A fair amount gets written about book cover trends. And there are absolutely trends, stylistic themes and sales/marketing mandates at play in publishing—but whenever an editor asks me to write about them, I generally flee into the digital night. Not because I’m bad at spotting them (I am), but rather because when you lump work together, you miss out on all the outliers, exceptions and anomalous covers that will inevitably start the next wave of trends—not to mention the jackets that manage to play and innovate within any given one.
As someone blissfully lost in the magic of minutiae at the cost of the big picture, here are a few highlights from the cache of covers that have been published or announced this month:
- Eliot Weinberger thrives in the experimental, defying expectation in various literary contortions and distortions. And thus his new book—“not a translation of individual poems, but a fictional autobiography of Tu Fu derived and adapted from the thoughts, images and allusions in the poetry”—was a delightfully straightforward fit with the stylings of Oliver Munday.
- For a novel that explores identity, Janet Hansen’s cover for Ask Me Again no doubt distills the essence of Clare Sestanovich’s prose. But tear it off the binding and it could work as an LP cover. Blow it up and it’s a poster. Throw it in a frame and hang it in an exhibition of your choice. With a few stark ingredients and an entrancing palette, Hansen’s alchemy is magnetic.
- And finally: When you look at Jamie Keenan’s cover for You Glow in the Dark, you will wonder: Did he really do it?! Well, in what had to be a mountain of utterly maddening work, yep, he really did.
