So you’ve figured out what to be for Halloween. But why shouldn’t your books get in on the fun, too?

The website Facsimile Dust Jackets sells reproductions of early-edition dust jackets, sized to fit whatever book you want–so you can “dress up” your volumes for Halloween or year-round. Here’s the cover of Of Mice and Men:

Image: Facsimile Book Jackets

Or why not let your staid dictionary let its hair down and disguise itself as Barney O’Hara: Trapper?

Image: Facsimile Book Jackets

If these are out of your budget, you can always make your own book costumes–uh, I mean, dust jackets. Craft blog Hydrangea Girl has a how-to. Can you guess which of the books below are “real” hardcovers and which are paperbacks in disguise? Click through to find out and for the tutorial.

Image: Hydrangea Girl

Image credit: Flicker - hyper7pro

Think book designers are namby-pamby design nerds hunched over their Macs? Think again. The Guardian reveals the secret, extreme lengths designers will go to in order to get that perfect cover:

Deputy art director Glenn O’Neill tells me that the original jacket concept for Robert Harris’s Cicero novel, Lustrum, was to feature an image of a raging fire. Not content with plucking any old flame image from a picture library, however, the team set a field in Gloucestershire on fire. (No, it wasn’t arson – they had the farm owner’s permission). “We created a big bonfire from old crates and torched it,” says Glenn. “It was pretty epic. But in the end we went for something a bit more literary – we’re still trying to find a book to put the [original] image on.”

A blog post on the Windmill Books website tells more of the stories behind the “Shelf of Doom,” including a chopped-up copy of Mark Twain’s Diaries, real bones and live tarantulas, and a blowtorched stuffed bumblebee.

When I was in graduate school, one of my professors, Peter Ho Davies, brought in an early cover for his novel The Welsh Girl. The design featured several sheep lying in a meadow—but to my surprise, when the hardcover was released, the cover was exactly the same except that the sheep had been Photoshopped out, leaving (in my mind) a sheep-shaped hollow in the grass. So I’d assumed that most book covers were simply Photoshopped! Hearing the stories behind these various book covers gives me a new respect for how hard designers work to represent the spirit of the book itself.

Which covers do you suspect have exciting stories behind them?

When British books are published in the United States, and vice versa, publishers don’t generally change the text to cater to their audiences across the pond. Okay, they often adjust the spelling of a few words, like “realise”/”realize” and “practise”/”practice.” And some small punctuation changes occur—British writers tend to put their periods and commas outside quotation marks, Americans within. But these changes are quite minor. There’s one major thing that changes when a book crosses the Atlantic, though: the cover.

The Millions has an interesting analysis of the UK and US covers of the books involved in the 2011 Tournament of Books. For the most part, I think the American covers are stronger and more thought-provoking—a little less direct, a little more evocative. But what differences in audience are the publishers trying to address? (Do they think Americans like circles more, while Brits prefer rectangles, as in the Gary Shteyngart cover?)

Have you seen other covers that differ in the US and UK? Do they fit with this trend?

At the Webster Branch, we recently put up a display with all of the books covered in brown paper. Above it there is a sign that reads: “Do You Judge a Book by Its Cover?” The rules are if you unwrap a book—based on the short description taped to it—you must check it out. Even if you’ve read it before, or if you think you won’t like it. Take it home, give it a shot. Don’t judge it by its cover alone!

The project may encourage readers to try books they wouldn’t otherwise have tried—like the girl who chose a book labled “3,856 stories. One book.” Kristy Raffensberger of the Webster Branch blogged about what happened:

The secret book in question is Meanwhile by Jason Shiga. It’s an old school “Choose Your Own Adventure” story, in graphic novel format, with about five thousand more twists and turns. It begins simply enough, with little Jimmy choosing an ice cream flavor—chocolate or vanilla. But once you choose, you don’t just skip to the next designated page; you follow a color coded line, up, down, across, and off the page onto a tab, which shows you which section of the book is next. [...]

The girl who unwrapped Meanwhile chose it because she was literally excited by the prospect of reading 3,856 stories. She is a very dedicated library user. When she saw the comic drawings, her face dropped. I explained how the book worked and told her it’s not a book I would normally read either. But I did. And it’s awesome.

She came into the library a few days ago, grinning. She was bound and determined to follow every single thread.

