(US) If you’ve read Dangerously Naive blog for a while (thank you for having the time and patience) you will notice on all my rumblings that I like books, photography, painting, and graphic design by now, all hobbies that paid my bills at least in different chapters of my life (different continents), reading hopefully will someday payoff and improve my new comeback love affair with writing. I love Amazon.com, I use it a lot to get rare books and dvds, and they have the most unbeatable prices, being a very visual person, it helps me a lot to see an appetizing and engaging image that’ll hook me to open the pages of the book that I just bought or planning to checkout on my Amazon.com cart list.
Every year Amazon have a year-end Best Book Cover Contest, one of their “top tens” in dozen’s of categories including the main category- Best Books of the Year, this 2009, Let the Great World Spin, Colum McCann’s beautiful, moving novel of New York City in the ’70s topped the 100 editors of Amazon’s list for the book of the year. Below are the top contenders for the BEST BOOK COVER OF 2009 and the deadline is Dec. 7 for the winners, the other categories that are not featured in this article are the Best One of a Kind Covers, the Best Cover in Children & Teens, the Best Cover in Cooking, Food & Wine, the Best Cover with Famous Faces, the Best Cover from a Series and the Best Paperback Cover. My personal favorite (for anyone who cares to know) is book designer- Doogie Horner‘s take on the Jane Austin Classic, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: The Classic Regency Romance – Now with Ultraviolent Zombie Mayhem! should bag the top category, it surely made me buy 15 copies to give away this holiday season.This is one of those rare celebration of almost all the things I love (in one article), a celebration of the unseen and often underrated driving force (the designers) in giving your favorite books the artistic facelift it deserves.
Some Nominees for Best Cover in Arts & Comics
A Shadow Falls (Hardcover) Price: $31.50
Designer: Nick Brandt and Michelle Ishay
Photograph: Nick Brandt
Author: Nick Brandt
Publisher: Abrams
Book Description (source: https://www.amazon.com/):
In A Shadow Falls, which features 58 recent images in stunning, oversized tritone plates, Nick Brandt continues his ambitious and ongoing photographic project to memorialize the vanishing natural grandeur of East Africa. Brandt’s wide-screen panoramas of animals and landscapes capture an epic vision of Africa that has not been seen before. His iconic portraits of its majestic animals are filled with an empathy usually reserved for human subjects. In years to come, we will look back at these powerful photographs and wonder why humanity did not do more to preserve this rare corner of earthly paradise.
Asylum: Inside the Closed World of State Mental Hospitals (Hardcover) Price: $26.37
Designer: Scott-Martin Kosofsky and Betsy Sarles at the Philidor Company
Photograph: Christopher Payne
Author: Christopher Payne
Publisher: MIT Press
Book Description (source: https://www.amazon.com/):
For more than half the nation’s history, vast mental hospitals were a prominent feature of the American landscape. The blueprint for these hospitals was set by Pennsylvania hospital superintendant Thomas Story Kirkbride: a central administration building flanked symmetrically by pavilions and surrounded by lavish grounds with pastoral vistas. Kirkbride and others believed that well-designed buildings and grounds, a peaceful environment, a regimen of fresh air, and places for work, exercise, and cultural activities would heal mental illness. But in the second half of the twentieth century, after the introduction of psychotropic drugs and policy shifts toward community-based care, patient populations declined dramatically, leaving many of these beautiful, massive buildings–and the patients who lived in them–neglected and abandoned.
The Map as Art: Contemporary Artists Explore Cartography (Hardcover) Price: $29.70
Designer: Jane Jeszeck, Jigsaw
Painting: Jules de Balincourt
Author: Katharine Harmon
Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press
Book Description (source: https://www.amazon.com/):
Maps can be simple tools, comfortable in their familiar form. Or they can lead to different destinations: places turned upside down or inside out, territories riddled with marks understood only by their maker, realms connected more to the interior mind than to the exterior world. These are the places of artists’ maps, that happy combination of information and illusion that flourishes in basement studios and downtown galleries alike. It is little surprise that, in an era of globalized politics, culture, and ecology, contemporary artists are drawn to maps to express their visions. Using paint, salt, souvenir tea towels, or their own bodies, map artists explore a world free of geographical constraints.
