Melville House Books

Here’s a bit of wonkery about publishing that probably sounds familiar to any seasonal business. In publishing there are generally 3 seasons we respect. At Melville House, we call those seasons spring, summer, and fall. (Where’s winter you ask? After this winter, I prefer not to think about it anymore.) Each season gets its own list of titles and we usually start presenting our titles to booksellers and sales reps anywhere from 9 months to a year in advance of a given season.

The ideal culmination of a list is when we make our seasonal catalogs. (For instance, here’s our spring and summer catalogs–perceptive observers will notice a few dates have changed. I did say “ideal” after all.) The thing I love about catalogs is that they attempt to represent a sort of coherent vision of a given season. It’s also a statement about a house’s publishing project and their aesthetic, moral, and commercial values at a certain point in time. To me, the analogy of an album applies pretty well: you have a bunch of songs that make singular statements in their own right but that, in the context of an album, fills in the narrative of a larger story.

A designer that goes by the name of See Gee (which we discovered via eBookNewser) has taken this analogy in a pretty literal direction. On their Flickr page there’s an entire set of pictures dubbed “The Library” that features classic albums redesigned as book covers. These album-as-book-cover images includes book versions of albums by The Red Hot Chili Peppers, The Police, and Joni Mitchell among others. Click on over to see the full library. In the meantime, here are my personal favorites.

A leather-bound, biblical version of ”Hatful of Hollow” by The Smiths:

The Pixies’ “Surfer Rosa” as children’s book (a playful, subversive take when you consider the original album art):

And best of all, a pulp edition of Bob Dylan‘s “Blood On the Tracks” (bonus points to the person who can tell me which song the sell line on this book comes from–no googling, please):