I recently finished a great book entitled By Its Cover: Modern American Book Cover Design by Ned Drew and Paul Sternberger. The book is an excellent overview of American book design from the early 1900s to 2003. It chronicles the first steps as book design first became important on through international Modernism’s influence on American book design, and finally into the eclectic visions of the 80′s and 90′s as book design dealt with postmodernism.
The cover of this book itself is average to me, although design a book cover for a book about great book covers is obviously a daunting task. The designer decided to use pieces of the covers inside to create a collage of ‘great book covers’ for his cover.
The inside of the book however is beautifully done. Large images of the covers themselves (most being photos of actual books, not computer-generated files, which adds a certain charm and physicality to them) are given plenty of breathing space next to concise, informative text. One of my favorite parts of the book is that all referenced book titles that have corresponding pictures are in BLUE CAPITALS. This makes it very easy to know when to look up and see what the author is talking about. The designers took this second color one step further in helping the reader – end notes are marked in tiny blue superscript. Being a lighter color these are easy to read past as you are reading, but easy to find later when you are looking for them.
All in all this is a great book with some fantastic designs and a good history on book design here in America.
Here are a few of my favorites mentioned in the book:
(Note: Ned and Paul did a great job collecting cover images – many of which can’t be found online (I know, I just looked))