Norman Rockwell: Behind the Camera (Hardcover) Price: $21.60
Designer: McCall Associates
Art and photographs: Normal Rockwell
Author: Ron Schick
Publisher: Little, Brown
Book Description (source: https://www.amazon.com/):
Norman Rockwell: Behind the Camera is the first book to explore the meticulously composed and richly detailed photographs that Norman Rockwell used to create his famous artworks. Working alongside skilled photographers, Rockwell acted as director, carefully orchestrating models, selecting props, and choosing locations for the photographs–works of art in their own right–that served as the basis of his iconic images. Readers will be surprised to find that many of his most memorable characters–the girl at the mirror, the young couple on prom night, the family on vacation–were friends and neighbors who served as his amateur models. In this groundbreaking book, author and historian Ron Schick delves into the archive of nearly 20,000 photographs housed at the Norman Rockwell Museum. Featuring reproductions of Rockwell’s black-and-white photographs and related full-color artworks, along with an incisive narrative and quotes from Rockwell models and family members, this book will intrigue anyone interested in photography, art, and Americana.
Asterios Polyp (Hardcover) Price: $19.77
Designer: David Mazzucchelli
Illustration: David Mazzucchelli
Author: David Mazzucchelli
Publisher: Pantheon
Book Description (source: https://www.amazon.com/):
Meet Asterios Polyp: middle-aged, meagerly successful architect and teacher, aesthete and womanizer, whose life is wholly upended when his New York City apartment goes up in flames. In a tenacious daze, he leaves the city and relocates to a small town in the American heartland. But what is this “escape” really about?
As the story unfolds, moving between the present and the past, we begin to understand this confounding yet fascinating character, and how he’s gotten to where he is. And isn’t. And we meet Hana: a sweet, smart, first-generation Japanese American artist with whom he had made a blissful life. But now she’s gone. Did Asterios do something to drive her away? What has happened to her? Is she even alive? All the questions will be answered, eventually.
Robert Frank: Portfolio (Paperback) Price: $13.60
Designer: Robert Frank and Gerhard Steidl
Author: Robert Frank
Publisher: Steidl/The Robert Frank Project
Book Description (source: https://www.amazon.com/):
When Robert Frank immigrated to New York from Zurich in 1947, having apprenticed with commercial photographers in his hometown, the aspiring young photographer brought along his portfolio to help him secure employment. Portfolio is the facsimile version of this fascinating object. Containing Frank’s earliest original photographs as well the work of other photographers which he had retouched, the portfolio presents images of rural life in Switzerland alongside alpine landscapes, cityscapes and still-lifes. A guaranteed collector’s item, this slim, beautifully printed volume contains the seeds of a career of such scope and influence that even the ambitious 23-year-old Robert Frank could never have anticipated it.
Some Nominees for Best Cover for Classics Reimagined
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: The Classic Regency Romance – Now with Ultraviolent Zombie Mayhem! (Paperback) Price: $7.77
Designer: Doogie Horner
Authors: Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith
Publisher: Quirk Books
Book Description (source: https://www.amazon.com/):
“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains.” So begins Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, an expanded edition of the beloved Jane Austen novel featuring all-new scenes of bone-crunching zombie mayhem. As our story opens, a mysterious plague has fallen upon the quiet English village of Meryton and the dead are returning to life! Feisty heroine Elizabeth Bennet is determined to wipe out the zombie menace, but she’s soon distracted by the arrival of the haughty and arrogant Mr. Darcy. What ensues is a delightful comedy of manners with plenty of civilized sparring between the two young lovers and even more violent sparring on the blood-soaked battlefield as Elizabeth wages war against hordes of flesh-eating undead. Can she vanquish the spawn of Satan? And overcome the social prejudices of the class-conscious landed gentry? Complete with romance, heartbreak, swordfights, cannibalism, and thousands of rotting corpses, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies transforms a masterpiece of world literature into something you’d actually want to read.
Miss Lonelyhearts & The Day of the Locust: (Revised) (New Directions Paperbook) (Paperback) Price: $8.60
Designer: Carin Goldberg
Author: Nathanael West
Publisher: New Directions
Book Description (source: https://www.amazon.com/):
Probably West’s most powerful work, Miss Lonelyhearts concerns a nameless man assigned to produce a newspaper advice column–but as time passes he begins to break under the endless misery of those who write in, begging him for advice. Unable to find answers, and with his shaky Christianity ridiculed to razor-edged shards by his poisonous editor, he tumbles into alcoholism and a madness fueled by his own spiritual emptiness. First published in 1933, Miss Lonelyhearts remains one of the most shocking works of 20th-century American literature, as unnerving as a glob of black bile vomited up at a church social : empty, blasphemous, and horrific. Set in New York during the Depression.
