The New York Times feature what they consider to be the best book covers of 2013 – to be honest, I don’t think it’s the greatest list, but I shall show you eight of the twelve selected here:
From NYT’s introduction to the selection:
The great book designer George Salter once said that a good jacket “must be in perfect accord with the literary quality of the book. It must be even more if it is to function as an important sales factor, if it is to ‘stop’ the eye of the person passing by.” Of the thousands of books that come through the offices of the Book Review each year, these are the covers and jackets that caught my eye, that compelled me to flip them over to check the back flap to see who designed them.
According to many book designers, it is becoming increasingly difficult to put together a good jacket. Each one needs to be approved by sales representatives, editors, art buyers and authors before it wins approval. “It is getting tougher and tougher to do good work these days,” Oliver Munday, a designer for Knopf, told me. And Matt Dorfman, a freelance book designer, admitted, “It was a pretty abysmal year for me approval-wise.” Here, along with the names of their designers, are some of the covers that not only survived the process, but stand out as impressive examples of design: innovative, intelligent and visually arresting.
You can see the full selection here:
