Columbia University Press

Congratulations to our design department for being selected by jurors of Association of American University Press’s Book, Jacket, and Journal Show as the very best examples … of excellent design.”

The winners included Let the Meatballs Rest: And Other Stories About Food and Culture by Massimo Montanari; translated by Beth A. Brombert for scholarly typographic and LoveKnowledge: The Life Philosophy from Socrates to Derrida, by Roy Brand for its jacket. The book’s jacket (see below) also won an award in the 2013 New York Book Show in the category of Professional and Scholarly Books:

Earlier this week we featured the cover for Atlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City. In the following post, Julia Kushnirsky, the book’s designer, describes the thinking behind this beautifully evocative cover:

Atlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City is translated from Chinese and is an imagined literary history of Hong Kong.

The author sent us a cover of the Chinese edition that was published in Hong Kong. We felt that the significance of the bird may not be familiar to American readers, and we wanted a bolder, literary look.

I liked the concept of showing a map with the section of Hong Kong missing since it gave the reader a sense of wanting to discover the lost city. I decided to choose historic images to show the archaeological aspect of the book. I had found an antique map of Hong Kong that was created in 1841 by Captain Edward Belcher, which added to the sense of discovery and adventure felt by the explorers of the 18th century.

To “age” the black and white image I gave it a sepia tone. I wanted to fill the “missing” section of the map with a nostalgic image of the “vanished” city. I found an original hand tinted photograph of Hong Kong harbor circa 1900. It was beautifully naturally faded with sepia tones that worked really well with the map.

Finally for the title type I wanted it have movement and handwritten quality as if someone wrote across the map with a quill pen. For the final jacket design I added ragged yellowed edges to the flaps and splotches of ink on the spine and back flap.

Our printer, Coral Graphics did a beautiful job picking up the colors and adding dimension with matte and gloss effect.

Our featured cover this week is from Atlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City, by Dung Kai-cheung. The cover was designed by Julia Kushnirsky.

Each week, we are to showcasing one of our new covers. The above is from Hospitality of the Matrix: Philosophy, Biomedicine, and Culture, by Irina Aristarkhova.

From time to time, we like to showcase one of our covers. The above is from Electric Dreamland: Amusement Parks, Movies, and American Modernity, by Lauren Rabinovitz. The cover was designed by Julia Kushnirsky.

The Association of American University Presses recently announced winners from its book, jacket, and journal show, awarding four awards to Columbia University for jacket design.

Congratulations to our excellent design department! Here are the winning jackets:

(Designer: Chang Jae Lee)

(Designer: Martin Hinze)

(Designer: Julia Kushnirsky)

(Designer: Chang Jae Lee)

Perhaps we are indulging a bit in hyperbole with our headline but as noted in Galleycat, it seems like other publishers are catching on to the remarkable photographs of Cara Barer.

We used one of her photographs for Ted Striphas’s The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture from Consumerism to Control and Other Press has just published with Beg, Borrow, Steal: A Writer’s Life, by Michael Greenberg, which also uses one of Barer’s images for the cover.

Over at his blog, Ted Striphas admits that the cover has almost received as much attention as the book’s content. Striphas writes,

Some writers would be put off by this, believing that what really counts is the stuff that lies between the covers. Not I. I’m acutely aware that books are meant to be sold as much as they’re meant to be read. In fact, in my undergraduate “Cultures of Books and Reading Class,” I have an assignment in which I ask my students to “judge a book by its cover” — that is, to explain what they can learn about a book and its audience strictly by virtue of its design.

(more…)

The New Yorker‘s blog The Book Bench recently featured Cao Naiqian’s There’s Nothing I Can Do When I Think of You Late at Night in their “Well Titled, Well Covered” feature.

Here’s how they explain their criteria for their well titled, well covered selections: “The art of writing a good title is a subtle one: it has to be intriguing enough to make you want to pick up the book and find out exactly what it’s about, but not so bizarre that you don’t already have an intimation. It also helps if the book has an unusual or striking cover.”

Scroll through to the fifth slide to see the cover to There’s Nothing I Can Do When I Think of You Late at Night , which the Book Bench calls “haunting” or see it below:

The New York Times featured Gastropolis: Food and New York City, edited by Annie Hauck-Lawson and Jonathan Deutsch, in their roundup of New York City books and gave special praise for the book’s delightful cover (see right).

From the article:

Few cities offer as much food for thought as New York. Now comes “Gastropolis: Food and New York City” (Columbia University Press, $29.95). The work, edited by Annie Hauck-Lawson and Jonathan Deutsch, two City University professors, is a veritable feast.

“New Yorkers have formed relationships with food that have helped shape the identity of their great city,” they write. “Whether you find yourself extracting the last slurp from the paper cup at the Lemon Ice King in Corona, eating fiery Jamaican jerk chicken fresh off the oil-drum grills at Badoo’s in Flatbush or enjoying a cool ocean breeze with a Nathan’s hot dog in hand on the Coney Island boardwalk, New York City allows the edible sensibility of traveling the world.”

…This is one book you can tell by its cover: a delightful illustration by Monica Gurevich of a city where you can eat your heart out.

Several Columbia University Press titles won awards in the New York Book Show. The awards are sponsored by the Bookbinders’ Guild of New York and recognize excellence in book production and design. The winners for book design were Four Jews on Parnassus — A Conversation: Benjamin, Adorno, Schonberg, by Carl Djerassi and The Hudson: America’s River, by Frances Dunwell.

The winners for book covers were: Kissing Cousins: A New Kinship Bestiary, by Frances Bartkowski, Shivers Down Your Spine: Cinema, Museums, and the Immersive View, by Alison Griffiths, and Philosophy in Turbulent Times: Canguilhem, Sartre, Foucault, Althusser, Deleuze, Derrida by Elisabeth Roudinesco.

Here are the winning covers: