Book Covers Hall of Fame
After looking over Chip Kidd’s awesome book cover designs, I engaged in lengthy deliberations with a hand-picked panel of experts (basically myself, Mrs. Bookmarking, and the Google Images search engine) in order to announce the first annual inductees in the Bookmarking Book Covers Hall of Fame.
The very first Baseball Hall of Fame class in 1936 included Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, and Christy Mathewson. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s inagural class featured Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, and Sam Cooke. In other words, only the heaviest of the heavyweights need apply for this pinnacle of achievement in the art, science, and witchcraft of book cover design. I fully expect the controversial results to cause more bar fights in Oklahoma City than a “Switzer vs. Stoops vs. Wilkinson” free-for-all.
This inagural class must represent the absolute icons of the field, book cover designs that define their accompanying volumes so completely that generations of cut-out-bin knock-offs and cheap paperback hack jobs should offend the sensibilities of millions of readers and forever be consigned to fishwraps and birdcage liners.
For my exhaustively subjective Book Cover Hall of Fame Board of Trustees, the first choice was obvious – Michael Mitchell’s first edition design for The Catcher in the Rye:
There’s something almost nightmarish about the carousel horse looming over the New York skyline, an image at least as enigmatic as the book’s title and as memorable as Holden Caulfield’s catalog of phonies. It’s the kind of design I don’t even want to study too closely or learn too much about, better to keep its weird mystery intact.
This website features an amazing collection of Catcher in the Rye covers from dozens of editions published all around the world. The standard paperback edition’s maroon and gold cover might be even more iconic for generations of schoolkids like me who read it in that bulk-purchased-for-public-schools format, but the original design is the gold standard in unforgettable book cover imagery.
Similarly, James Joyce’s Ulysses may be better recognized in its almost sickly sea-green cover design, but for me this version’s weird combination of fonts and uneven type is really unsettling and memorable:
The final inductee of my Hall of Fame’s inagural class also features a haunting figure floating over New York City: Francis Cugat’s definitive Art Deco dust jacket design for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby:
This essay describes the design as “the most celebrated and widely disseminated jacket art in 20th century American literature,” and it discusses the interesting connections between the cover image and the book’s themes.
Scholars believe the design was completed before Fitzgerald had even finished the novel, and its portrayal of a “girl whose disembodied face floated along the dark cornices and blinding signs” of nighttime New York may have informed the author’s own descriptions of Daisy Buchanan. A closer look at the irises of the “Celestial Eyes” reveals a little of the designer’s mysterious intent.
This website features an excellent collection of 150 of the “Greatest Book Covers,” some of which will jockey for position in my next class of Hall of Fame honorees. On the other side of the coin, this display of “The 15 Worst Book Covers Ever” features some equally unforgettable images, particularly the children’s recipe collection, Cooking with Pooh.
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[...] seems like the right time to induct some more works into the prestigious Bookmarking Book Covers Hall of Fame. (Clearly, ironic air quotes should by all rights be added to the word “Fame” in this [...]