The Penguin Book of Gaslight Crime: Con Artists, Burglars, Rogues, and Scoundrels from the Time of Sherlock Holmes (Penguin Classics) (Paperback) Price: $10.20
Illustration: Jaya Miceli
Editor: Michael Sims
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Book Description (source: https://www.amazon.com/):
An exclusive collection–the first-ever gathering of rogues from the gaslight era–collected here for the first time: the best crime fiction from the gaslight era. All the legendary thieves are present–Arsène Lupin and A. J. Raffles, Colonel Clay and Simon Carne, Romney Pringle, Get Rich Quick Wallingford, and the Infallible Godahl–burgling London and Paris, conning New York and Ostend, laughing all the way to the bank. Also featured are stories by distinguished writers from outside the mystery and detective genres, including Sinclair Lewis, Arnold Bennett, H. G. Wells, and William Hope Hodgson.
The Wild Things (Hardcover) Price: $11.66
Designer: Dave Eggers
Eyes Illustration: Dave Eggers
Printer: Tien Wah Press, Singapore
Author: Dave Eggers
Publisher: McSweeney’s
Book Description (source: https://www.amazon.com/):
The Wild Things–based loosely on the storybook by Maurice Sendak and the screenplay cowritten with Spike Jonze–is about the confusions of a boy, Max, making his way in a world he can’t control. His father is gone, his mother is spending time with a younger boyfriend, his sister is becoming a teenager and no longer has interest in him. At the same time, Max finds himself capable of startling acts of wildness: he wears a wolf suit, bites his mom, and can’t always control his outbursts. During a fight at home, Max flees and runs away into the woods. He finds a boat there, jumps in, and ends up on the open sea, destination unknown. He lands on the island of the Wild Things, and soon he becomes their king. But things get complicated when Max realizes that the Wild Things want as much from him as he wants from them. Funny, dark, and alive, The Wild Things is a timeless and time-tested tale for all ages.
Pride and Prejudice (Bantam Classics) (Mass Market Paperback) Price: $4.95
Designer: Ruben Toledo
Author: Jane Austen
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Book Description (source: https://www.amazon.com/):
An iconic novel dressed in a fierce design by acclaimed fashion illustrator Ruben Toledo. Ruben Toledo’s breathtaking drawings have appeared in such high-fashion magazines as Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and Visionaire. Now he’s turning his talented hand to illustrating the gorgeous deluxe editions of three of the most beloved novels in literature. Here Elizabeth Bennet’s rejection of Mr. Darcy, Hester Prynne’s fateful letter “A”, and Catherine Earnshaw’s wanderings on the Yorkshire moors are transformed into witty and surreal landscapes to appeal to the novels’ aficionados and the most discerning designer’s eyes.
The Prince (Bantam Classics) (Mass Market Paperback) Price: $4.50
Designer: Jaya Miceli
Author: Niccolo Machiavelli
Translator: Tim Parks
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Book Description (source: https://www.amazon.com/):
A new translation of the infamous Renaissance classic, in a striking deluxe edition. The original blueprint for realpolitik, The Prince shocked sixteenth-century Europe with its advocacy of ruthless tactics for gaining absolute power and its abandonment of conventional morality. For this treatise on statecraft, Machiavelli drew upon his own experience of office under the turbulent Florentine republic, rejecting traditional values of political theory and recognizing the complicated, transient nature of political life. Concerned not with lofty ideals, but with a regime that would last, this seminal work of modern political thought retains its power to alarm and to instruct.
Some Nominees for Best Cover in Fiction
The Interrogative Mood: A Novel? (Hardcover) Price: $14.95
Designer: Alison Forner
Author: Padgett Powell
Publisher: Ecco
Book Description (source: https://www.amazon.com/):
“Are you happy? Do we need galoshes? Are bluebirds perfect? Do you know the distinctions, empirical or theoretical, between moss and lichen? Is it clear to you why I am asking you all these questions? Should I go away? Leave you alone? Should I bother but myself with the interrogative mood?”
The acclaimed writer Padgett Powell is fascinated by what it feels like to walk through everyday life, to hear the swing and snap of American talk, to be both electrified and overwhelmed by the mad cacophony–the “muchness”–of America. The Interrogative Mood is Powell’s playful and profound response, a bebop solo of a book in which every sentence is a question.
