If you like the idea of super compact books that will fit into your pocket but aren’t keen on reading books on a small digital device such as an iPhone, there is still hope! U.K. company TankBooks has come up with a very clever and visually appealing way of packaging miniature books—inside specially designed boxes that look like flip-top cigarette packs.

The company currently offers six titles, all classics, by Joseph Conrad, Ernest Hemingway, Franz Kafka, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Leo Tolstoy. The books can be purchased individually or as a set (the set comes in a nice tin), and yes, they will ship to the United States. And while the cigarette box-packaged books may be addictive, they won’t be harmful to your health. Seems like a win-win!

Do you attend bookstore readings? I am fortunate to live in Portland, Oregon, home to many bookstores, including the venerable Powell’s Books. I could probably go to a bookstore reading on a daily basis, and I often read through the listings in the local paper with great interest. The truth, though, is that I rarely go to bookstore readings. I never gave it much thought other than to attribute it to laziness, but then I saw this article, “The Dreaded Question: What is a ‘Reading’?” in the Huffington Post. The piece is by bookstore owner Alex Green, who talks about how the label “reading” is not quite accurate. He writes that “many of us are reluctant to attend a reading because we don’t know what one is, and we become afraid that something egregiously uncomfortable, or boring, is going to happen.” Green then goes on to explain that readings, at least at his bookstore, are engaging and lively discussions.

Green’s article made me question why I don’t attend more bookstore readings, and I think he is right—I think they are going to be kind of boring. I fully expect the author to read a chapter or two from a book, and thanks, but I can do that on my own at home. I would rather know about the author’s writing process or reasons for writing a particular book, or maybe I want to know the author’s favorite flavor of ice cream. If Green is correct that “readings” are actually conversations between authors and readers, then I could get on board, but really, it’s hard to know what to really expect. So, what do you think of bookstore readings? Do you attend? Look forward to them? What do you like about readings?

*The photo is from the last “reading” I attended. It was at Powell’s Books for my friend Amy Karol, author of Bend the Rules Sewing and Bend the Rules with Fabric. At the “reading” she displayed and discussed some of projects in the book, took questions, signed books, and hosted a cakewalk, so no, it wasn’t a typical reading.

Come on, poetry books! Don’t be so modest. You’re too beautiful to sit around in that frumpy old bathrobe. Here are a few looks you could try on!

Christine Hume, Shot; Counterpath Press, 2009

Susan Briscoe, The Crow’s Vow; Signal, 2010

Alex Lemon, Fancy Beasts; Milkweed Editions, 2010; Cover and interior design by Christian Fuenfhausen

C.K. Williams, Wait; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010

Gillian Conoley, The Plot Genie; Omnidawn Publishing, 2009

Kim Addonizio, Lucifer at the Starlite; W.W. Norton & Company, 2009

First there was the Oscar Meyer Weinermobile and then the Peeps Fun Bus, and now there’s the Penguin Anniversary-mobile. The automobile, which commemorates the 75th anniversary of Penguin Books, will be touring the United States and making stops for anniversary parties at bookstores. The Penguin Car, a flaming orange Mini Cooper emblazoned with the Penguin logo, will also be transporting authors to book signings and celebrations.

Penguin will donate a set of 75 of its most prominent titles to a library or literacy organization in each scheduled stop along the anniversary tour. In June the Penguin Car will visit Minnesota, New York, South Carolina, Kentucky, and California. Though Penguin’s official anniversary date is July 30, the anniversary tour will continue through the summer. At the end of the anniversary celebration, the Penguin Car will be auctioned off, and proceeds will be donated to a literacy group.

Another fun part of Penguin’s celebration is Penguin Ink, which pairs six tattoo artists with six Penguin titles. The tattoo artists designed new covers for the titles, which include Waiting for the Barbarians by J. M. Coetzee, From Russia with Love (yes, it’s a James Bond title) by Ian Fleming, and The Broom of the System by David Foster Wallace.

Visit Penguin’s special anniversary website here to follow the Penguin Car and read about the history of Penguin Books.

Mendelsund’s not alone. Last year Einarsson showed a set of similar paintings that appropriate Camus book covers designed by Helen Yentus: 

Einarsson isn’t trying to keep the appropriations a secret—he names the paintings with the book title. I think Mendelsund and Yentus should have a discussion about this and then post the transcript!

In other book-scandal news, have you heard about how Penguin Australia published a cookbook with a racist typo? They’re blaming it on a spell-checking program.  That’s a $20,000 mistake. I wonder how many trees it wasted?

Current shirt selections include George Orwell’s 1984, John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye (I think that was the cover of the edition I read!), Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, and plenty more. Shirts come in both men’s and women’s styles, and hey, wouldn’t these make great gifts?

The U.K. paperback that comes out later this year is also striking. It’s one of a series of Atwood cover designs by Nathan Burton (the Caustic Cover Critic has a post about the designs on his blog).

Here’s a detail shot of the Oryx and Crake cover: 

I stumbled upon a great blog called Curious Pages that features interesting children’s picture books. The subtitle for the site is “recommended inappropriate books for kids,” which should give you an idea of the types of books highlighted. The images of and from the featured books are entertaining enough, but what makes the blog posts even more engaging is the commentary—funny and somewhat irreverent.

If you are a fan of illustrated books and dry wit, check out Curious Pages.

In 2006 Panama began publishing French translations of “The Library of Babel,” a 30-volume series of fantastic stories by well-known authors selected and introduced by Jorge Luis Borges. The series is named after his story of the same name in which the universe is an unknowably vast library. The project was originally proposed to Borges in the 1970s by the Italian publisher Franco Maria Ricci and published in Italian as “La Biblioteca di Babele.” The books look beautiful and strange, like they came from an alternate universe—just like they’re from a Borges story.

Panama put out eight volumes, keeping the original cover designs.  Here they are:

In the ’80s the Spanish publisher Ediciones Siruela reissued the series in Spanish (as “La Biblioteca de Babel”), also retaining the same design.

So let’s conduct a little experiment here. Following are four covers for the same book, Chinua Achebe’s seminal Things Fall Apart.

Pretty different, aren’t they? Now let’s assume you had never heard of this book. If you saw these lined up on a shelf, would you stop to investigate any of them? Personally I am attracted to the anniversary edition cover. I would buy that book for the cover! The red and orange one? Not so much, but then, that is the cover sported by the school-copy edition I read.

A captivating cover leads me to anticipate what kind of magic is on the pages within and inspires me to take a chance on that book. Call it superficial if you want, but if you’re the publisher who produced that book, you win.

Publication Studio Makes A Book from Mike Merrill on Vimeo.

I was reading the local newspaper this morning and came across an interesting article about a print-on-demand publisher called Publication Studio. Their publishing model is unique in that Publication Studio aims not just to print and bind books but to create a community interested in the books. The publisher thus sponsors get-togethers to discuss publishing trends, books, what have you.

The publishing “laboratory” has its offices in the Ace Hotel in downtown Portland, Oregon. Cofounded by Matthew Stadler and Patricia No, Publication Studio creates jank editions, which are basic photocopies bound in manila file folders, using an Instabook III machine. Profits are divided evenly with the author. Anyone can publish a book with Publication Studio for a fee. The studio also publishes bootlegs for authors whose work is temporarily unavailable, usually when the author’s original publisher has fulfillment issues.

Some of the works published by Publication Studio are available for sale on the studio’s web site.

Here’s an interior illustration: 

Carlin’s work reminds me of Ludwig Bemelmans’s slanting, loose, and moody Madeline illustrations.

. . . And I mean that in the best possible way. Everyone has influences; after all, Bemelmans was (apparently) influenced by Raoul Dufy, who was (definitely) influenced by Matisse:

Raoul Dufy, Open Window, Nice, 1925—Art Institute of Chicago

Henri Matisse, Small Blue Room

I discovered recently, however, that Feedbooks (one of the 13 collections offered on Stanza) generally chooses more attractive covers for their public-domain books. Below on the right is the cover that Feedbooks uses for the same work. Much easier on the eyes, in my opinion. I think it’s the cover for the first American edition, but I’m not positive.

A little more browsing and comparing confirmed my suspicion: someone there is paying attention! Here are a few typical book covers that other ebook publishers use for public-domain works:

You’ve got your generic templates, random stock photography, and the cover to any old edition that’s available. It gets the job done. 

But Feedbooks is clearly having more FUN picking the covers, and as a reader who’s eager to use this technology, I appreciate that. The authors may be dead, but that doesn’t mean their books have to look dead! Check out some examples:

And notice, too, how the Feedbooks versions all provide publication years and summaries, which is really useful when you’re browsing for something to download.

The assignment was: “Use typography to create a series cover design for Faber Film’s range of books that reflects Faber and Faber’s long history of typographic excellence.”  They also wanted entrants to design specifically for POD (print on demand) by creating a single template that could be used to generate an infinite number of cover designs.  This is a clever solution to that problem!  Plus: pretty!

Michael’s design wasn’t chosen (here are the winners)—it was probably deemed too conceptual for the assignment.

If you’re intrigued by these images, you might be interested in this new book that’s all about art made from glitches (like the image below): Glitch: Designing Imperfection.

