Someone has set up a Flickr page of book covers designed by Edward Gorey (which we were tipped off to by the wonderful Casual Optimist).

The American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA), the oldest and largest professional membership organization for design, has announced the winners of their prestigious annual book design competition “50 Books/50 Covers of 2009,” and we are very happy and proud to announce that three of those books were Melville House titles designed by our art director Kelly Blair: The Blindfold Test, Experimental Geography and Drunk.

According to the press release on AIGA’s website, “Experts in publishing and book design met to review entries for the “50 Books/50 Covers of 2009” competition, reviewing more than 800 entries over the course of several days.”

According to the release, “This year’s selections for AIGA’s annual design competitions reflect the changing landscape of communication design and book design, in which designers are pushing boundaries by experimenting with format, context, materials and even their traditional role in society.”

Some of their other selections are fabulous, too. Not as fabulous, perhaps, but, well …. You can check out all the winners here.

According to Macphee, this is "Kropotkin both holding up a portrait of himself and having an image of himself holding up a portrait of himself flowing out of his forehead."

For the past few weeks, Josh Macphee over at Just Seeds has been publishing a great collection of anarchist and radical book covers in a blog series called “Judging Books by Their Covers.” There are a handful of Norwegian-published anarchist titles here; a cool set of Portuguese modernist book covers here; some work by the designer Flavio Costantini here; and a strange set of covers from a series of books published by the Liberation Support Movement, a Canadian group that focused on African liberation movements in the 1970s, here, here, and here. All are well worth a look.

According to Macphee: “I’ve been really digging designing book covers of late, which has made me look much closer at all the other covers I come across and already have on my shelf.”

Amazon subsidiary AbeBooks here selects 25 iconic book cover. According to the post, “If you saw these particular editions in a bookshop window, then we believe you would stop and stare. Most have been around for some decades, some are very famous, some were famous, and a few have been forgotten. Every one is all worth a second look.” Among the gems selected are 1st editions covers for Robert Bloch’s Psycho, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, and John O’Hara’s Appointment in Samarra.

The blog Strange Maps has scanned a small selection of book jackets published by Dell during the 1940s and 50s that feature wonderful maps. According to the Strange Maps post, “the American series of pulp fiction books, featured many genres, but most of all the detective story. Prominently featured were the maps on the back cover, setting the scene for the adventures and crimes within the covers. An amazing grand total of 577 ‘Map Backs’ were published during the lifespan of the series, from 1943 to 1952. The subject of the maps would naturally reflect the setting of the story (more often than not a murder mystery), and could be anything from the diagram of a multistorey building to the layout of a city or state–fictional or not–as the scene of the action.”

Two maps are below; click through to see the rest… in a higher-resolution format to boot.

The Philadelphia Center for the Book, the Philadelphia Athenaeum, and Philagrafika 2.0 present “Building by the Book,” an exhibition hosted at the Athenaeum, one of Philly’s earliest private libraries (today it is a special collections library with a public gallery).  The three co-sponsors put out a call for artists to respond to selected architecture and design books from the Athenaeum’s collection.  Out of all of the submissions, six were chosen and are on display through May. The works are quite a site to behold and remind us of the physical beauty and art that are contained in books, especially in the days of e-books, iPads, and Kindles.  Everyone lucky enough to be living in downtown Philly should stop by for a quick peak at the show.  More details here.

What, exactly, is the point of a dustjacket, asks Peter Robins in this Guardian story. “The clue can’t be in the name: on the shelf, the most dust-prone part of a book is the top, which a jacket doesn’t cover … the jacket remains an unnecessary and vulnerable encumbrance.” And now, he says, “some in the book trade appear to be reaching the same conclusion.”

He notes the rise of what’s known in the US as “paper over board” books, and in the UK as “casewrapped”: “Jacketless hardbacks with cover art printed on them …. It was the style for set texts to be handed down across generations of schoolchildren, and workshop manuals to be kept within reach of greasy fingers,” but that now “seems to be becoming an increasingly popular option for literary fiction.”

Some examples: Toby Barlow’s Sharp Teeth, Andrea Levy’s The Long Song, and Zadie Smith’s Changing My Mind. Meanwhile another critic tells him

… she reckoned it was part of a wider race among publishers for “distinctive and different ways to publish all their titles to increase their ’shelf appeal’, as there is so much competition for space and attention in the bookshops”. An emphasis on the printed book as an object - “a beautiful and special and distinctive object” - could also help it keep “a separate market in the age of the ebook”.

Detail from a "Mysterious Benedict" cover showing Sticky Washington character as a white person

Yet another publisher is in coming under fire for depicting white characters on the cover of a book about black people. As Rocco Staino reports in a School Library Journal story, “Little Brown Books for Young Readers is changing the covers on Trenton Lee Stewart’s ‘Mysterious Benedict Society‘ series, following complaints that the character Sticky Washington, described as having light brown skin, appears on all three covers as white.”

The company’s head publicist, Melanie Chang, yesterday announced, “We are adjusting the covers of all three titles immediately as they reprint in order to offer a more faithful rendering as soon as possible.”

But Staino says “Librarian bloggers and those on Twitter have long discussed the misrepresentation of Sticky Washington in the books’ illustrations.” So what finally prompted the publisher to react?

One can only think it was the worldwide coverage — and scorn — given two other recent similar incidents (see the earlier MobyLives story). But of course, that just made this story more likely to get attention, whereas if Little, Brown had just listened to those online commentators a while ago ….

A cover that soon won't exist ... of course, it never should have in the first place

Following up on an earlier Moby story: The folks at Bloomsbury may keep making the same disgusting error over and over, but at least they’ve improved on their response time to public outcry about it: A story in Publishers Weekly by John A. Sellers reports that, within days of being villified around the internet for running yet another cover featuring a white model on a book about a black protagonist — in this instance, the book in question is Jaclyn Dolamore’s Magic Under Glass — the company has “apologized for the cover and released a statement saying that it would stop supplying copies of Magic Under Glass, Dolamore’s debut novel, and that books with a new jacket would be made ‘available shortly.’”

Actually, they didn’t apologize too hard — here’s the company’s statement in its entirety:

Bloomsbury is ceasing to supply copies of the US edition of Magic Under Glass. The jacket design has caused offense and we apologize for our mistake. Copies of the book with a new jacket design will be available shortly.

Hmm … shouldn’t someone from the company — you know, the publisher or someone — take a little more responsibility and explain how this keeps happening?

It’s one of the stupider trends in the book biz — stupid that it happens in the first place, even stupider that, although every time it does happen it leads to a furor, publishers keep doing it. The “it” in question: Using white cover models for books featuring black protagonists.

Last July a MobyLives report detailed how Bloomsbury was just about to publish Justine Larbalestier’s novel about a young black girl, Liar, when the author complained (and rather eloquently at that) on her blog about the cover illustration — which featured a white girl. The story was picked up just about every blog in creation and Bloomsbury changed the cover at the last minute, clearly embarrassed.

But not that embarrassed: As a report by Kate Harding on Salon details, Bloomsbury has done it again, “releasing Jaclyn Dolamore’s ‘Magic Under Glass’ — the protagonist of which is clearly described as having brown skin — with a young white woman on the cover.”

As Harding continues, “Bloomsbury’s fear of losing the white market was evidently greater than their embarrassment over the “Liar” debacle — unless, of course, what they chiefly learned from the “Liar” debacle is that you don’t need to put as much money into publicizing a novel if its packaging is sufficiently controversial (in which case, you’re welcome, jerks).”