This Is Where I Leave You (Hardcover) Price: $17.13
Designer: Gray318
Author: Jonathan Tropper
Publisher: Dutton
Book Description (source: https://www.amazon.com/):
The death of Judd Foxman’s father marks the first time that the entire Foxman family–including Judd’s mother, brothers, and sister–have been together in years. Conspicuously absent: Judd’s wife, Jen, whose fourteen-month affair with Judd’s radio-shock-jock boss has recently become painfully public. Simultaneously mourning the death of his father and the demise of his marriage, Judd joins the rest of the Foxmans as they reluctantly submit to their patriarch’s dying request: to spend the seven days following the funeral together. In the same house. Like a family.
Let the Great World Spin: A Novel (Hardcover) Price: $14.47
Designer: Robbin Schiff and Anna Bauer
Drawing: Matteo Pericoli
Author: Colum McCann
Publisher: Random House
Book Description (source: https://www.amazon.com/):
In the dawning light of a late-summer morning, the people of lower Manhattan stand hushed, staring up in disbelief at the Twin Towers. It is August 1974, and a mysterious tightrope walker is running, dancing, leaping between the towers, suspended a quarter mile above the ground. In the streets below, a slew of ordinary lives become extraordinary in bestselling novelist Colum McCann’s stunningly intricate portrait of a city and its people.
Pygmy (Hardcover) Price: $14.58
Designer: Rodrigo Corral
Author: Chuck Palahniuk
Publisher: Doubleday
Book Description (source: https://www.amazon.com/):
The Manchurian Candidate meets South Park in Chuck Palahniuk’s finest novel since the generation-defining Fight Club.
“Begins here first account of operative me, agent number 67 on arrival Midwestern American airport greater _____ area. Flight _____. Date _____. Priority mission top success to complete. Code name: Operation Havoc.”
Thus speaks Pygmy, one of a handful of young adults from a totalitarian state sent to the United States, disguised as exchange students, to live with typical American families and blend in, all the while planning an unspecified act of massive terrorism. Palahniuk depicts Midwestern life through the eyes of this thoroughly indoctrinated little killer, who hates us with a passion, in this cunning double-edged satire of an American xenophobia that might, in fact, be completely justified. For Pygmy and his fellow operatives are cooking up something big, something truly awful, that will bring this big dumb country and its fat dumb inhabitants to their knees.
Lark and Termite [DECKLE EDGE] (Hardcover) Price: $16.32
Designer: Peter Mendelsund
Author: Jayne Anne Phillips
Publisher: Knopf
Book Description (source: https://www.amazon.com/):
A rich, wonderfully alive novel from one of our most admired and best-loved writers, her first book in nine years. Lark and Termite is set during the 1950s in West Virginia and Korea. It is a story of the power of loss and love, the echoing ramifications of war, family secrets, dreams and ghosts, and the unseen, almost magical bonds that unite and sustain us. At its center, two children: Lark, on the verge of adulthood, and her brother, Termite, a child unable to walk and talk but filled with radiance. Around them, their mother, Lola, a haunting but absent presence; their aunt Nonie, a matronly, vibrant woman in her fifties, who raises them; and Termite’s father, Corporal Robert Leavitt, who finds himself caught up in the chaotic early months of the Korean War.
Chronic City (Hardcover) Price: $18.45
Designer: Rodrigo Corral
Photograph: Scott Peterman courtesy of Higher Pictures
Author: Jonathan Lethem
Publisher: Doubleday
Book Description (source: https://www.amazon.com/):
The acclaimed author of Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude returns with a roar with this gorgeous, searing portrayal of Manhattanites wrapped in their own delusions, desires, and lies. Chase Insteadman, a handsome, inoffensive fixture on Manhattan’s social scene, lives off residuals earned as a child star on a beloved sitcom called Martyr & Pesty. Chase owes his current social cachet to an ongoing tragedy much covered in the tabloids: His teenage sweetheart and fiancée, Janice Trumbull, is trapped by a layer of low-orbit mines on the International Space Station, from which she sends him rapturous and heartbreaking love letters. Like Janice, Chase is adrift, she in Earth’s stratosphere, he in a vague routine punctuated by Upper East Side dinner parties.
Some Nominees for Best Cover in Nonfiction
Imperial (Hardcover) Price: $34.65
Designer: Paul Buckley
Photograph: Erika Larsen / Redux Pictures
Author: William T. Vollmann
Publisher: Viking
Book Description (source: https://www.amazon.com/):
It sprawls across a stinking artificial sea, across the deserts, date groves, and labor camps of southeastern California, right across the Mexican border. For generations of migrant workers, from Okies fleeing the Dust Bowl of the 1930s to Mexican laborers today, Imperial County has held the promise of paradise–and the reality of hell. It is a land beautiful and harsh, enticing and deadly, rich in history and heartbreak. Across the border, the desert is the same but there are different secrets. In Imperial, award-winning writer William T. Vollmann takes us deep into the heart of this haunted region, and by extension into the dark soul of American imperialism.
