Jackets Required: Love Today
By Fwis -- Publishers Weekly, 6/18/2008 2:16:00 PM
This is the latest installment in a weekly column by Fwis, a graphic design group that blogs on book jacket design. The Fwis designers judge a recent book by its cover each week on PublishersWeekly.com.
Title: Love Today: Stories
Designer: Barbara deWilde
Author: Maxim Biller
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
The French dramatist Jean Anouilh once said “There is love of course. And then there’s life, its enemy.”
Maxim Biller makes his American debut with Love Today, a collection of stories about love lost and love regained. A series of fictions which demonstrate the indomitability of romance and life’s inability to get in its way. One of the stories, for instance, reunites grade school sweethearts who find each other later in life on the verge of becoming middle aged.
Its cover cleverly depicts this by way of treating the physical space as a metaphor for the stories themselves. Turn the book over and you’ll see the lost “O” waiting patiently to be reunited with its former whole. This designed interaction with the plot makes for a wonderful “a-ha!” moment on the part of the potential reader.
Where the concept soars, the delivery falls a bit short, however. The harsh black and white of the letters along with the rigid grid and absolute absence of visual foreplay leaves one wondering if this isn’t something more akin to a primer on the periodic table of elements; let alone a book which deals with that most endearing and enduring of emotions.
