Modern American Book Cover Design
Looking back through all the covers reproduced in this book, I love Alvin Lustig and Paul Rand’s covers from the 1950s, a few things here and there from the 1960s, and then nothing much else until the last chapter, looking at the late 1990s with a section focusing on various Knopf designers.
This cover by Alan Peckolick & Tom Carnase from 1976 is perhaps the only 1970s era design I really liked.
I wanted to like the movie Capote but in truth I found myself bored through large stretches. Aesthetically it was pretty well-done, but the story maybe needed some extra editing. This isn’t one of those straight-up book vs. movies cases, as the stories are from the same source but different perspectives—the movie a story about Capote writing the book and the book absent of Capote’s personality and interactions with the town entirely. That said, the prose in the book is often quite stunning, but there are, much like the movie, long chapters that I trudged through; so perhaps the movie and the book are pretty close in their impact. Overall, the book felt like a better use of time than the movie, perhaps because Catherine Keener was such a distracting Harper Lee.
This story about the bizarre events surrounding a Montreal apartment Doucet lived in ended kind of weird and anti-climactic after all the suspense. It was originally printed serially in a newspaper, and I think that would be the best way to read it, slowly and over time.
I seem to read comics easier than books lately, which is probably why it’s been a while since I’ve been reading my current book. I love this collection of Julie Doucet’s dream-related comics. She has some totally messed up dreams!
Someone recommended this to me for the design, which is pretty funky, but almost too funky for me to appreciate design-wise. It got a little incohesive. But it is a little motivational book and maybe they succeed better with a little wacky incohesiveness.
