The first class of honorees included such heavy hitters as Catcher in the Rye and The Great Gatsby, the Babe Ruth and Chuck Berry of their particular field of accomplishment.  For this early summer induction ceremony we’ll look a little farther afield for a few deserving but less obvious choices.

John Gall is an influential art designer for Vintage and Anchor books, companies whose book covers are almost always so compelling that I immediately consider buying any reasonably priced used copies of them I find even if I already own other editions.  There’s just something about that Vintage imprint on the spine that screams, “Classy, and you know it!”

Gall’s design for the rather scholarly A General Theory of Love might be the coolest book cover I’ve ever seen:

Designer Evan Gaffney is a book cover creator whose visual style is almost always recognizeable once you’ve seen a collection of his work.  Like the great Chip Kidd, his designs can be wildly different but still retain a totally distinctive element not easily copied by second-rate knockoffs.

Gaffney’s design for One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding, is about as perfect as it gets:

The cover for James Hawes’s Why You Should Read Kafka Before You Waste Your Life just kills me.  I find myself staring at it for minutes at a time and laughing even the 100th time I glance at it.  As is so often the case with my favorite book covers, it’s the small details that really bring it on home to all-time classic status.  In this case, it’s the cockroach’s crossed legs:

I also feel like I just know exactly what his face looks like . . . but I never will.

Finally, attention must be paid to a cover unearthed by the great FontFeed.com’s “Typodisasters” collection.  It’s not even a typo, really.  It may even be for real, although comments seem to suggest “it’s only a careless library rebind.”  Whether intentional or simply the greatest moment of irony in the history of the English language, this one richly deserves its spot in the 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.

Once I learned about Kidd’s ubiquity in the world of book-cover design, I began to see his own work and examples of his influence on almost every bookstore and library shelf.  I was first formally introduced to his designs by Veronique Vienne’s fascinating critical study, Chip Kidd: Monographics, which features a lengthy essay on Kidd’s life and career along with dozens of examples of his work.

Kidd has described his primary design influences as a combination of 1960s television images, cartoons, and comic books.  The bold graphics and bright colors of the era’s toy packaging, particularly Batman memorabilia, are credited by Kidd as some of his earliest and most valuable lessons in layout and design.

Vienne’s book thoughtfully evaluates Kidd’s iconic book covers, and its photo captions connect the often abstract themes of Kidd’s work with the actual content of the books whose visual first impressions he created.

One of my favorite examples, both as a novel and a cover design, is Donna Tartt’s The Secret History.  Kidd explains that he attempted to “combine classical and modern sensibilities” on the cover just as Tartt’s characters tragically attempt in the book:

Kidd insists one of his cardinal rules of book-cover design is “never be literal.”  Although it violates this maxim, his design for Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses, along with the other two volumes of the Border Trilogy, has become one of Kidd’s best-known works:

Some of Kidd’s comic book influences can be seen in his series of designs for writers like Elmore Leonard and James Ellroy, for whom Kidd’s lurid covers have become a kind of visual trademark:

Kidd has also tried his hand at writing autobiographical fiction in 2001’s The Cheese Monkeys and last year’s sequel The Learners.  The novels are satires of academic life that draw on Kidd’s experiences in a large state college design school staffed by discouraging, unhelpful professors, and as one would expect their own covers are striking examples of Kidd’s design aesthetic: