Out Front

From: The Museum of Bad Covers

Book cover design causes much heated debate. We all know what works and what doesn't but getting the desired result is something of an inexact science. […]

     One thing's for sure, bad design is something that's as obvious as the proverbial donkey's dangly bits. And in this day and age of indie and self-publishing just because you can create your own, doesn't mean you should.

PUSHER: We all know a good cover when we see one, and a bad one, before we talk about what makes a good one - what makes a bad one for you?

JIM DIVINE [veteran book-cover designer]: A bad cover to me is something that simply does not do the material inside justice. if it's a bad book then in my opinion, it deserves a bad cover. Generally bad covers are produced because the designers producing them either don't get what the book's about or don't care."
— Tony Black's Pulp Pusher
Read more…

Find out more about Bron Fane, author of Rodent Mutation, here...

Transformed

Here's what one of Dmitriy Yoav Reinshtein's photographs looks like on a hypothetical book cover for The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka. This majestic, hyper-real close-up of an insect needs no embellishment, and the book itself could do without a cover at this point in its career.
     Do book covers tamper with the text? That's a discussion for another day...
     Anyway, the intriguing revelation in this and some of D.Y. Reishtein's other photos is the transformation of water. The droplets are turned into dense, liquid jewels of a texture and heft that seems alien to us — alien to me, at leasts.

You can see more photos by Dmitriy Yoav Reinshtein here…

And here's the original cover from 1916 (left) and a English translation below it.

From: Wikimedia Commons

From: Big Fake Books and Records

You can buy all of Kafka's books here...

Imprinted

From: Book of Joe

Some iconic titles are associated, in my mind at least, with certain colours. Apart from The Little Red Book ("The Quotations of Chaiman Mao") by Mao Zedong, the next book that comes to mind is the plain, dark red cover of the ubiquitous Signet paperback edition of J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye; followed by the blue of Joseph Heller's Catch 22 cover. My favorite red cover is the hardcover edition of The Stories of John Cheever.
     I remember picking a copy of Alvin Toffler's Future Shock from a display case of the paperback edition; it was available in four or five background colours. (Back in the Seventies all sorts of bestsellers were coming out with this option.) I picked the white one — I'm sure of that because it's still on my bookshelf.
     More recent titles seem to be lost in a swirling, blendered dazzle of the entire spectrum—print technology has turned the discipline of the fifties and sixties (design choices that maximized impact and minimized production costs) on its ear... or eye. And with the advent of e-books and digital publishing in general, the notion that the contents can forever be associated with the colour of the package, for books at least, will become a thing of the past.
— Michael Hale