FRESH FACE

Just try choosing your favorite Kafka cover from these colorful, soon-to-be-released gems by designer Peter Mendelsund.

RECOVERED

 

 

A flawlessly restrained cover design for a book about excess, by Think Studio.

LOVE STORY

 

 

A limited edition book by the French graphic designer, Fanette Mellier.

ATTENTION GETTER

 

Who wouldn’t be distracted by this impossibly elegant cover for a book by the Australian philosopher and writer, Damon Young, designed by Kate Williams at Acumen Publishing.

TALE SPIN

 

A beautiful book cover design–and brilliant exercise in restraint–from Leo Nickolls.

SWEET SORROW

 

A simple cover befitting C.S. Lewis’s meditation on loss, designed by Jason Gabbert.

THE DISTANCE

Immediacy has its allure, but some things become deeply burnished only by the passing of the years. Patti Smith probably knew this when she decided to tell the story of her love affair with Robert Mapplethorpe–40 years after they met, and more than two decades after his death.  Just Kids, a memoir of youth, love, and loss–and an elegy to a New York long gone–won the National Book Award for non-fiction this past week. Some good things, it seems, do come to those who wait to tell all.

FACE BOOK

The latest in a collection of books on influential graphic designers, curated by the Spanish team at Graffica, featuring a whimsical illustration by Alvaro Dominquez Gamez.

POETIC LICENSE

The Danish design studio, Daddy, couldn’t have seized upon a more fortuitous opportunity to showcase its considerable talents:  a visual interpretation of Sylvia Plath’s oppressively doleful poem, Daddy, powerfully expressed here in spartan black-and-white, and masterfully designed and set in hand-carved woodblock type.

NOVELTY

Another beautiful, vitage Penguin book cover.