Saturday, January 12, 2013

Turn Style: Best Book Jackets of 2012

Posted By: Jeff McKown

Flavorwire.com has polled a group of book jacket designers and published their picks for "best" book covers of 2012. My picks for best and worst from their list are below. I'd love to hear which ones you like or don't like, and any great book jackets from last year you think were left off the list.

Click here to see all the jackets the experts selected (but don't, of course, judge the books by their covers).

My favorite from the list: The Flame Alphabet by Ben Marcus
(concept flames, symmetry, color, three-dimensional)


And my least favorite from the list: NW by Zadie Smith
(surely more refined artistic eyes see something special, I see two letters)


As a bonus, here is one of my all-time favorite book jackets. The book is My War Gone By, I Miss It So, a poignant chronicle of the horrors of the war in Bosnia published in 1999 with stunning prose by British journalist and self-proclaimed war junkie Anthony Loyd.

2 comments:

  1. The Flame Alphabet was among my favorites, too, from a design perspective. Great colors and a sense of texture & depth. Also, Bloodland: A Novel, by Alan Glynn. Can't say that I've ever gotten vertigo from a book cover before this one! Covers that might compel me to pick up the book: Girlchild: A Novel, by Tupleo Hassman and Running the Rift, by Naomi Benaron. Thanks for the reminder to pay closer attention to something I often overlook!

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  2. Thanks Kyle - Looked them up. I love Running the Rift. Beautiful cover. If anyone else wants to see it, they can copy and paste this link.

    http://bit.ly/VZe8Wu

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