50 Watts (formerly A Journey Around My Skull) followed its 2009 Evil Orchid Bookplate Contest with a contest to design a Polish book cover. The results were announced a few hours ago, the winner being the above design by Ben Jones who happens to be from Manchester. The rest of the entries can be seen in this Flickr set. I’m astonished at the variety on display, and also the success of the majority of these pieces as both cover designs and pastiches of an idiosyncratic style. Nice to see so many people using non-digital techniques, Ben Jones included, and there’s an additional pleasure with this challenge in seeing the titles people have chosen to illustrate. Congrats to Will on an inspiring contest.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive
Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Evil Orchid Bookplate Contest
• Polish posters: Freedom on the Fence
• The Robing of The Birds
• Franciszek Starowieyski, 1930–2009
• Czech film posters
• Czech book covers
I like the To Kill a Mockingbird one too but the title always makes me think of that famous alchoholic drink the tequila mockingbird.
The Lolita one is good too.
I thought the Nabokov one was too minimal, actually. With that cover the task should be to convey the two main features of the novel, first that Lolita is very young, second that it’s a love story. I generally feel that even with a book whose content “everyone knows” you can’t take it for granted too much that everyone does know the content. So a pair of lips could be any pair of lips rather than the specific lips relevant to that story. It’s a tough title to design when there are so many prior examples. Easier to go for a book that’s less well-known.
Didn’t realize there were so many Lolita covers out there. And if you include the film posters there’s even more of them.
Also liked the 3rd runner up for House of Leaves but if I hadn’t read the explanation I wouldn’t have realized that was morse code dots. Looks like the tops of letters with the bottom parts cut off.
It helps if you’ve read the book. I remember a really bizarre book cover for Picture of Dorian Gray which might have been Polish but had some sort of giant lizard on it and I don’t remember any lizard in Wilde’s novel.
Have you got this http://www.1000okladek.pl/?lang=en