Your favorite book designs?

[Coelacanth]

Also this wonderful embossed hb from Félix Labisse's UK biography.



This has been posted on another part of this forum, but I wrote a piece around it and a few other nice bits of broadly 'horror' design — including Malpertuis and the Parker ouija board — here, if anyone didn't see it.

[Coelacanth]

Hm, I can see the links there didn't work. Here's the images:

[Coelacanth]

The cover for Darkness Visible uses a painting from the Australian artist Russell Drysdale which fits in perfectly with a rather hallucinatory passage from the book, but I thought some of his other works worth sharing too -- swerving off-topic massively.

Desert Children (1958)



The Rabbiters (1947)

[bendk]

This is a relatively inexpensive paperback, but the interior design is outstanding. It is filled with period illustrations and photographs from 'the good old days' along with text describing the incidents.

It reminds me of this passage by Ligotti from Conspiracy.


There will come a day for each of us—and then for all of us—when the future will be done with. Until then, humanity will acclimate itself to every new horror that comes knocking, as it has done from the very beginning. It will go on and on until it stops. And the horror will go on, with generations falling into the future like so many bodies into open graves. The horror handed down to us will be handed down to others like a scandalous heirloom. Being alive: decades of waking up on time, then trudging through another round of moods, sensations, thoughts, cravings—the complete gamut of agitations—and finally flopping into bed to sweat in the pitch of dead sleep or simmer in the phantasmagorias that molest our dreaming minds.

[bendk]

This is one of my favorite book designs. I am a fan of 20s-30s Disney animation and Fleischer Studios. This book has the story of the Disney cartoon accompanied by cells from the animation. I think the book is pricey now. I also have most of the Mickey Mouse Annuals from the 30s. They are beautifully illustrated with ingenious page layouts. My familiarity with this work has given me a better appreciation of the art of Al Columbia who draws from this source.



This book is also wonderfully designed. It is a facsimile of the 1935 Mickey Mouse Movie Stories Volume II. It was published in 1988 with an introduction by Maurice Sendak. It is also inexpensive!

[miguel1984]

[miguel1984]

Covers by Mike Mignola.