Blessed Water by Margot Douaihy. Cover design by Will Staehle
This is a follow-up to Scorched Grace which came out last year and also has an amazing cover. What’s not to love about this? A nun smoking a cig and taking a one-handed Polaroid shot of a crime scene all encompassed in a moody vaporwave/synthwave color palette. Plus I’m a sucker for stained glass art.
Woman in the Sable Coat by Elizabeth Brooks. Cover design by Beth Steidle.
Those wiggly crossbars in the typography are everything. We know from the fur coat that this is going to be a period piece. Only seeing half the woman’s head gives a feeling of ~mystery~ and I’m pretty sure that’s blood splatter on those lilacs.
James by Percival Everett. Cover design by Emily Mahon.
The J is in a serif font with a very curly descender but then the top gets elongated, stretching into something more modern and that’s where the rest of the letters turn into a san serif font. The voluminous stem of the J reminds me of one of my favorite Ulysses covers by Edward McKnight Kauffer who is an American modernist graphic design. He was actively designing posters and books from the early 1910s to the 1950s and largely inspired by cubism, futurism, and vorticism. The vibe of the James cover feels a bit more like a kitschy contemporary version of a classic pocketbook and less refined compared to the Kauffer Ulysses cover. I could do a whole post on Ulysses’ covers.
The Tree Doctor by Marie Mutsuki. Cover Design by Kimberly Glyder.
I was very drawn to this artwork and the cover. I like the way the designer asymmetrically framed the artwork with color-blocking squares and waves. I need to know what folklore is behind this illustration. Here’s the original art piece by Cord Feder:
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I love to judge a book by its cover (though Neha has her qualms) - loved looking more closely at these covers! - Shruti