Major magazines aren’t usually littered with articles about publishing associate art directors but the past couple days Hollywood stars and other celebrities have had to take a back seat to the man who holds that position at Alfred A. Knopf, designing book jackets for new editions of Kafka, a new translation of Doctor Zhivago, Cortazar’s […]
Joanna Trzeciak has won this year’s Found in Translation award for her rendition of Sobbing Superpower by Polish poet Tadeusz Różewicz. The annual award is presented by The Polish Book Institute in Krakow, W.A.B. Publishers, the Polish Cultural Institute in London and the Polish Cultural Institute New York for the best English translation of a […]
Book jacket design is an ever interesting topic which exhibits an often sharp difference of aesthetics among its practitioners. I have written about it before in interviewing Peter Mendelsund about his designs for a recent edition of Kafka’s works. On his own blog Mendelsund has recently offered an insider’s view of designing book covers in […]
The second installment of Peter Mendelsund’s series of essays on jacketing fiction is up, in which he asks whether designers “are, or should be, in the business of representing the underlying themes put forward by the works of fiction that we are charged with making jackets for.” There is a lot of Central and Eastern […]
The first part of an essay by book jacket designer Peter Mendelsund on his blog Jacket Mechanical covering just what it is his job involves. And he starts with a bang, as it were, questioning some of cover designs for Nabokov’s Lolita because: “It is easy to forget, especially easy given the soft-core Lolita renderings […]
Designing book jackets requires a certain amount of humility and acceptance that your work will be enjoyed without most people acknowledging the time and effort you put into it, or ever associating the book with your name. On the other hand who else is there who can boast of having collaborated with the likes of […]
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