Pimples, buttocks, green blobs: what’s the best book cover of 2022? | From other media

De Volkskrant looks at the lists of the experts and makes a recommendation.

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How do you interpret the past year? Commentators look at geopolitical tensions, but it can also be done differently. Matt Dorfman does it using book covers. At the turn of the year, the art director of The New York Times Book Review selects his favorites from twelve months of book design, which he believes also say something about the state of the world.

Cover design by Christopher Sergio.

The theme of 2022 according to Dorfman: increasing noise, also in a visual sense. Designers need to stand out ‘while the world around them is shouting and self-promoting’. Whoever manages to do that without putting up a throat himself, deserves a place in Dorfman’s top-12. Like the New York designer Christopher Sergio, who put a simple but powerful red block on Philip Shorts biography Putin, combined with an almost imperceptibly corroded P, U, T, I and N.

Cover design by Alex Merto and Ian Woods.

The fact that Dorfman does not apply his criterion too dogmatically is proven by his choice of I Want to Keep Smashing Myself Until I Am Whole, an anthology from the oeuvre of Elias Canetti. Alex Merto and Ian Woods provided the collection with a refined cacophonous image that fits the title: in pieces and yet whole.

Cover design by Linda Huang.

Remarkably for a newspaper with the reach of The New York Times, Dorfman fishes in a relatively small pond: designers from outside the United States or England are rarely featured, some names return year after year. Regular customer Na Kim is present again, with an eye-catcher for Sheila Heti’s novel Pure Colour: a lithograph by Ellsworth Kelly (Vert, from 1965) that just barely swallows the title like a thick green blob.

Cover design by John Gall.

More spacious and more democratic is the traditional annual review of the digital literature platform The Literary Hub, which had 31 designers look back at 2022, including greats such as Jamie Keenan and – here she is again – Na Kim, who herself has six titles in the list . The result is a reasoned ranking of no less than 103 covers, with the Canetti cover by Merto and Woods at 1 again, equal to the sweet and sour Cupido variant on the cover of Tess Gunty’s The Rabbit Hutch, designed and illustrated by Linda Huang.

Cover design by Amanda Kain.

Lower on the list, but no less imaginative: the inverted balloons on Charles Simic’s poetry collection No Land in Sight (design John Gall), the pimple pattern on Laura Chinn’s childhood memories Acne (Amanda Kain) and the tasty peach on Heather Radkes Butts, a cultural-historical reflection about the bottom (Rodrigo Corral).

Butts A Backstory. Omslagontwerp door Rodrigo Corral.

In the Netherlands we know the election of the most beautiful book cover, which is organized for the eleventh time by the bookstore chain Libris under the motto ‘never judge a cover by its book’. No nominations by a professional jury this time: readers could nominate the best cover of 2022 online. The result will follow on January 24.

-Photo: Iris Koopmans

De Volkskrant’s favourite: the new, 16th edition of the Van Dale Groot dictionary of the Dutch language, an overwhelming design by Studio Joost Grootens that does everything differently than you would expect, but sacrifices nothing to readability.

Cover design by Rouwhorst + Van Roon.

For thirteen years, until last summer, Erik van den Berg wrote weekly about cover design in de Volkskrant. A lavishly illustrated selection from the section has now been published under the title Omslag (published by Hoogland & Van Klaveren, € 24.90). The design is by Rouwhorst + Van Roon. Lisa Kuitert, professor of book studies, wrote the foreword.

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