Jessica Svendsen

These covers for Nabokov were first released in 2009, but I recently revisited the series. Commissioned by art director and designer John Gall, these covers use a butterfly specimen box to frame the cover image, a reference to Nabokov’s lifelong passion for butterfly collecting:

Nabokov was a passionate butterfly collector, a theme that has cropped up on some of his past covers. My idea was also a play on this concept. Each cover consists of a photograph of a specimen box, the kind used by collectors like Nabokov to display insects. Each box would be filled with paper, ephemera, and insect pins, selected to somehow evoke the book’s content.

Though each cover was designed by a different designer, there’s a remarkable simplicity to each cover and a wonderful depth and tactility as a result of using physical materials. Some of the designers explain their process behind creating the cover in this article in Print.

Left: Michael Bierut; Right: John Gall

Left: Stephen Doyle; Right: Carin Goldberg

Left: Peter Mendelsund; Right: Rodrigo Corral

Left: Paul Sahre; Right: Martin Venezky

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Thank you, Peter Mendelsund, for restoring an Alvin Lustig sensibility to contemporary book design. Mendelsund designed these covers for a new Schocken series of Kafka classics, with each one employing a different configuration of eyes. On his blog, Jacket Mechanical, Mendelsund describes his reasoning for using the eye as a graphic tool:

So, as you can see, I’ve gone with eyes here (not the first or last time I will use an eye as a device on a jacket-book covers are, after all, faces, both literally and figuratively, of the books they wrap). I find eyes, taken in the singular, create intimacy, and in the plural instill paranoia. This seemed a good combo for Kafka- who is so very adept at the portrayal of the individual, as well as the portrayal of the persecution of the individual.

I also opted for color. It needs saying that Kafka’s books are, among other things, funny, sentimental, and in their own way, yea-saying. I am so weary of the serious Kafka, the pessimist Kafka. Kafkaesque has become synonymous with the machinations of anonymous bureaucracy- but, of course, Kafka was a satirist (ironist, exaggerator) of the bureaucratic, and not an organ of it. Because of this mischaracterization, Kafka’s books have a tendency to be jacketed in either black, or in some combination of colors I associate with socialist realism, constructivism, or fascism- i.e. black, beige and red. Part of the purpose of this project for me, was to let some of the sunlight back in. In any case, hopefully these colors, though bright, are not without tension.

The typography. The script is an amalgam of Kafka’s own hand, and a wonderfully versatile typeface called “Mister K” (based on Kafka’s own hand) by Julia Sysmäläine who works at Edenspiekermann in Berlin.

View all of the covers over on Jacket Mechanical.

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David Pearson has created yet another volume of the Penguin Great Ideas series—volumes by philosophers, writers, political theorists that all adopt the same small format. But for each book, Pearson creates a typographically-rich cover that comments upon the author, volume, or era. Pearson has posted the fifth volume on his flickr stream, or you can see the previous Great Ideas volumes on his website.