I love these Faber and Faber Poetry books, designed by Justus Oehler of Pentagram. This series uses color so beautifully, setting up the rule of three colors (one for the background, one for the title, and one for the author) and then playing with the way the colors complement or contrast with each other. The color combinations vary from vibrant contrasts—like lavender and yellow on greenish blue—to three shades of purple. The size of the text depends on what fits on the page. So Lachlan Mackinnon is never going to have big text, but Alice Oswald can. They also have a tactile feel, being printed on textured, uncoated paper.

And then they break the rule slightly for this one, befitting the wonderfully weird title:

I was collecting some images of these myself and admiring the way they look next to each other, and then I discovered that Faber Books has put together a Flickr set of them! Check it out.

This is also a clever tie-in: get a Faber Poetry poem-a-week widget for your blog or Facebook profile here: http://www.52poems.co.uk/. I just added it to my Facebook profile.

And there’s yet another tie-in: mugs and playing cards. For when you need to buy a gift for the poetry reader in your life, I guess. You could buy them an actual book, but who knows what they already own, right? Or perhaps you’re looking for a present for someone who is generally literary but might be bummed out if you just gave them a book. It’s too bad they had to pick the three most recognizable names (Eliot, Plath, Heaney—the fourth was clearly chosen because it mentions cocoa). I might have actually bought a mug that said “Ooga-Booga” or “Hare Soup.” I would definitely wear a T-shirt bearing the title “Tyrannosaurus Rex Versus the Corduroy Kid.”

• Fiona Tinwei Lam, Enter the Chrysanthemum. Designer: David Drummond.
• Naomi Guttman, Wet Apples, White Blood. Another one by David Drummond! Check out FaceOut Books for bigger, better pictures and some insight from the designer.
• Cate Marvin, Fragment of the Head of a Queen.  I don’t know who designed the book, but I do know that the cover art is by Arturo Herrera.
• Mary Ruefle, The Most of It
• Richard Meier, Shelley Gave Jane a Guitar
• Rebecca Wolff, The King

(Andrew Hood, Pardon Our Monsters; Harry Thurston, Animals of My Own Kind; Christopher Willard, Garbage Head)

On his blog he often lets readers in on his creative process by posting designs in progress. In this post he explains how he created the cover image for Don LePan’s forthcoming novel Animals, for which he appears to have smashed some Delft china—but it’s in fact some cheap plates and a little Photoshop magic.

Drummond discusses the evolution of the cover for Pure Product by Jason Guriel here.

And Ukula magazine has this interesting article on the creation of a Véhicule cover (Postscript by Geoffrey Cook), talking to Drummond, the publisher, and the poet.

And while you’re there, I urge you to check out his post on Penguin’s Great Ideas series, with glorious hi-res images, which I am most appreciative of, seeing as these are not destined for U.S. bookstore shelves. This here’s my favorite one.

That reminds me, an older copy of De Quincey’s book is featured in the display “The Horrors of Opium Consumption,” at the excellent blog of The National Museum of Hospital and Pharmaceutical History: http://hospitalmuseum.blogspot.com/2009/02/on-subject-of-opium.html:

Vintage Swedish book covers at A Journey Round My Skull:

And Book Covers Anonymous on Penguin’s “Couture Classics” deluxe editions. Yeah, it’s not going to appeal to everyone! But I have to say, I DO think this is a good idea in terms of getting teenage girls interested in the books. Is that cynical of me? As a former teenage girl, I don’t think so!

The series was launched in 2006, and these six books are a representative selection.

George Restrepo is the art director of The Improper Bostonian, and Alex Camin is the creative director at Da Capo Press/Perseus Books Group. Here’s another of Camin’s cover designs: 

I really like another MIT Press book that also won a BoNe Award: Camps: A Guide to 21st-Century Space, by Charlie Hailey. According to the press’s website, Hailey examines “how camp spaces are informed by politics and transform the ways we think about and make built environments.” Leaving the bookboard and stitches exposed was a great idea!

Sandra says she has been worried about the supposed trendiness of the “cut paper aesthetic.” That that didn’t even occur to me—they’re well executed and don’t rely on the cut/folded paper as a gimmick. And the stark black-and-white palette, high contrast, and bold font help counteract any preciousness associated with origami.

Kudos to Orion Books for not diluting Sandra’s work in the name of “marketability.” Other publishers (U.S. ones especially! It’s so disappointing when the U.K. versions of books look so much cooler than ours) ought to take note—see how you can get good publicity by giving designers creative freedom?

You can see more pictures of the books at The Book Cover Archive.