A few of my favourite’s are Freud’s biography of Leonardo da Vinci and The Hidden Persueders about American culture being imported into Britain and how to avoid being sucked in.

It’s such a shame there is no major publisher brining out these kind of titles now, whatever happened to Pelicans?

One in particular stays with me as perfectly evocative of the book’s content and style (surely the first job of cover art is to expound the story and style of the novel! – I hate abstract covers). Besides being beautifully rendered, it is spare and dark and frightening.

The cover of JG Ballard’s ‘The Wind From Nowhere’ perfectly dramatizes the book’s theme. The slightly stylized image of a Challenger tank flying through the air is inseparable in my memory from the experience of reading the book.

Five minutes searching on Google found a good image of this and several other Ballard covers on this blog:

http://theentropytango.wordpress.com/2008/07/15/jg-ballard-box-set-inc-the-wind-from-nowhere-the-drowned-world-the-terminal-beach-and-the-drought/

If you love good graphic art you should take a look – these covers are stunning.

For me, the odd gem notwithstanding, these pale in comparison with the illustrative genius of Dick Bruna (who does the Miffy books which were blatantly ripped off by Sanrio’s Hello Kitty.)

I just discovered here:

http://www.creativereview.co.uk/cr-blog/2007/may/penguin-by-designers-david-pelham

that he did them himself – (along with the classic cover of Clockwork Orange and a ton of other fantastic work).

http://www.totalcardboard.com/book_cover_gallery.htm

Pelican books were an incredible resource of learned information; a whole reference library available from your local bookshop, at prices realistic even at pocket-money levels

I wonder how many of those titles made money for Penguin?

It’s just wonderful that the series existed at all; publishing at its very, very best.

But as we went on I noticed both the art and the ideas from clients got lazier and lazier, visually lkess interesting and eventually homogenous – in regards to style, identity etc etc.

Working with coarse halftone printers and clunky GTOs, creating bromides on 300PPI lasers, having to use pasteups – they can create a much more interesting effect. Hell give me “four colour process” on four copiers with different coloured toners over a Fiery RIP and a Xerox A-series.

I think it’s sad that many course now seem to skip the hands on visual studies and design fundamentals – which include pasting up type, so you can get a feel for kerning and leading, negative space etc – in favour of easily available technology.

Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium is the Massage is a great example of paste-up / early typesetting smacking down the notion that technology has somehow made for a richer visual landscape, rather than glossier colours and substanceless pap.

A freakin’ excellent repository of book covers.

http://theentropytango.wordpress.com/