Image credit: Flicker - Katey Nicosia

For the spa in Philippe Starck’s Icon Brickell, the icy glass condo tower in Miami, [designer Thatcher Wine] was asked to wrap 1,500 books in blank white paper, without titles, to provide a “textural accent” to the space. He chose mass-market hardcovers that flood the used book outlets — titles by John Grisham and Danielle Steel, or biographies of Michael Jackson, he said — because they are cheap, clean and a nice, generous size.

For another Starck project, in Dallas, Mr. Wine used black paper to wrap the 2,000 vintage books he picked for their “distressed edges,” so they could be displayed backward. [...]

[Builder Steve] Hermann designed a glassy Neutra-like house with a 60-by-14-foot shelving system, which has room for 4,000 books, he said.

“But who has 4,000 books?” he said. “I always stage my houses, so it was up to me to fill the shelves.” He ordered 2,000 white-wrapped books from Mr. Wine and deployed them in tidy, horizontal stacks (watch for the white-wrapped book to become this year’s version of the deer head).

That passage, from a recent article in the New York Times about “decorative book solutions”—carefully curated (and sometimes re-covered) collections of books used for decoration—makes me feel a little ill.

The article attempted to comfort bibliophiles:

Book lovers, you can exhale. The printed, bound book has been given a stay of execution by an unlikely source: the design community. In this Kindle-and-iPad age, architects, builders and designers are still making spaces with shelves — lots and lots of shelves — and turning to companies like Mr. Wines’s Juniper Books for help filling them.

Image credit: Flicker - resakse

Worse, it’s hardly a triumph for literature if you labor to look like a reader without all the trouble of, you know, actually reading. But that’s what seems to be happening here:

“Some people will insist that [the books] be in English, because they want them to look as if they could read the books,” Mr. Weinstock said. [my emphasis]

Or:

Alexa Hampton, the New York decorator, remembers her father, Mark Hampton, buying “masses of random, leatherbound books to assemble libraries,” she said. “But the people I work for don’t want books just as backdrop or theater, which they did 20 years ago. Now they want books they actually might read.”

Is it okay to just look like a reader, to chop books in half and re-cover them with blank paper, if you’re helping create a market for print books? Or does merely looking like a reader—but not actually being one—push us farther down the road towards “Books? Is that something to read?”

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?

Designer Martin Konrad Gloecke has designed a book lamp that uses your own book as a lampshade—and functions as a bookmark.

Writes Gloecke on his website:

wall light. complete lamp by adding book as lamp shade. remove book for reading, change lamp by changing book, use as bookmark.

part of un-readymades series: inspires, encourages, and enables creativity, play, product interaction, and personal expression.

And if you like that, check out Gloecke’s “Booked” table—a set of legs that attach to your own book to form an end table.

Via GalleyCat and FYB.

image credit - Flickr: bloomimwhom

“Designing a printed book is remarkably different from designing an ebook,” says Charles Nix, a partner in the New York publishing firm Scott & Nix and the president of the Type Directors’ Club.

“Printed-book design is about fixed-size pages and spreads. Those are gone in ebooks. Book designers choose typefaces and point sizes to maximize legibility and comprehension. Those are gone in ebooks too. Some formats, he notes, do allow you to embed a font, but you can’t rely on reading devices picking it up. Book designers finesse layouts and choose paper to achieve a particular bulk, weight, and feel for the finished book. Gone also.”

It’s not just aesthetics, Robins argues. Sometimes the differences affect the book itself:

Nicholas Blake, the editorial manager for digital at Pan Macmillan in London, shows me China Miéville’s The City and the City on Adobe Digital Editions. The City and the City is a highly praised novel and Adobe Digital Editions is a heavily supported ebook platform, backed by the UK’s largest high-street bookshop, Waterstone’s, and with an implementation of the open standard for ebooks, Epub, more sophisticated than many. But The City and the City is set in an uncanny place called Be¿el; and one thing the platform did not permit, at least with its default font, was the character ¿.

And even something like line length can have major effects:

Shorter lines also cause problems for justification (the smooth edges at either end of a page that most readers expect), especially as many e-readers don’t yet do hyphenation. Unjustified text, with the right margin left ragged, may help, but long words may cause problems even then. Blake reports trouble with The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, where the sigh of satisfaction emitted by the automatic doors – a string of “m”s – can disappear off the edge of the screen.

Those of you reading ebooks, have you noticed any weird design issues on your Kindle or Nook? Designers, what other design challenges might ebooks raise?

Via.

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.”

The classic Strand tote bag

One of the winning new designs

You’ve seen it a million times: that iconic tote bag with The Strand logo on it. Recently, The Strand partnered with the School of Visual Arts, TOON Books, Drawn & Quarterly, and Fantagraphics Books to host a tote bag design contest. Over 800 emerging artists submitted their representations of The Strand Bookstore, and a panel of judges, including Pulitzer Prize–winner Art Spiegelman, selected three winners.

Check out a slideshow of all the entries, just the finalists, or the three winners. The image by the grand prize winner, Zak Foster, will be featured on a new tote bag, available in-store and online, in June.

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?

More information on the contest is here. And for further inspiration, check out the stunning entries and winners for the last book cover contest: Nabokov’s Lolita. My favorite is the one with the scrunchie–how about you?