Changing fashions…in book cover design. Six original vs current covers.

It’s wise to remember that the “perfect idea” or “perfect solution” doesn’t stay perfect forever.

The idea of what makes something ‘great’ is far from static. It changes over time – sometimes it only takes months, or a few years – but what was once the ideal becomes passé. It’s affected by everything from technology to taste to design trends.

This is really changes in ‘fashion’ – which is noticeable in areas far outside the clothing industry.

Book publishing is a prime example: Books and book jackets look extremely different now than they did even ten or twenty years ago.

You can see variations in everything from fonts to imagery to text. And of course with ‘classic’ books, their nod to the original period is notable – but still somehow more modern.

We’ve collected a few classics and pictured their original (or an early) edition against their modern counterpart. Even if some of the original jackets didn’t look so worn, you can immediately place the old versus the new.

ALICE IN WONDERLAND

“Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” was published by the Homewood Publishing company, circa 1900. “Through The Looking Glass” was published by Donohue, circa 1904. Image sourced from Forgotten Book Marks.

CARRIE

 

HOW TO WIN FRIENDS AND INFLUENCE PEOPLE

TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

ANIMAL FARM

THE GREAT GATSBY

 

 

Happy Birthday to us! Top ten posts from the last year

Today Daily Inkling turns one- it’s been a year since we first started posting regularly. Let the frivolities begin! Here are ten of our favourite posts from the last twelve months.

Top ten favourite posts

1. Creative entrepreneur interview: Michelle Matthews, Deck of Secrets

Our first interview with a powerhouse of publishing. Michelle started with one simple (but brilliant) idea. From that first Deck of Secrets box grew an empire. The Deck of Secrets series has now spread all over the world.

2. How to get a book published by a major publisher (series of three)

Kimberly and I first cemented our creative partnership in a book project. From concept, to content, to market analysis and publishing – our little project was picked up by Penguin and now sits proudly on our shelves.

3. 52 ways to generate ideas on demand – Tips from 14 creative people

At the heart of this blog is understanding creativity. To get to that great idea you first need a spark; so with the help of fellow creatives, here are some tips to get you started.

4. Eight trends, themes and observations from SXSW 2014 – The Wrap

Kimberly went along to SXSW this year and all of her posts on the sessions she attended are worth a read – here’s the wrap-up of her experience along with lots of great pics.

5. Great book cover designs and designers

I love a great book cover as much as I love a great book – and yes, I do judge. But is it as simple as great books deserve great covers?

6. What’s the best soundtrack for creativity? 10 ways music can impact your creativity

I know I have specific playlists for different projects I’m working on. For some it has to be silence. What works to bring out your creative best?

7. How to evaluate ideas? For a new business, concept or novel

A great checklist to help you separate the truly great from the maybe mediocre.

8. How to pick the perfect colour for your brand or business

Colour options leap out at us at every turn – from the colour of our underwear to what we put on our walls; what packaging we prefer to remembering our parking level. Picking the perfect colour for your brand or business is one that has to be right.

9. Books that changed our lives

Both Kimberly and I shared our lists of books that have had an impact on us, and I feel like it made me evaluate what it was about these stories that stuck with me (as well as spending hours agonising about which ones to include or leave out. Talk about killing your darlings).

10. Idioms – how many ways can you kick the bucket?

We’ve done a lot of wordy posts, but this one is my favourite – one day we’ll all park our slippers.

Top five popular crafty posts

Our most popular posts have usually been the crafty ones – so here are the five most popular for makers and doers everywhere

1. How to make cute reversible placemats using an A4 template

2. Weekend creative project – Colourful and simple giant granny square baby blanket

3. DIY Washi tape Christmas baubles

4. Great gift idea – teacup succulents with Washi tape

5. Make you own re-usable shopping bag from an A4 template

 

 

Top 5 books with birds- birdwatching in literature

Twitchers get your binoculars out- time for a little literary birdwatching. Our feathered friends are in our backyards, stealing our scraps, chortling in trees and looking out from the pages on our shelves. Here are some famous stories that lean on avian counterparts.

1. The Pigeon, Patrick Süskind – a great symbol of cities the world over. Pigeons: flying rats or misunderstood doves? Here the pigeon is a symbol of monumental fear, a creature that paralyses the protagonist completely, forcing him to face his past and future in a moment of irrational terror. Does the pigeon represent his death? Or is it simply a symbol of change?

2. The Raven, Edgar Allan Poe – ‘Quoth the raven, “Nevermore.”‘ Need I say more?

3. Mockingjay, Suzanne Collins – while not a bird of this earth, the mockingjay becomes a symbol of adaptation and revolution in The Hunger Games Trilogy. Mockingjays started life as a Capitol invention, were warped by the natural environment and came back as a weapon and ally for Katniss.

4. Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll – the image of playing croquet with upside-down flamingos has stayed with me- but let’s not forget there is also a dodo who appears in chapter three (thought to be a reference to Lewis Carroll himself) along with others; a duck, a lory and an eaglet:

‘…These characters also represent real people. The Duck is Robinson Duckworth, who was Carroll’s friend, and the Lory and the Eaglet are Lorina and Edith, who were the sisters of real Alice.’ (from this article)

5. The Nightingale, Hans Christian Andersen – A beautiful tale with complex themes; real versus artificial, freedom and reward. It is thought that the Nightingale character was based on the opera singer Jenny Lind, who was called ‘the Swedish Nightingale’. Hans Christian Andersen fell in love with Jenny, but his love was never returned.

Here’s some more reading on birds and some beautiful bird pictures by Leila Jeffreys.

Looking for a good book to read next?

If you’re a reader, you’re always looking for your next great read: I rarely catch up with fellow readers where we don’t eagerly ask each other for book recommendations.

So I thought a semi-regular post to introduce might simply be what good books we’ve read lately (a more casual version of our past reading lists like our summer reading or 15 books to change your life or best dystopian fiction).

We would love to get your recommendations too, so please add them in the comments.

Reconstructing Amelia – Kimberly McCreight

Set in Brooklyn, this book is about a mother’s journey to try and uncover what motivated her daughter to commit suicide…or was it suicide?

I devoured this book in two days, reading until 3am to finish it. It features one of my favourite storytelling mechanisms – that of a tale told from multiple perspectives – hard to do but so effective when done well. This rises about a ‘crime tale’ and instead delves into issues as wide as working mothers’ guilt to bullying.

 The first fifteen lives of Harry August – Claire North

I’m in the midst of this book which has a fantastic premise – a society of people who are born, live, die…and then live again during the same time period. What would you do if you knew you got to do it all over again and again? In this story, some people simply live for pleasure, while one does something – we’re not sure what just yet – that is destined to bring about the end of the world. We follow Harry as he tries, over his lives, to stop this end.

The ocean at the end of the lane – Neil Gaiman

An intriguing and somewhat dark little tale about a man’s visit to his childhood home and what he remembers when he is there: An important friendship and a whole series of events from his childhood that are extremely disturbing.

A large dose of fantasy inhabits this tale, but it doesn’t read like ‘fantasy’ fiction. It’s a charming story about magic, sacrifice and mystery.

Great book cover designs and designers

I love a great book cover. Regardless of a proverbial fairness, we all judge a book by its cover. Book cover designs are generally driven by the marketing department of a publishing house and for good reason. They are the first point of contact with a potential customer and have to sum up a lot in a few seconds. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then book covers work work even harder to sum up 60-100,000 words in one succinct image.

So what makes a great book cover? Your first question should be ‘What makes me pick up a book in a bookshop?’. I know this seems obvious, but analyse your decision; was it the colour? The picture? The type? Did it look like a similar book you read and enjoyed?

The last point is what the marketing department zeroes in on. Much of book cover design is based around genre and a style that instantly places the book in a category we understand. There’s also a lot of copycatting from successful books; when Da Vinci Code hit you may have noticed a shift in action-adventure covers to look more like Dan Brown’s books. This isn’t to trip you up and make you think you’re buying Dan Brown when you’re not, it’s basically saying to you from the publisher ‘You loved Da Vinci Code, we think you’ll love this too.’

But back to my first question; what makes a great cover design? For me, great book covers are ones that stand out, are unique and beautiful, while still giving the potential reader clues as to the story inside. In my opinion, really successful book covers do all these things and also add a little cleverness, a play on the title or themes of the book, something that makes you look for longer than those few precious seconds and entices you to pick up the book and turn it over to read the blurb.

Here are a few great covers and their designers.

Chip Kidd

In the world of book cover design, Chip Kidd is a rock star. He’s worked with top publishers, authors and art directors and produced an abundance of well-known and stunning covers. There are some great resources on his website; interviews and a video where he talks about the process of designing a book cover.

Two of my favourites of Chip Kidd’s designs are these two; Nothing If Not Critical and Mixing Messages. Both are great examples of covers that sum up the content of the book, appeal to their intended audience, are simple and clever.

Gabriele Wilson

Gabriele Wilson works across a range of graphic projects, all of which are beautifully executed. It’s her covers I really feel are special though – the simplicity of image and beautiful type makes her style distinctive and successful. Resistance portrays more than a concept, it gives you that suffocating, restrictive feeling, the potential of being stretched to breaking point.

There’s something about the way Emily is standing on the second cover that suggests unconscious contemplation; and looking at it I do have the urge to procure some Victorian underwear and walk around the house scribbling poetry.

Peter Mendelsund

Peter Mendelsund is another prolific designer, working at both Knopf Publishers and at Pantheon Books, with a swathe of great covers to his name. There’s a great interview with him on Fisk about how he got into cover design (Chip Kidd played a part).

It was hard to pick from his work the pieces I liked best – My Prizes has that same simplicity and cleverness of image I’ve loved in the other two designers. I love Dreams in a Time of War even more for its quirkyness – it suggests a time past and a playfulness, but with a sinister edge and hints of dictatorship. All of which is backed up in the title.

