Modcult

(Side note: I’ve had this sitting in the post queue for awhile, and flat out missed Halloween.)

The new covers for Penguin Classic’s Gothic Reds series really pop off the shelf. Coralie Bickford-Smith, a senion designer at Penguin whose work I’ve posted before, is responsible.

Penguin has posted a video interview with her on their blog, in which she discusses the cyanotype process and sources for some of the individual covers, including the use of her Ikea kitchen knife on Ambrose Bierce’s The Spook House.

I think the title selection here is excellent as well, since it veers towards the lesser known work of some of these authors (well, besides Poe).

Can Penguin please start making these available in the US? Otherwise, I’m going to be forced to order these from Amazon UK.

Chip Kidd’s cover for The Old Moderns.

Criterion Collection cover for Samuel Fuller’s White Dog.

PostSpectacular has designed a system for creating one of a kind covers for Faber Finds, Faber’s print-on-demand service. The generative design system is built using PHP, Java, and Processing.

The gorgeous font used on the covers is B-HMMND, designed by Corey Holms.

More images can be found here.

Lovecraft Meets Bladerunner

Gene Wolfe’s newest novel, An Evil Guest is now available for preorder, and set to be released on September 16th.

I linked Neil Gaiman’s review of a draft a while back, but the Amazon page has some more information.

It seems Wolfe indulges himself in a bit of a genre stew– mixing noir’s private detectives, Broadway glitter, sorcerers, iPods, cold war intrigue, and Cthulhu, itself.

From Caitlín R. Kiernan’s blurb:

The distinctions we draw between past, present, and future are discriminations among illusions. This paraphrase of Einstein stands as a sort of thesis statement for this deliriously anachronistic novel, which, though seemingly set near or at the end of the 21st century, feels more like a wild confabulation of the ’20s, ’30s, ’40s and ’50s, with a bit of the ’80s sprinkled here and there, and just a dash of the first decade of our new millennium.

Even as Wolfe warps time and space, he also warps and dismisses the too often indulged expectations of genre readers. There is no slavish devotion to dull futurism, but a swaggering, romantic, unabashedly unlikely tomorrowland.

Really, really poor cover choice though. Luckily, the UK edition appears to have a more tasteful design, thankfully avoiding the goth-vampire-meets-fairy-romance cover of the US version.

More Penguin cookery book covers can be found here.

This 1971 collaboration between Terry Riley and John Cale has just been reissued on compact disc by Wounded Bird.

Submitted for your consideration as album cover of the decade.

Had to post Coralie Bickford-Smith’s eye-catching cover for the Penguin’s current “Boys Own Books” edition of G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday, featuring illustrations by Mick Brownfield. You can see more of Bickford-Smith’s covers for the Boys Own series at Penguin’s Flickr page.

Bickford-Smith is also responsible, along with partner/illustrator Mike Topping, for the new round of Sherlock Holmes covers Penguin, inspired by vintage movie posters. There’s a nice walkthrough of their collaborative process by Mike and Coralie accompanied by pictures of the covers over at Scamp.

As a side note, the recent Penguin Classics collections all look quite fantastic and it’s a struggle not to pick up these new editions whenever I am lingering in a bookstore.

Looks to be nerdiest shirt I’ve seen this year… Inspired by Ellen Raskin’s The Westing Game. Of course, I would have chosen some of Raskin’s own cover artwork. I’m happy to see the current Modern Classics edition has (mostly) restored the lovely original artwork and retired the banal covers from the 80’s and 90’s.

Obscure psych record cover or lost Three Investigators novel?

Intricate cover (three bellybands, debossing, and foil) by Jordan Crane for Michael Chabon’s new non-fiction collection Maps and Legends. Published by McSweeneys.

The Way Some People Read

Speaking of book covers, I had somehow missed that Vintage/Black Lizard is in the process of putting more of Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer novels back in print with some nice new covers that mesh with the style of their other classics. Picked up The Way Some People Die today. Instant Enemy and The Blue Hammer won’t be released until April.

And no, Black Lizard still hasn’t redesigned their website.

Jacket design by gray318.

Is it too late to nominate Fricara Pacchu’s “Stories of the Old” for best record cover of 2007?