — look at The Charterhouse of Parma! — while others are a little fussy and more illustrative (Vanity Fair). There's a certain umbrella aesthetic at work that somehow keeps them all consistent, even though the illustrators are different. But they're almost all beautiful and every time I see one, I pick it up and wonder, "Do I have this one yet?" It's a slippery slope, trust me. But if any of you run across a stash of them ... well, bid low and send them all to me.

—D.G. Strong is a regular contributor to The Readerville Journal and Forum.

[To view the Most Coveted Covers 2001-2007 click here.]

"The Principles of Uncertainty" by Maira Kalman

Most Coveted Covers #167
By Karen Templer

I went to the bookstore, as I always do, looking to see what shiny new cover might catch my eye. It turns out the one book I couldn't manage to leave on its shelf was illustrator Maira Kalman's sketchbook-memoir, The Principles of Uncertainty. The only reason I've managed to not buy it before now is that I hadn't come face to face with it. I admit I rolled my eyes a little when I first heard of its existence. Then, last fall, I watched the video of her NYPL appearance and suspected I'd have to have it. Partly because I could tell, just seeing her with it, that it was somehow the perfect size and heft for a book to be. (Though the cover price kept me from seeking it out.) But as soon as I pulled it from the shelf and saw the bright green United Pickle ticket on the back cover, the "index" on the flaps, I was a goner. I think it's time for me to accept that any "mixed feelings" I have about her are actually just garden-variety jealousy. She got a lot of grief, early on, for riding her husband's coattails, but wouldn't you, given that chance? And it's not as if she's talentless. I don't know what it is exactly about her work but it's charming. It just is. I keep a short shelf of kids' books in my living room for small visitors and they're pretty much all Maira Kalman's. I always relish a chance to pull them out and read them to someone, and I'm not sure why I don't just keep them on the coffee table and flip through them whenever I want. That's certainly where you'll find this one if you ever drop by.

Talk about it: Judging a Book

—Karen Templer is the founder and editor of Readerville. Yes, she is still reading Richard Russo's Bridge of Sighs.

[To view the Most Coveted Covers 2001-2007 click here.]

"Alcoholism" by Neil Kessel and Henry Walton

Most Coveted Covers #166
By D.G. Strong

There are two things I am a stout defender of: Helvetica and negative space. Okay, maybe there are some others (pinot noir, Gena Rowlands, Topsy-Turvy), but as a designer, these are the two about which I am stalwart. Pelican, a Penguin imprint, utilized both to an almost otherworldly degree, especially in the 1960s and '70s. (Just LOOK!). Pelican's design influence reached its apotheosis in the '70s, and Alcoholism is the acme of that particular period. I am 99% sure this is a David Pelham cover (feel free to comment in the Letters to the Editor section if you know otherwise) and it's almost preposterously perfect. Let's think about it. What would make you pick up a cover about a disease? I love that the designer chose to balance the seriousness of the title with something we've all seen (or, because I know some of you are practically Amish, at least heard about): the pink elephant in the room. I love that you see the abrupt title — Alcoholism — and then you have a long visual pause (and mental one, actually) before the elephant makes any sense. I only wish that when I first saw the pink elephant (Freshman orientation party, PGA punch, Prince's Purple Rain) there had been a strong title in the upper left-hand corner of my vision, in Helvetica Bold, offering a little bit of guidance. It really would have helped. Regardless, I think it's a pretty ageless cover; if it showed up at my local Borders (faced out, of course!) I'd definitely notice it.

Talk about it: Judging a Book

—D.G. Strong is a regular contributor to The Readerville Journal and Forum. He has no idea why you are laughing that he selected this particular book title.

[To view the Most Coveted Covers 2001-2007 click here.]

