I am no stranger to book covers. Having designed the covers in two book series, this has sparked some fun discussions with my friend Kaz over the evolution of cover design, especially in theology and philosophy books.
Most book covers until recent times have been about careful text placement on usually a single-color background. To illustrate just a few examples, see, for instance, the bright red cover to the Krell-edited Basic Writings of Heidegger; the simple large text upon white of Charles Taylor’s Hegel and Modern Society; the original cover to Hauerwas’ The Peaceable Kingdom, which ups the ante a bit by applying a radial orange-yellow gradient; the highly recognizeable two-tone covers of Princeton’s Kierkegaard Writings series with SK’s portrait at the two-tone intersection. And from here, more multi-tone and pictures are introduced so that there really does not seem to be much of a limit in design any longer, outside of the usual printing costs.
Enter Continuum Press, namely, their Continuum Impacts series. These are reprints of well-known philosophical texts that have already established themselves in the history of philosophy, most of them being within the wider contintental tradition, with plenty of exceptions, theological and otherwise (Erasmus and Luther on Free Will, Barth, Schillebeeckx, Gandhi, et. al.). To see a slapdash view of all of the covers in this series, click here (after quickly extracting all the ISBN’s, I whipped up a short PHP script to display all the books in the series).
I’m curious, what do you think about the covers in this series? What say you?!
Update: Anthony has alerted me to a post he wrote three years ago on the same subject, with funny and appropriate commentary worth checking out.
Thanks for the shout out! As I browse through my own library it is always fun to see the differences between books published twenty years ago and those published yesterday. From Time to Playboy publishers have long been familiar with making use of photographic overlays and creative textual design. So why has it been that only recently have they thought of putting pictures on the front of book covers? Or is it just that more academic publishing houses are now joining the media revolution of the latter half of the twentieth century?
The Continuum volumes are eye catching to be sure. The almost comicbook-like font, however, is what really gets me. The covers look like thought bubbles from an issue of The Amazing Spiderman.
By comparison, the Veritas and Interventions series (from Eerdman’s and SCM Press respectively) have some unusual covers among them–the little guy in the lint trap comes to mind–with a mixture of more simple (and perhaps metaphorical) images of objects (an apple, a needle, a pair of slippers) and more bizarre, almost cartoonish arrangements (the guy in the lint trap, Peter Baker’s smashed face).
We’ve come a long way I suppose. Or maybe this is the result of a world brimming with freelance graphic designers with bootlegged versions of Photoshop. Either way, I prefer solid color arrangements–they look better in my color coded bookshelf system–than the more quixodic book covers that make everything look like a Stephen King novel.
For the record, I bought my copy of Photoshop 7.
On second thought, I think we need a series of books with autestereogrammatic covers. That’s the future, I’m sure of it.
Well, many of the Deleuze and Badiou books I own have those covers; and I quite like them. The biggest problem I have with the series is that the actual text is really small; they cram large books into a small amount of pages.
http://www.adamkotsko.com/weblog/2005/03/continuums-changing-minds-series-or.html
Nearly three years ago I wrote about this. I hate those covers so much. Except the new edition of Guattari’s The Three Ecologies. That cover is sick. Oh, and Micheal is right.
Anthony,
Oh sheesh, my post is nearly identical to yours, even mentioning the Princeton Kierkegaard works. Honestly never saw your original post (didn’t start reading the Weblog until late 2006). Kinda embarrassing but yeah… I’ll bump your original link in the post itself.
Ha, no, no, no. I wasn’t saying that! Just was putting the link as my response to your “what do you think?” question.
Yeah I know, I just think it’s funny and bizarre.
I for one, am delighted that decent to really good graphic design has found its way onto the covers of books in this genre. Another publisher that really focused on great cover design has been Brazos press. I tend to really like their books and I’m glad they make the effort to wrap great books in great design. With the one exception of “Unleashing the Scriptures” all of Stanley Hauerwas’ early books were absolutely HIDEOUS… and yet what gems lie inside!
Well, given that Continuum are competing with Routledge Classics, I reckon they’ve done an OK job. I just think it’s brilliant they try to hide how extremely difficult to read some of these books are by giving them bubble writing! The title is particularly jarring against Bataille on Nietzsche. I got funny looks when I read that on the train…
Yeah, it’s a mix for me. Some of them I think a great, but for the most part the covers themselves look ridiculous to me, as if the designers all listen to Atreyu and other emo-core/metal stuff and have adopted their aesthetic for the album art. It’s a decent effort, I just think they tried too hard. As Kaz pointed out in a passing link, the Diary of a Seducer cover is pretty dumb.
Step 1: Desaturate a bit (or all the way)
Step 2: Increase contrast
Step 3: add errata: scratches, or splatter, or fold marks, or ‘tears’
Voila!
Covers aside, I too dig what Continuum is doing with the series in general by making these titles available and making them cheaper and stuff. I’m all for it.
Oh, and I quite like the covers for the Theology and Philosophy series that Kotsko is in, too.
I always thought the Peaceable Kingdom cover looked like it should be the cover for an 80’s B horror movie.
Hey, this post caught my eye as a graphic designer. I think a lot of the images are pretty arresting–I like the Irigaray, the Bloom, and Deleuze with the butterflies. But the font—and the fact that they use OUTLINES!! is craptastic. Outlines have no place in typography. Maybe they were going for a pop-y relatable look, but they didn’t have to go so cheezy with the font. And the fact that they change the font sizes to make the name span the whole cover is a kind of crazy and kind of very bad idea. They needed to rein it in a little and use a grid or something.