Left: First UK edition. Right: First US edition.
Bad years look considerably worse in England than in the States, where even bad years cater to young women readers. I don't care for the cover of Coetzee's latest, a feminine departure for whoever handles the designs, which are typically quite good: clean, nice author font, a firm signature look.
About Chip Kidd, book cover rock star: His covers are handsome but aren't they overliteral? Now, I don't think you could do much else with The Road. And his logos for DC Comics' All Star imprint (e.g., Superman, Batman & Robin) are pitch perfect. But his Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is all wrong. Kidd gives the game away. The fun in Gawain is imagining what Gawain-poet has actually written despite your many-layered and Hollywood-informed expectations of medieval imagery. Depicting the Green Knight as some emissary of hell flattens the comic possibilities of the story. No, it's not laugh-out-loud funny like Chaucer, but it has its moments. Burton Raffel describes the emerald knight reclaiming his decapitated head as a football player in a mad scramble after a fumble. And there's an amusing tension in the court scenes, the knights all feigning silence as courtly propriety when, in fact, they're all terrified. That tension doesn't work under the presumption that the Green Knight is something like the Mouth of Sauron, more creature than man. Kidd's suggesting the Spectre here.
Tolkien's cover is even worse for getting Gawain wrong as well. Only the Cotton Nero A.x. illumination will do.
Posted by Kriston at January 31, 2008 9:30 AMIME book covers are generally much better on the UK than the US editions. But really book cover design's fallen off since the 50s and 60s (though I do really like the cover for The Fall in the current topmost post—though arguably all the covers for the novels are "overliteral"). Those Chip Kidd covers blow.
Posted by: ben wolfson at February 3, 2008 1:32 PMThe Sir Gawain cover is a valid attempt to echo the recent, HUGELY successful Beowulf cover -- y'know, the chainmail-covered head cover? i'm not technically proficient enough to provide a link...books...
...it sold more copies (by a lot) than any other book of its type EVER. Money talks -- new editions of classics will be trying to capture that magic for a long time.
Posted by: paul at February 5, 2008 9:07 PMThis one? So boring. The designer brags that the chainmail is embossed. Sigh. Did it really sell more copies than evar? It does put me in mind of a piece that would have made for a much better cover for Beowulf: Martin Puryear's Old Mole.
Here's a really great cover that did get made.
Posted by: Kriston at February 6, 2008 8:53 AMI have that Candide cover in poster form.
Posted by: ben wolfson at February 6, 2008 2:39 PMyeah that's it.
from comments there:
"So, which is it? Did C-Dog design it and/or does he approve of it?"
"uh, no, sorry, he didn�t design it. Just approves of it."
...so no blaming the designer for the lame 'embossed' brag!
i agree it's a little boring...but it's burly, eye-catching, and it sold Beowulf to Americans -- a cover design coup.
guys felt snug as a gun reading it...
old mole -- very cool.
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