"Never Drank the Kool-Aid" by Touré

Most Coveted Covers #165
By Karen Templer

Almost exactly a year ago, I sang the praises of Philip Earl Pascuzzo's graffiti-style photo-illustration for the paperback edition of The Messiah of Morris Avenue. While I like that cover quite a lot, it was remarkable mostly for not being the awful dustjacket design that preceded it. But now Pascuzzo has done himself one better, while mining the same territory. This time the book is Never Drank the Kool-Aid, a collection of essays by one-named journalist Touré that were originally published in Rolling Stone, The New Yorker and other publications. Never one to stop at a good stock photo and some tasteful type, Pascuzzo has in this case taken a David Stuart photo of a guy in a suit, hand over mouth (the author? who knows), and obscured most of his head with some gestural patches of paint, upon which he's then placed the typography and a few graphic doodads. The end result is a little bit street, as if the book itself has been tagged, and a little bit kooky. I'd like it better without the arrow under the hand-lettered name, but that much also appears on the Pascuzzo-designed cover of Soul City, Touré's novel, so maybe it's really his signature. As it turns out, the author has been quite lucky with covers and illustrators. His story collection, The Portable Promised Land, has a cover by one of the immensely talented Clayton brothers.

Talk about it: Judging a Book

—Karen Templer is the founder and editor of Readerville. Her current before-sleep read is Richard Russo's Bridge of Sighs.

[To view the Most Coveted Covers 2001-2007 click here.]

"Flair" edited by Fleur Cowles

Most Coveted Covers #164
By D.G. Strong

For one year — twelve glorious months, from February 1950 through January 1951 — there existed in the magazine world something so extraordinary and unlikely that it couldn't possibly have lasted one moment longer: editor Fleur Cowles' insanely influential arts, travel and culture magazine Flair. Each issue was focused (loosely) on a particular subject — Paris, Spring, Men, Spain etc. — and each one went back to the drawing board when it came time to design. Full of tip-ins and fold-outs and die cuts — some on contrasting, oniony paper stock — it's a near-miracle that copies have survived for almost sixty years. The contributing luminaries were cut from a wide swath of cloth: Tennessee Williams, Dawn Powell, Cecil Beaton, Lucien Freud, Gypsy Rose Lee, the Duchess of Windsor, Salvador Dali, Jean Cocteau, Margaret Mead, Talullah Bankhead. (I wish I could say "countless others," but with just the dozen issues, it's pretty easy to count them all.) One constant is that each cover featured a peek-a-boo cutout, revealing something on the page underneath. And each one was so expensive to produce that even at the cost of fifty 1950 cents, the financial future of the magazine was pretty clear early on. It's an amazing periodical to peruse; it's still fresh-off-the-press modern, every little gimmick thoughtful and innovative and somehow necessary. It's the Visionaire of its time. (And cheaper to collect!) There's a modern reprint of some of the highlights, The Best of Flair, but it's probably less expensive to just eBay all the original issues. That's what I did, anyway.

Talk about it: Judging a Book

—D.G. Strong is a regular contributor to The Readerville Journal and Forum. He is currently at the beach reading Joan Crawford: The Essential Biography. For some reason.

[To view the Most Coveted Covers 2001-2007 click here.]

"Dead Boys" by Richard Lange

Most Coveted Covers #163
By Karen Templer

I regret that the available scan of this isn't better because it's a lovely, detailed piece of work. It's Allison J. Warner's cover for Richard Lange's story collection Dead Boys. Warner has taken a pair of intriguing pen-and-ink drawings by Ali Campbell and layered them onto what appears to be the book jacket and a second wrapround, the latter all folded and tattered. There's a nice play between the crispness of the line drawings (and the type, for that matter) and the murkier backgrounds they're dropped onto. And the layering continues with the use of the inks, with the negative space of the window anchoring it all. The drawings — one the underside of a highway overpass and the other a window with a fire escape — quickly telegraph a gritty urbanness. But then what's with the palm tree growing out of the fire escape? It's the kind of cover that invites you to linger awhile before flipping it open.

Talk about it: Judging a Book

—Karen Templer is the founder and editor of Readerville. She's currently dipping into The New York Stories of Edith Wharton.

[To view the Most Coveted Covers 2001-2007 click here.]

