So yesterday I went to London. I got to eat at Chipotle again. I bought a new microphone, which will hopefully do wonders for the quality of my podcasts. And I attended a party at Pan Macmillan for the launch of a cover redesign for China Miéville’s books. Cover design is a controversial subject in the blogosphere, and as usual people often assume that their personal taste must be, and should be, universal. There is, of course, a variety of tastes, and a variety of purposes for particular designs. I’d be interested to hear your views.
Photos of all of the covers are in my Twitter feed. My apologies for forgetting to tag them, but Aidan Moher has usefully blogged the full set. (The photos are actually of a set of postcards that the PanMac PR people were giving away at the event, and were taken on an iPhone with a close-up lens on Paddington station, which only partly excuses my crappy photography.)
Lovely deign work.
I don’t know if you know him, but, it might interest you to know that ‘The City and the City’ is available in Estonian. I bought it in English for myself and showed it to my IT student. We have been reading Si-Fi short stories together like Hannu Rajaniemi’s Elegy for a Young Elk. He was very interested in the Miéville book and just last week turned and announced that he had found it in translation in our bookstore. WOW!
Looks like they are aiming for the thriller market. That is *so* going to backfire when people read The Scar.
I’ve only read The Scar and The City and the City, and my initial reaction is that the one for the former gives way too much away, and the latter is just meh.
These made me think of this joking set of minimalist Harry Potter covers… but trying to find that page again, I just came across the actual new Bloomsbury Harry Potter covers. I guess this is the current fad in British book covers.