Booklicious: Coolest Book Covers of the Year

November 02, 2010

Coolest Book Covers of the Year
[Tuesday, November 02, 2010 | 0 comments]

OK, so there are still 60-odd days left until we ring in 2011, and while some of us are already bemoaning the Christmas music on the radio (Laura!), others apparently can't wait to shoo out 2010 and usher in 2011. And while I must plead guilty to ogling Christmas trees already, even I think it's a bit premature to toast the best book covers of this year with two months to go. Not that I won't browse them, however...

Anis Shivani over at HuffPo has pulled together 21 of his favorite 2010 covers. I'm not sure all of them belong on a best-of list, but there are some stellar designs among them. Here are a couple that made me want to take a peek inside. 

At first, the cover for Ether doesn't seem like such a big deal. It's just a house interior, right? Wrong. It's actually the interior of a dollhouse. Nayon Cho, the cover designer: "...on closer inspection there is enough off-kilter to signal that it is not what it seems. To gain even more of a distance, I enclosed the image in a circle, to suggest that perhaps the viewer is a voyeur. The title treatment is a play on the title, with 'Ether' itself dissolving into the ether."


I'll let the author herself tell the story behind this one. "The drawing was done by my younger son, Sean Evers. I picked him up from the Art Student's League one day when he was 11 years old, and he had done a version of this. At the time, I had not yet finished writing the collection and didn't have a title -- 'Further Adventures in the Restless Universe' was one of a few I was toying with. I made up my mind as soon as I saw the drawing, and although there's no title story, I ended up adding a story that referenced the restless universe. The original drawing was horizontal, as you usually see the solar system, and I worried about how that would work on a book cover. Leave it to a child to recognize that there's no reason, other than convention, that the planets can't be stacked vertically. He redid the illustration and suggested running the title through the asteroid belt. Then he gave me a shooting star!" Props to her son - this is fantastic! 


You can browse the rest of the list here.

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