Zeitoun (Hardcover) Price: $14.47
Illustration: Rachell Sumpter
Author: Dave Eggers
Publisher: McSweeney’s
Book Description (source: https://www.amazon.com/):
When Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a prosperous Syrian-American and father of four, chose to stay through the storm to protect his house and contracting business. In the days after the storm, he traveled the flooded streets in a secondhand canoe, passing on supplies and helping those he could. A week later, on September 6, 2005, Zeitoun abruptly disappeared. Eggers’s riveting nonfiction book, three years in the making, explores Zeitoun’s roots in Syria, his marriage to Kathy–an American who converted to Islam–and their children, and the surreal atmosphere (in New Orleans and the United States generally) in which what happened to Abdulrahman Zeitoun was possible. Like What Is the What, Zeitoun was written in close collaboration with its subjects and involved vast research–in this case, in the United States, Spain, and Syria.
Vanished Smile: The Mysterious Theft of Mona Lisa [DECKLE EDGE] (Hardcover) Price: $16.47
Designer: Barbara de Wilde
Art: Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci, ca. 1503-06 (detail). Louvre, Paris, France. Giraudon / The Bridgeman Art Library
Author: R.A. Scotti
Publisher: Knopf
Book Description (source: https://www.amazon.com/):
On August 21, 1911, the unfathomable happened–Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa vanished from the Louvre. More than twenty-four hours passed before museum officials realized she was gone. The prime suspects were as shocking as the crime: Pablo Picasso and Guillaume Apollinaire, young provocateurs of a new art. As French detectives using the latest methods of criminology, including fingerprinting, tried to trace the thieves, a burgeoning international media hyped news of the heist.
1959: The Year Everything Changed (Hardcover) Price: $18.45
Designer: Susan Olinsky
Author: Fred Kaplan
Publisher: Wiley
Book Description (source: https://www.amazon.com/):
It was the year of the microchip, the birth-control pill, the space race, and the computer revolution; the rise of Pop art, free jazz, “sick comics,” the New Journalism, and indie films; the emergence of Castro, Malcolm X, and personal superpower diplomacy; the beginnings of Motown, Happenings, and the Generation Gap-all bursting against the backdrop of the Cold War, the fallout-shelter craze, and the first American casualties of the war in Vietnam.
The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon (Hardcover) Price: $18.15
Designer: John Fontana
Photograph: Beth Wald, Aurora Photos
Author: David Grann
Publisher: Doubleday
Book Description (source: https://www.amazon.com/):
A grand mystery reaching back centuries. A sensational disappearance that made headlines around the world. A quest for truth that leads to death, madness or disappearance for those who seek to solve it. The Lost City of Z is a blockbuster adventure narrative about what lies beneath the impenetrable jungle canopy of the Amazon.
After stumbling upon a hidden trove of diaries, acclaimed New Yorker writer David Grann set out to solve “the greatest exploration mystery of the twentieth century:” What happened to the British explorer Percy Fawcett and his quest for the Lost City of Z? dramatically, leaving many of these beautiful, massive building-and the patients who lived in them–neglected and abandoned.
Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City (Hardcover) Price: $18.15
Designer: Rodrigo Corral Design/Ben Wiseman
Illustration: Mark Stutzman
Author: Greg Grandin
Publisher: Metropolitan
Book Description (source: https://www.amazon.com/):
In 1927, Henry Ford, the richest man in the world, bought a tract of land twice the size of Delaware in the Brazilian Amazon. His intention was to grow rubber, but the project rapidly evolved into a more ambitious bid to export America itself, along with its golf courses, ice-cream shops, bandstands, indoor plumbing, and Model Ts rolling down broad streets. Fordlandia, as the settlement was called, quickly became the site of an epic clash. On one side was the car magnate, lean, austere, the man who reduced industrial production to its simplest motions; on the other, the Amazon, lush, extravagant, the most complex ecological system on the planet. Ford’s early success in imposing time clocks and square dances on the jungle soon collapsed, as indigenous workers, rejecting his midwestern Puritanism, turned the place into a ribald tropical boomtown. Fordlandia’s eventual demise as a rubber plantation foreshadowed the practices that today are laying waste to the rain forest.
https://www.amazon.com/
Related Entry: http://naiveboy.com/2009/11/06/armed-with-saliva-by-navo/