"Invisible Man" by Ralph Ellison

Most Coveted Covers #162
By D.G. Strong

I recently attended an exhibit of paintings, sculpture and collage (and film and music and, oh, pretty much everything else) from the original Société Anonyme exhibit of 1920. It was a pretty overwhelming show, and it was interesting to see all these pieces together, as they were originally shown. I heard some people complain that it felt too intellectual or whatever but I thought it was a refreshing change from water lilies and sunflowers, frankly. One thing that really jumped out at me was how influential the Modernist movement has been on graphic design for decades, long after its influence on painting and sculpture seems to have waned. Working parallel to Duchamp, Arp, Man Ray et al. was designer Edward McKnight Kauffer, who's responsible for a whole raft of famous book jacket and poster designs. Just Google him and you'll see. A prime example of Kauffer at his best (and latest — he died two years later) is his original cover for Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, about which there is nothing to say beyond "sheer perfection." One thing I find telling about it is there have been how many editions of the book since this 1952 first edition? It 's still the best cover the book's ever had, and it was created thirty years after the Société Anonyme show. Kauffer had kept at it, refining the tenets of the movement down to a few strokes and lines. He was truly one of the great Modernists — in any medium.

Talk about it: Judging a Book

—D.G. Strong is a regular contributor to The Readerville Journal and Forum.

[To view the Most Coveted Covers 2001-2007 click here.]

"Men and Gods" by Rex Warner

Most Coveted Covers #161
By Karen Templer

Breezing past the poetry section of my tiny local indie, en route to the register, I was quite literally stopped in my tracks by this NYRB edition of Rex Warner's Men and Gods, with its cover and illustrations by Edward Gorey. Petite and hard-bound with illustrated boards in what I can only call 'Loeb green,' it begged to take up permanent residence in my bag. And so off it went with me to the register. I'd love to tell you a whole big story about how much personal resonance this one has for me — and given that my favorite childhood library book was an oversized, grey cloth-bound volume of Greek myths and that I have an ongoing obsession with Loeb Library editions, I could do it — but I won't. It's not clear to me whether this is a direct reprint of an older edition or whether it's an NYRB repackaging of the author's and illustrator's previous work. But I'm left wondering if that big book I checked out over and over wasn't Rex Warner's work, and whether it wasn't perhaps also illustrated by Gorey, who I can't say has ever had any special appeal for me. I do really like the notion that it could be a portable edition of my childhood favorite, but I've no doubt this book would have leapt off that shelf at me regardless. The big orange cats, the hand-lettering, that fantastic green — and you should see the snake on the back. It's a pretty irresistible little package. I'm having trouble refraining from looking up the two other Goreys on the NYRB list.

Talk about it: Judging a Book

—Karen Templer is the founder and editor of Readerville. She's currently reading The Master and Margarita. Honest.

[To view the Most Coveted Covers 2001-2007 click here.]

"For Freedom" by Arthur Huff Fauset

Most Coveted Covers #160
By D.G. Strong

First off, let me say that this is not really the cover that I Most Covet. I recently attended an exhibit of the work of Aaron Douglas and was sort of blown away by his graphic sensibility. I don't think he was a great painter, necessarily; there was a surface flatness to the actual la-ti-da paintings that didn't resonate with me, but there's no doubt in my mind that he had a fantastic eye for composition. Douglas was one of the leading lights of the Harlem Renaissance and in addition to canvasses and murals, he designed music programs and posters and — most successfully of all — book jackets. He did a few for Langston Hughes but the one I admired the most was for Wallace Thurman's The Blacker the Berry, which I cannot find online for the life of me. I apologize, and you all must come to Nashville to see it in person in the fancy vitrine at the museum. But this cover for Arthur Huff Fauset's For Freedom does hit a few of the same notes that the Thurman I admired does. Douglas practically invented this style of illustration, the ostensibly uneasy mix of silhouette-y Art Deco and Harlem chic, though now it's so common it's a cliché. But can you imagine seeing this on a bookstore shelf in the late 1920s? Look at the way the female figure on the right blends into the edge; it's almost an optical illusion: Is she there or not? Which is positive, which is negative? It's a visual question Douglas revisited again and again, and I'm glad he bothered to bring his inquiry to commercial design. People have been copying him for decades without even knowing it.

Talk about it: Judging a Book

—D.G. Strong is a regular contributor to The Readerville Journal and Forum.

[To view the Most Coveted Covers 2001-2007 click here.]

