Last month, we spotted lots of "women's fiction" book jackets with cover models who were photographed from behind. Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Karen Heller has spotted them, too, and conflates that trend with the "disjointed body parts" cover trend of a few years back to come up with an overarching conspiracy theory:

"The thinking, or so I imagine, is that readers will look at these women's body parts or backs and identify. 'Why that's me!' or 'That looks just like my old friend Susie!' In other words, they think we're stupid."

Other than that, her argument pretty much boils down to "I really like Katie Crouch's Girls in Trucks, which means it can't be chick lit, so why does it have a chick lit cover?" Then there's the curious assertion that "if [publishers] would banish the uniform covers... and realize that women—who buy an awful lot of books—will buy ones without pink or shoes or severed body parts on the cover, they might sell a good deal more copies." In the meantime, maybe Heller can start a book club with Maureen Dowd and Jane Smiley.

What do you think?

When The Runner and Only Love Can Break Your Heart showed up together in my mailbox, I was impressed not only that David Samuels was getting two hardcover nonfiction books published simultaneously, but that he'd designed the jackets himself—so, I asked him recently, is that his own handwriting on the cover? No, he emailed back:

"It is a freehand approximation of the handwriting of the 1980s graffiti artist and clothing designer Stephen Sprouse that was scanned into a computer and reformatted as a character set. I have always loved Sprouse's handwriting and I thought there was something about the Sprousian sensibility that connected with my own writing style."

Samuels had originally recruited Milton Glaser to do the cover design, but after some creative differences emerged, he decided to tackle the project himself—negotiating into his contract with the New Press that he'd get three tries at creating his own covers before they approached anyone else. "I felt confident that I had enough command of the basic language of design to turn out something that would speak to the reader about the form and content of the work, though my chief virtue as a designer is probably the fact that I read my own books," he says. The American flag on Only Love Can Break Your Heart is his handiwork, drawn in magic marker in a deliberate homage to Gore Vidal's United States; "I wanted it to look like a version of Vidal's book as imagined by a precocious, sullen punk rock fan in the back of his high school English class."

He adds that the books were always conceived of as one grand project. "The idea was to publish a Slouching Towards Bethlehem-style collection in tandem with an LP version of one piece to form a two volume set of my American-themed works, " he explains, observing that in practice, readers often wind up liking one volume way more than the other: "Reviewers who love The Runner tend to be a bit bored by the collection, and reviewers who love the collection see The Runner as baggy and too personal." You can judge for yourself tonight at Brooklyn's Book Court, where Samuels will be reading from at least one of his books...

"The bodies we have are the first things we take for granted," David Macaulay said to a cluster of media folks gathered in a private dining room at the Landmarc, "and they're probably the most amazing things we'll ever have." We'd been brought in to meet the author-illustrator months in advance of the publication of his next book with Houghton Mifflin, The Way We Work, in which he applies his genius for explaining mechanical structures to human anatomy. "It's really for anybody with a body," he quipped about the book, adding, "I didn't know anything about the body when I started this book. I didn't know where the pancreas was, for example, or what it does." He learned, of course, but "my friends at Houghton have saked me not to go into how the digestive system works here at lunch."

Instead, he told us (among other things) about the long quest to create just the right cover image. The smaller image above is the one that was on the cover of the blad we all received, but "that jacket had gotten more and more complicated," he observed, "and less indicative of what was actually in the book." So he went back to a classic Macaulay cover design for inspiration, and we all agreed that this new version (right) should prove quite eye-catching when the book arrives in October.

(Well, okay, when he came over to our table, Macaulay did in fact wax rhapsodic about the compact elegance of the small intestine's design, but I figured that's not quite publishing industry talk. And, anyway, he tells it a lot better than I could, so wait for the book to come out.)

You might remember back in November, when I did a post about T-shirts as a book jacket trend, including Unmarketable: Brandalism, Copyfighting, Mocketing, and the Erosion of Integrity. It's taken a while, but apparently the book has found an audience in Malibu, as Pam Anderson relaxes on her patio...

Naturally, bloggers are all set to bring the snark, from the mildly ironic "Ouch... my head hurts!" to outright cruel comments like "At least she's reading that book right-side up." (In response to one observer's suggestion that "they should dump the old cover and have this one as the new cover, because the book is still in there, but this also has a girl's hot ass in a bikini," somebody who might very well be Anne Elizabeth Moore drops by to say, "If the photographer gets in touch, I will totally see about changing the cover.") Meanwhile, the folks at New Press are no doubt hoping this'll be just like the time Posh was spotted with a copy of Skinny Bitch...