Jenny Grigg

And finally here’s a cover that made me want to buy this book, before I read the hype and before it won the Booker – there’s something about it that is so beautiful and intriguing. It says to me as a reader that this is history in beautiful portraiture, but with a twist.

Jenny Grigg has also designed lots of lovely covers, but The Luminaries image I feel has pervaded every book space, and yet I still love it. She gives a great interview in Meanjin, which includes a look at some of the working covers as part of her process.

I could go on and on about cover design – these are such a small selection of the great work that is out there!

In the meantime, here are some links you might like to check out.

Links

• I found a lot of these covers on the Book Cover Archive, a great site dedicated to good book cover design.
• Chipp Kidd’s website is here.
• Gabriele Wilson’s website is here.
• Peter Mendelsund’s website is here, and his interview with Fisk is here.
• Jenny Grigg’s website is here.
• Behind the Cover: Jenny Grigg in Meanjin is here
• The Casual Optimist also does a great round-up of ‘best covers’
• Design Observer also curates a competition of 50 books, 50 covers

The Wonderful Egg – book review (and a worship of print techniques)

I am fortunate to have young children, in order to justify my picture book addiction. I found The Wonderful Egg by Dahlov Ipcar in the National Gallery bookshop and from first touch I had to have it. The paper! The pink! The green! The dinosaurs!

It is utter delight in hard cover – and a feat in reproduction. Originally printed in 1958 using ‘a hand-picked colour palette and traditional printing techniques’, Flying Eye Books have produced a faithful copy of Dahlov Ipcar’s original work. For those of you interested in printing processes; that includes picking out each layer of spot colour and re-mastering each brush stroke. (The original lithographic plates have been long since lost, so this was all done from scratch).

I have a little experience in this area, having done a similar thing in wallpaper reproduction, so I can say with some authority that this is impressive. ‘Why not just scan the original in and reprint it that way?’ I hear you ask. Well, then you wouldn’t have a book that is as charming and wonderfully coloured as this one is. It evokes an age where illustration and print were carefully crafted, and picture books were designed to be appreciated by more than just the little ones among us.

These pictures in no way do justice to Dahlov Ipcar’s work, but you get a feel for it.

My favourite lines sum up the dinosaurs perfectly: ‘They were very strange beasts and most of them were big. Stupendously, tremendously, enormously BIG.’

And did the small ones appreciate this volume as much as I did? Well, it had dinosaurs in it so it was an easy sell. What we all spent a lot of time on was the chart in the back, showing the different dinosaurs and their relative size to each other. And the list of pronunciation of their names was very handy. It’s a lovely story, full of real dinosaur facts, which added to its appeal.

And because I fell deeply in love with the colours in this book, here is a bonus colour palette, inspired by The Wonderful Egg:

More about The Wonderful Egg here:

Here’s Dahlov Ipcar’s website, she still lives and works in Maine – and there are many wonderful picture books to her name.

And here’s the Flying Eye Books website, they are based in the UK and are committed to the quality of their books as you can see from their mission statement here.

Book art – delve into the world under covers

I love book art. I know there are those out there that would cry foul at the destruction of what is already an art form, but I disagree. Book art is collaboration. It’s creating another layer to an already beautiful object, forcing you to look again. To absorb words and stories differently, to appreciate the tactile quality of a well-loved book.

Here are some of my favourite book artists (with links if you want to look deeper):

Nicholas Jones – a fellow Melburnian and booklover. As he says on his website, ‘(my art is)… as much about process as it is about the form – these books were conceived, born, loved, stored, discarded, found anew, studied, cut, folded and reborn.’

His work is beautiful and sculptural, respecting the form of the book but exploring ways in which it can be worked and changed. For anyone in Melbourne, he currently has some of his artwork at the State Library of Victoria (exhibition titled A Conspiracy of Cartographers, in the LaTrobe (Dome) Reading Room).

Thomas Allen – I adore the mini dioramas Thomas Allen creates with his paperback art; there’s a new story concocted with each tweak or addition. He’s pretty popular and prolific, there are hundreds of examples of his work all over Pinterest. The ominous but comical set-ups are so perfectly combined it looks like they were meant to be (which is always the mark of a well-crafted work).

Su Blackwell – Su Blackwell’s work captures the whimsy and magic of the stories she brings to life. Scenes grow out of the books she chooses, pages morph into trees, words into leaves.

She says about her work: ‘Paper has been used for communication since its invention; either between humans or in an attempt to communicate with the spirit world. I employ this delicate, accessible medium and use irreversible, destructive processes to reflect on the precariousness of the world we inhabit and the fragility of our life, dreams and ambitions.’
Su Blackwell, 2007

See more of Nicholas Jones’s work on his website here. Thomas Allen also has a website here; and Su Blackwell’s work on her website here.

All images are the artist’s own as specified, sourced from their websites or represented galleries.