Evolution by Jean-Baptiste De Panafieu, Patrick Gries

Most Coveted Covers #159
By Douglas Cruickshank

For those of us who love bones and big beautiful books, the cover of Evolution is the doorway to heaven. Indeed, it wouldn't be a bad design for just such a portal. Most of the cover — nearly a foot square and tar black — is filled with a vivid photograph of a rattlesnake skeleton arranged in a spiral resembling the DNA helix. Stretched above the rattler, letter spaced, in type as slender and white as snake ribs, are the nine letters of the title. When has a single word and a bunch of bones said so much, with such visual forcefulness and social coding, and in such elegant fashion? It was the serpent, after all, that coaxed Adam and Eve to eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Trust me, you will not be able to resist the temptation to open this massive volume and slowly, pleasurably make your way through its hundreds of pages of extraordinary black and white photographs, by Patrick Gries, of the skeletons of mandrills, anteaters, horned lizards, swans, sea lions, aardvarks, Homo sapiens, red-necked wallabies, sloths and dozens and dozens more of this planet's creatures. The crisply written text, by Jean-Baptiste de Panafieu, moves from "Architecture," "The Birth of Species" and "Seduction and Selection" to "Evolutionary Tinkering," "The Power of the Environment" and, finally, "Evolution and Time." Darwin would have approved.

Talk about it: Judging a Book

—Douglas Cruickshank is the features editor of The Readerville Journal. Last night he started reading The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid.

[To view the Most Coveted Covers 2001-2007 click here.]

A Practical Guide to Racism by C.H. Dalton

Most Coveted Covers #158
By Karen Templer

I honestly don't know what the hell this is. It's a piece of satire so thoroughly disguised as a mid-century handbook that it's a little like Sacha Baron Cohen doing interviews in full Borat mode. And in fact, Borat's not a bad comparison, as far as I can tell. The book is A Practical Guide to Racism — "for both racists and non-racists alike" — by "C.H. Dalton." ("This book collects the 2005 Lothrop Stoddard lectures, delivered by C.H. Dalton near Harvard University.") It's not at all rare to see a new book designed to look like an old one. It is, however, rarely so well done. This one contains back-of-the-book ads for such books as "Hill on Pain" and "Gottheil on Syphilis," a list of other handbooks by the author, an extensive index, seven appendices — including a 64-page Glossary of Racial Epithets ("with suggestions for additional slurs") — and copious illustrations by named illustrators (Andy Friedman, Nicholas Gurewitch et al.) ... but no cover design credit. Whether they actually had the bookbinder set the type for the foil stamp — which would be a stroke of true genius — or whether the designer chose not to be named, I cannot know. But in case any of this has made you nervous, let me note that the book ends with this quote from Kurt Vonnegut: "There are plenty of good reasons for fighting, but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too."

Talk about it: Judging a Book

—Karen Templer is Readerville's founder and Editor in Chief. She is finally reading a long-time Forum favorite, The Book of Ebenezer Le Page

[To view the Most Coveted Covers 2001-2007 click here.]

Whistle Stop by Maritta M. Wolff

Most Coveted Covers #157
By D.G. Strong

As with most books from the 1940s, there's no illustrator credit on the flap of the original printing of Maritta M. Wolff's Whistle Stop. There's a signature I can't quite make out, and it's a damned shame. A perfect integration of illustration and type — this sort of perspective thing can frequently look contrived — it's Exhibit A in the upcoming Supreme Court case of Classic Mid-Century Jacket Design vs. What We Have Now. The novel is largely about stasis, about downtrodden people who never change and who never will, no matter what happens to or around them. The sound of a train whistling and moving through town is a recurring (if maybe obvious) motif, but the unnamed designer, like Wolff herself, knew a powerful symbol when he saw it, obvious or not. The execution is flawless, especially considering that all the title type was hand-drawn back in 1941. I've included the spine in the scan because I love the way the illustration wraps around it. And I'm a little bit amazed at how much is actually crammed onto that spine panel — the title, the author, the publication date, the Random House logo and a fully illustrated rail warning light. It's a lot! And it's perfectly done.

Talk about it: Judging a Book

—D.G. Strong is a regular contributor to Most Coveted Covers and to the Readerville Forum. He is currently working his way through the Maritta Wolff books — in handsome, dust-jacketed first editions only, of course.

[To view the Most Coveted Covers 2001-2007 click here.]