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

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

The Nightingales of Troy (paperback) by Alice Fulton (W.W. Norton, 2009) — Designed by Kelly Blair

To See Every Bird on Earth: A Father, a Son, and a Lifelong Obsession (paperback) by Dan Koeppel (Plume, 2006).  According to the Book Cover Archive, the designer is Mike Langman, but I don’t see anything like it on his website, so I think that perhaps someone else designed the book using his wonderful paintings. I could be wrong!

My Side of the Matter by Truman Capote (Penguin Pocket 70s, 2005). This is my favorite of the bunch. I like the dimness of the photo contrasted with the pink lettering. Also, the composition really works — it’s held together with diagonals as opposed to a grid.

Accidental Species by Kass Fleisher (Chax Press, 2005). I wish I could find a larger picture of this. Is the image a photo of a three-dimensional assemblage?

Dear Dearly Departed by Harold Abramowitz (Palm Press, 2008). I don’t have any information on the illustrator or designer.

The Kiss by Anton Chekhov (Penguin Pocket 70s, 2005)

• Sonya Hartnett, The Silver Donkey (UK hardcover — Walker Books, 2006)
• Steven Pinker, Hotheads (Penguin, 2005)  [Designed by Smith & Gilmour; part of the gorgeous Pocket Penguin 70s series]
• Sherman Alexie, Face (Hanging Loose Press, 2009)
• Jonathan Messinger, Hiding Out (Featherproof Books, 2007)  [Cover photo by Nathan Keay (www.nathankeay.com)]
• James Tate, Dreams of a Robot Dancing Bee (Wave Books, 2008) [Design by Quemadura]
• David Barringer, We Were Ugly So We Made Beautiful Things (Word Riot Press, 2003)  [Cover art, illustrations, and typefaces by Eduardo Recife (www.misprintedtype.com)]

I was used to seeing the U.S. version (published by Europa), so the more staid U.K. cover (published by Gallic Books) surprised me. I like it — it’s fitting that the wrought-iron design evokes the lobby of an older, upscale building, because the book’s about a girl’s friendship with a concierge. But it’s not super-obvious at first — it could just seem like an abstract design. And the French cover couldn’t get any more French than this. (Full disclosure: I’ve been blogging about French things, and I’m a bit of a francophile, but I don’t speak French!) It’s the classic off-white cover that in France signifies Literature With A Capital “L.” Indeed, it’s part of Gallimard’s venerable Collection Blanche, founded 98 years ago. Francois Luong gave an insightful analysis of the French book aesthetic on his blog last year–check it out. Merci, Francois! 

While I’m at it, here are the Spanish and Japanese editions. Amazon.com thinks that the Spanish translates to English as “The Elegance of the Sprocket Wheel.”

I’m sure it’s a coincidence, but the last one is uncannily similar to the cover of Gale’s Contemporary Theatre, Film & Television, which we work on as book developers. I’m guessing they both reference the same kind of mid-century design, but I don’t have much knowledge of design history. Any theories?

• Chuck Stebelton, Circulation Flowers (Tougher Disguises, 2005), designed by James Meetze, the founder of Tougher Disguises. See this interview with the poet at Kicking Wind, which touches upon the book design.

• Matthew Rohrer, A Green Light (Wave Books, 2004), designed by Jeff Clark, a.k.a. Quemadura

• Chelsey Minnis, Poemland (Wave Books, 2009). Pink fur! I don’t know who designed this — if you do, please comment! [Update: another one by Quemadura, according to commenter Narnia Hamilton!] It’s too small to see in this photo, but if you click here you can see that the book title is in the bar code label.

• Janet Holmes, F2F (University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), designed by Jeff Clark

• Alex Lemon, Hallelujah Blackout (Milkweed Editions, 2008), designed by Brad Norr; art by Natalie Salminen Rude

• Christian Peet, The Nines (Palm Press, 2006), designed by Derek White. White demonstrates the evolution of the cover here.

I love everything about these bold and stripped-down designs, which are by the Montreal firm Paprika—but especially the colors. One thing that makes this series work so well is that the design is very consistent, but each cover is also unique, which keeps things interesting. The Dada-esque illustrations are by Alain Pilon.

They look really good all together in a pile:

Image from AIGA Design Archives

Paprika won a lot of recognition for these designs, and you can read some comments on the work here:

• STEP Design 100 Judge’s Selection
• Graphex 2008 Judge’s Choice
• AIGA 50 Books/50 Covers of 2007 competition

Maybe it’s true that you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover—but if you want to judge a book’s cover, you’re in good company! There are a number of blogs dedicated to discussing book cover design. One with a lot of fans is Joseph Sullivan’s The Book Design Review, which he’s been publishing since 2005. Sullivan updates frequently, writing brief, entertaining posts about the latest noteworthy book covers. He tries to track down the name of the designer for each cover he mentions, which I think is great, because the designer is often not credited anywhere in the book.

Another good book-design blog is FaceOut Books, the blog of the Oregon firm DesignWorks Group. The DesignWorks folks choose a book cover they admire and ask the designer to talk about the process of creating it. And the designers generously do so—often including images of sketches, source materials, and rejected ideas. FaceOut is updated every Monday, and the entries are usually quite detailed. I love that DesignWorks is putting energy into such a cooperative approach instead of being snarky and competitive.

Here are a few more good sites about book covers:

• Readerville Journal’s regular feature Most Coveted Covers
• The Book Cover Archive Blog
• Covers
• Caustic Cover Critic