Dustjacket Face

Librarians in Hungary really get into their books!   To promote reading in the town of Kaposvar, librarians imitated the popular sleeveface record album movement and put their bookcovers where their mouths are:

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Nancy Drew, via Hark A Vagrant

The ever-awesome webcomic Hark, A Vagrant takes a look at what you can glean from just the covers of Nancy Drew mysteries. I admit, I giggled heartily at almost all of them. There are two pages, so don't miss any:

Rogues and Rouge

Poe's Law states: "Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of Fundamentalism that SOMEONE won't mistake for the real thing." The release of Sara Palin's memoirs has, amusingly, put Poe's Law on display for book lovers. On the same day as Going Rogue's release, a satirical memoir title Going Rouge hit the streets, too, using a strikingly similar cover. From USA Today to Fox News (yes, Fox News!), the media has accidentally shown the satire book's cover when intending to talk about Palin's book. While I'd like to think its outright inability to distinguish the books (I'm having trouble telling them apart), I'd lay the reason for the mistake to be poor spelling ability. "Rouge" versus "Rogue" is a common spelling mistake for everyone, including the Googling graphic designers of Fox News and their ilk. Keep in mind, O family members who read my blog: make sure you buy the right one when shopping for my Christmas present!

Vintage Yates Covers

Richard Yates wrote from the viewpoint of the post-war, pre-Baby-Boomer set, set upon by the modern world while dealing with their own fractured lives, and what could be more fitting than covers done in the style of those tempting and beautiful "modern world" advertisements and images that identify with the world Yates' characters struggled against? Despite the very retro style of the graphics, the design is ultimately modern, reducing the focus of the original design, setting the image off-center of what is really going on and surrounding with a lot of empty space, symbolizing Yates moreso.

Video Games As 70s Novels

The intent was to redraw modern videogames in the style of retro paperback novels; I find that the covers look a lot like old Colecovision and Atari covers:


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NYPL Book Cover Library

The New York Public Library, as the excellent archivists they are, have compiled an archive of those dustjackets that are so often torn or missing when you buy them at thrift shops and used book stores. Most seem to hail from the 1940s — lots of Nazi/Axis-related books — but a lot of fine WPA-style art that I miss so. Beware: give yourself time, you could lose hours.

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