When I first started posting about those trendy backside covers, one of the first examples cited was Allison Winn Scotch's The Department of Lost and Found. The paperback cover, it turns out, is quite a departure from the one on the hardcover, and Winn Scotch explained why the switch was made on her blog yesterday. Well, actually, she explains how she's come to live with the switch:

"I've come not only to accept the new cover, but I've even come to like it... as much as I'm going to like a cover that I probably wouldn't grab from the shelf," she writes. "Book marketing is a tricky thing... no one is quite sure what will sell a book... and if the marketing department thinks that this image, which in my mind is very evocative of a Jodi Picoult book and which is certainly good company to keep, will do the trick, then it's a-okay with me."

Then she explains that Avon is looking to reach "moms in the Midwest and book club readers and a whole slew of folks who felt alienated by the other image," and "if it's putting out this cover so that the words inside the book reach more people, well, that's the whole point of this thing anyway, isn't it?" So she's good to go.

Yesterday, I asked if anybody knew of a Go Fug Yourself for book cover art—and about five minutes after I hit the publish button, I remembered that my friends at Smart Bitches, Trashy Books have been poking fun at romance covers for just over three years now. Here's an excerpt from one of their most recent outbursts, in response to the cover for A Warrior's Taking:

"Behold, the Avon checklist: Mullet? Check. Black pants, no shirt? Check. Heroine with absurdedly big, absurdedly curly hair? Check. Off the shoulder dress with possibly surgically augmented boobs about to burst forth in nippulous delight? Check and double check. Barefoot and showing of flexed calf? Check. Ribbons flying out in a flirty approximation of girly erection? Check."

Speaking of romance covers, I also got a note from Marianne Mancusi about a segment she'd produced for Better.TV that goes backstage at Dorchester to reveal how those sweeping illustrations are created, using C. L. Wilson's Queen of Song and Souls as an example. Watch for the wall of covers!

But back to the merciless evisceration: There's Judge A Book By Its Cover, which is written by a staff member at a public library, and covers a slightly wider range of genre material. And the commentary at this gallery of bad covers is a bit hit or miss, but there's some snappy one-liners in there, if you can bring yourself to look at enough aesthetic trainwrecks. I tried to comfort myself in the knowledge that I was getting paid for it, and I still had trouble pressing forward.

After perusing ABA's Bookselling this Week I noticed that Collins' Gorgeously Green by Sophie Uliano seems to be dueling it out with HarperCollins' The Red Leather Diary by Lily Koppel for the most ink in the April monthlies and pushing aside most of the other competition.

Uliano's work is perfectly poised for the ladies mags with all the hoopla about going green and it being Earth Day and all on April 22nd. As for Koppel, the packaging is gorgeous, and the voyeuristic/snooping thrill of rifling through a discarded diary is showing its mass appeal in much the same way that led to the success of Griffin and Sabine.

Greenleaf Book Group has launched a new website called "Rate My Book Cover" where you get to judge potential book covers created by independent presses and self-publishers before they get to market—because, as the distributor's CEO, Clint Greenleaf, says in the press release, "the vast majority of books are simply not packaged well enough to compete with other forms of entertainment and packaged information." He adds that Greenleaf rejects more than 90 percent of the books submitted to it for distribution because they're so badly packaged the company knows it won't be able to do anything with them. The idea behind the new site is to provide those publishers with objective, if unscientific feedback about whether or not they should really take that cover design to the printers.

It's a fine enough idea, as far as it goes, but I want more: I want a Go Fug Yourself for book covers. In fact, given the limits of my knowledge, I wouldn't be surprised if that site already exists, and I just need somebody to tell me about it.

All the hoopla over National Poetry Month reminded me about how much I love the book design on Toby Barlow's Sharp Teeth, a novel-length blank verse poem about werewolves in Los Angeles. Shortly after the book came out, senior HarperCollins designer Christine Van Bree had been kind enough to explain to me how she had taken the core elements of the illustration Natasha Michaels had done for the cover Suzanne Dean designed for Heinemann's UK edition and applied it directly to a raspberry textured paper over board, with three different pigments of foil stamping—black for the dog's body, silver for its teeth, and white for the hand-lettered type. Putting all the blurbs—and this is probably the only book that comes with public endorsements from Nick Hornby, Michael Moorcock, and David Mamet—in red and white type on a black background was the result, Van Bree added, of a suggestion from editor Jennifer Barth, and production director Roni Axelrod worked closely with the printers to make sure all their creative intentions were fully realized. The result is, quite honestly, one of the handsomest books, on the level of the physical object, likely to be published all year.

Oh, yeah, and it's a damn good story, too.

When Ildefonso Falcones's Cathedral of the Sea showed up in my mailbox last week, I thought, wow, Dutton really wants to push that Ken Follett comparison, don't they? Eventually, I realized that I was subconsciously conflating the twin "pillars" in the World Without End cover with the image of the cathedral for The Pillars of the Earth, and that echoed with the "between-the-arches" perspective on the Cathedral jacket. But I also figured out that they're totally using the same typeface for both authors. The only difference is that the first letters in the Falcones cover are slightly larger.

As it happens, while Dutton did subtly work that typographical resonance in, the cover art concept actually goes back to the original Spanish-language edition.