This sounds like a fun project—and a great exercise in open-mindedness. Because let’s face it: a book’s cover does influence whether you’d pick it up. Thank goodness, for example, that at age 14 I ignored the Danielle Steele–esque cover on my copy of The Scarlet Letter. I’d have missed one of the great classics.

It would also be fun to write the teasers on those brown paper wrappers. Raffensberger gave a few other examples: “Read this you must” for The Strange Case of Origami Yoda by Tom Angleberger, “A fluffy parrot that smells like honey!” for Kakapo Rescue by Sy Montgomery, and “Wild adventure story” for Wild River by P.J. Petersen. If you were writing the teasers, trying to intrigue readers, what would you put on the cover of your favorite book?

Europa Editions – is a New York-based publisher of literary fiction, high-end mystery and noir, children’s illustrated fiction, narrative non-fiction, and memoir. Approximately two-thirds of the titles on our list are works of literature in translation. Their lovely softcovers and color-blocking get me every time.

Open Letter Books – is the University of Rochester’s literary publishing house. Dedicated to connecting readers with great international authors and their works, Open Letter publishes 12 books a year and runs an online literary website called Three Percent. They also pay attention to aesthetics, and it shows.

Seagull Books – publishing arm of the 37-year-old Seagull Foundation for the Arts in India. Seagull offers literature in translation, series on Censorship and Offense, several branches of theory, in short – a wealth of the political and the wonderfully entertaining. Not all the covers are the graphically punch black-and-white with a pop of color, but they’re all eye-catching.

White’s Books – this British publisher’s tomes remind me a bit of the Penguin Classics, but with a wrap-around design on the clothbound cover that I find even more gorgeous. There are only eight titles on offer at the moment, but each one is pure bliss.

Enter: the perfect intersection of my admiration for the handwritten note and a love of cover design. Penguin has a set of 100 classic book covers in postcard form – from Wuthering Heights to Tender Is the Night. I first noticed these at Anthropologie, but I’m a stationary hoarder so I’ve held off on the purchase – thus far.

You can also purchase a box of 100 Puffin Book Covers – Penguin’s Children’s imprint. Those might even intrigue me more, as books like Charlotte’s Web, The Trumpet of the Swan and James and the Giant Peach were my gateway into the joys of reading.

Among other changes heralded by the e-book era, digital editions are bumping book covers off the subway, the coffee table and the beach. That is a loss for publishers and authors, who enjoy some free advertising for their books in printed form: if you notice the jackets on the books people are reading on a plane or in the park, you might decide to check out The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo or The Help, too.

“So often when you’re thinking of a book, you remember its cover,” said Jeffrey C. Alexander, professor of cultural sociology at Yale. “It’s a way of drawing people through the visual into reading.”

This video shows how Orbit Books’ Creative Designer Lauren Panepinto designed the cover for an upcoming novel. The whole process took over 6 hours, but the video condenses that into just under two minutes:

On Orbit’s webpage, Panepito explains:

Trust me, no one wants to watch it in real-time…and even then I left out the not-as-riveting-onscreen stages of my cover design process, such as reading the manuscript, sifting through Alexia photoshoot outtakes, background photo research, etc. And since this is a series look that has already been established for Soulless and Changeless, there weren’t the usual batches and rounds of versions of different designs that happen with standalone or first-in-a-new-series covers. That would be a weeklong video!

from http://hypolib.typepad.com/the-hypothetical-library/

The subtitle of the blog The Hypothetical Library is “Imaginary Book Covers. Designed for Real Authors.” And that sums up this interesting little project nicely. Book designer Charlie Orr collaborates with real authors like Colum McCann, David Lehman, and Thomas Kelly to design covers for books that the authors have not written—and never will write.

I ask each writer to provide flap copy for a book that they haven’t, won’t, but in theory could, write, and then I design a cover for it.

I am not a writer. I have tried over the years, but it is simply something I can not do well. I am, however, a designer—and it’s my combined love of books and graphic design that brought me to the book cover as an outlet for any literary ambitions I may have had. [...] Looking back I’ve seen how the two disciplines have influenced one another. In both, a single image combined with some brief text can convey an expansive narrative.

Each entry includes an introduction to the hypothetical work and cover, the hypothetical flap copy and blurbs, and a (real) biography of the author. The project has only been in progress for a few months, but my favorite so far is the cover for McCann’s imagined novel In the Country Below—a great example of an evocative cover.

Am I the only one who wishes these books were real?