REVIEWS
The 13 Best Art and Design Books of 2013 by Maria Popova (Brain Pickings, November 2013)
"Given no conceptual constraints and liberated from the marketing burden of using the cover as an actual sales tool, the eighty designers — ranging from in-house talent from major publishing houses to notable freelancers — brought to the subject uncommon freedom of thought and bravery of interpretation, with graphics spanning from the unabashedly provocative to the brilliantly subtle. Some intentionally violated Nabokov’s “no girls” injunction, others winked at it irreverently and assaulted it obliquely, while others still paid full heed and went with the expressly metaphorical. (Though, as John Gall thoughtfully admonishes in one of the chapters, “the land of metaphor is filled with furrows and ruts and roads going off into the distance.”)"
"Given no conceptual constraints and liberated from the marketing burden of using the cover as an actual sales tool, the eighty designers — ranging from in-house talent from major publishing houses to notable freelancers — brought to the subject uncommon freedom of thought and bravery of interpretation, with graphics spanning from the unabashedly provocative to the brilliantly subtle. Some intentionally violated Nabokov’s “no girls” injunction, others winked at it irreverently and assaulted it obliquely, while others still paid full heed and went with the expressly metaphorical. (Though, as John Gall thoughtfully admonishes in one of the chapters, “the land of metaphor is filled with furrows and ruts and roads going off into the distance.”)"
Covers, Awards, Agents, and More by LIZ FRENCH (The Library Journal, NOVEMBER 25, 2013)
"I’ve always had it drummed into me that judging a book by its cover is a cardinal error for a bibliophile. With that in mind, I’m reading Lolita: The Story of a Cover Girl–Vladimir Nabokov’s Novel in Art and Design (Print Books, ed. by John Bertram & Yuri Leving), a work that analyzes the way that Nabokov’s masterpiece has been represented in cover form, through both a series of essays and covers that were commissioned by artists who given free rein (with none of the marketing-type constraints that an actual graphic designer creating an actual cover would encounter)."
"I’ve always had it drummed into me that judging a book by its cover is a cardinal error for a bibliophile. With that in mind, I’m reading Lolita: The Story of a Cover Girl–Vladimir Nabokov’s Novel in Art and Design (Print Books, ed. by John Bertram & Yuri Leving), a work that analyzes the way that Nabokov’s masterpiece has been represented in cover form, through both a series of essays and covers that were commissioned by artists who given free rein (with none of the marketing-type constraints that an actual graphic designer creating an actual cover would encounter)."