Artists create 164 unique speculative designs for Nabokov’s Lolita:

As does artist Jim Tierney for Jules Verne’s classics:

Does book design matter to you? If you weren’t interested in reading these books before, do the spiffy new covers convince you to give the book a shot? I’m curious.

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[Via The Rumpus and The Millions.]

Yum.

I would totally read a novel based on Craigslist Missed Connections.

I would also totally enjoy book reports made out of cake. (See left.)

Teenagers on Salinger.

Interlinked short stories via geocaches.

For you book design lovers: 45 beautifully designed book covers and classic titles turned into cigarette packs.

Finnegan’s Wank.

McSweeney’s reimagines The Baby-sitter’s Club for the new decade.

How to be a literary manboy of New York City.

Aaand to get you through the rest of your week: the ultimate graphic novel, in six panels: Read more »

So, judging a book by its cover is like cardinal sin numero uno, right?  We’re in an era when people often find books NOT because of their quality but because they have a pretty cover or they have a long enough title that it matches one of their google search terms. So I should be fighting against the valorization of pretty book covers, right?

Yipes, wrong, I guess.  My design nerdery means that I actually love to browse all the book covers in the bookstore.  I did some graphic design in college and led my own campaign against ugly flyers. That’s how seriously I take design.  This love of all things pretty, well-designed, well-composed, with nice typography means that I’m totally digging this list of the best book covers from 2009 from The Book Design Review blog.  My favorites from the list below the fold:

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Is November also National Book Cover Redesign Month? NaBoCoReMo? Did nobody tell me?

Carin Goldberg’s iconic series design from the late 1980s has been replaced with an ostensibly hipper-looking one:

Art director John Gall has also undertaken a book cover redesign project. The assignment: redesign Vladimir Nabokov’s entire book covers, all 21 of them. The result: 21 beautiful specimen boxes (a lovely homage to Nabokov’s passion for butterfly collecting), each created by a different designer: Read more »