Category Archives: Book Talk

Book Covers, Book Design, Book Talk, On the Web

Bad bookcover blog

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I ran across Judge a Book By Its Cover this weekend. It’s a public librarian’s blog that features the worst book covers in the library. Pure torture, if you ask me. There are some really bad covers out there. Ugh! Not sure I can check in too often. After visiting that one I always have to click over to Henry Yene See’s blog to cleanse my palette and calm down. His covers are great and his work is fun to follow because he posts everything from concepts through final work.

But that first blog kind of runs along the line of the Boston’s Museum of Bad Art (which is home to the immortal Lucy in the Field with Flowers).

Book Talk, On the Web

We share no books

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I have never read a book that Thomas Jefferson did. What a bummer! Not one! I was hoping for at least one, but alas, Jefferson read too many French books (or maybe I don’t read enough).

I know this thanks to 17 volunteers over at LibraryThing who cataloged all 4,889 books that Jefferson owned. VERY cool! They even entered all of the third President’s book reviews. The collection these folks spent four months cataloging is the own Jefferson donated to the US after the British destroyed the Library of Congress during the War of 1812. It’s a pretty cool catalog and author cloud to peruse to see what all Jefferson collected.

The libraries of Tupac Shakur and Mozart have already been completely entered.

Other famous folks are slated to ‘join’ LT, including  Ernest Hemingway, John Adams, William Faulkner, William Congreve, Adam Smith,  Leonardo da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin, Marie Antoinette and Isabella Stewart Gardner.

I wonder what one book (outside of the Bible, they all seemed to own the Bible) all these people owned?

Book Covers, Book Design, Book Talk

Covering the covers

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Across the pond, The Financial Times is running a periodic “check in” with current book covers. They’ve only picked 4 so far, but the insight from the news staff as been fairly good. They actually take the time to discuss some of the designers influences and frames of reference for each of the covers. I hope they keep it up.

What’s fun is that they are not just reviewing the covers of new releases. So you never know what might turn up. So far, the Molloy cover is my favorite. Very Alvin Lustig. And they say the spine has no title, author or publisher emblem, which would seem to make it one of the more useless jackets designed.