Favourite Covers of 2011

After posting my long overdue picks for 2010 last week, here are my selections for my favourite book covers of 2011.

I’m currently reading Where The Stress Falls a collection of writing by Susan Sontag published in 2001. In an essay about art she quotes Paul Valéry on the painter Corot. “One must always apologize for talking about painting” he says. I know just what he means. I feel the same way about book design. Perhaps even more than a painting, what you see is what you get with a book jacket. If you have to explain why it works, it probably doesn’t. Or you’re talking to the wrong crowd. But there’s something else too. I also feel like I need to apologize for not knowing more; for producing reductive lists like this one; for being, well, so presumptuous…

The 2011 list has changed a few times in the last few days and would likely be different again if you asked me tomorrow — not for lack of quality you understand, but simply because narrowing the list down to a manageable number and deciding which should be in the final ‘top 10’ was just plain hard. This isn’t a definitive survey of book covers in 2011 by any means (sorry!) it’s simply a list of the book jackets that caught my eye this year — designs I thought that were beautiful, a bit different, audacious, a bit out of the ordinary, a bit worthwhile… I’m grateful to all the designers who created these covers, who gave me suggestions and helped me source the images. Once again, I’ve been struck by their generosity. Nevertheless I have surely I’ve missed some great covers. Tell me what they are in the comments.





1Q84 by Haruki Murakami, designed by Chip Kidd (Knopf)

Art of Immersion, by Frank Rose, designed by Jason Booher (W. W. Norton)

The Best American Comics 2011 Edited by Alison Bechdel, illustration by Jillian Tamaki (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

The First Husband by Laura Dave, designed by Jaya Miceli (Penguin)

The Mystery Vase by Andrea Gibson, designed by Amy Thompson (Write Bloody)

The Pale King by David Foster Wallace, designed by Gray318 (Hamish Hamilton)

The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson, designed by Matt Dorfman (Riverhead Books)

The Sisters Brothers by Patrick Dewitt, designed by Dan Stiles (Ecco)

This Will Be Difficult to Explain by Joanna Skibsrud, designed by Michel Vrana (Hamish Hamilton Canada)

Vault by David Rose, designed by David Pearson (Salt Publishing)

Series:

Penguin Great Food by various, designed by Coralie Bickford-Smith (Penguin)

James M. Cain series, designed by Evan Gaffney (Vintage)

Kafka series, designed by Peter Mendelsund (Schocken)

Le Carré series, illustration by Matt Taylor, designed by Paul Buckley and Gregg Kulick (Penguin US)

Vintage Oliver Sacks, designed by Cardon Webb (Vintage)

Steven Jay Gould, designed by Sam Potts (University of Harvard Press)



Honourable Mentions:

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