Front Cover: Great Book Jacket and Cover Design

Rating:
Summary: Literary billboards.
Review: A comprehensive look at book jacket design from the twenties to the nineties. The book only covers fiction and is divided into themed spreads with between five and nine covers on each. Author Powers writes detailed captions to each cover as well as providing short essays on each decade and genre. Nearly three hundred covers are shown in this well designed and printed book, none of them are angled or overlap other covers.

As the title covers the last eighty years there is not much opportunity to show lots of great covers in the same style put out by some English publishers, only two examples are shown of the unique designs created by Brian Cook for Batsford in the thirties and although there are several Penguin paperbacks included I would liked to have seen more. Actually Penguins should have a book all to themselves, the company has published hundreds of titles with knockout covers.

Most of the jackets were designed in the UK but there is a good showing of well designed US covers. There are some pulp fiction and thriller covers apart from the literary stuff. A very similar book with 270 American covers is `Jackets Required' by Steven Heller and Seymour Chwast, covering jacket design from 1920 thru 1950 and if you have both these books it will make an excellent visual record of some of the best twentieth century fiction

Rating:
Summary: Literary billboards.
Review: A comprehensive look at book jacket design from the twenties to the nineties. The book only covers fiction and is divided into themed spreads with between five and nine covers on each. Author Powers writes detailed captions to each cover as well as providing short essays on each decade and genre. Nearly three hundred covers are shown in this well designed and printed book, none of them are angled or overlap other covers.

As the title covers the last eighty years there is not much opportunity to show lots of great covers in the same style put out by some English publishers, only two examples are shown of the unique designs created by Brian Cook for Batsford in the thirties and although there are several Penguin paperbacks included I would liked to have seen more. Actually Penguins should have a book all to themselves, the company has published hundreds of titles with knockout covers.

Most of the jackets were designed in the UK but there is a good showing of well designed US covers. There are some pulp fiction and thriller covers apart from the literary stuff. A very similar book with 270 American covers is 'Jackets Required' by Steven Heller and Seymour Chwast, covering jacket design from 1920 thru 1950 and if you have both these books it will make an excellent visual record of some of the best twentieth century fiction

Rating:
Summary: Great for your collection, not a how-to book.
Review: I ordered this book looking for some direction & inspiration while designing a book cover. It's a beautiful book, covering decades of work, with small blurbs on each book. These blurbs help clarify the subject the artist was trying to convey, which is sometimes fun to figure out.
HOWEVER, if you're looking for a how-to book, this is not one. Maybe I should have read the other review a little better. But if you're looking for some history and inspiration, this is a great book. I'm glad I bought it, even though it's not what I was looking for.