34: John Heartfield, part V
November 29, 2010
This week we’ll look at some John Heartfield designed covers he did for publishers other than Malik-Verlag. The covers here are from two other Berlin publishing houses: Verlag für Literatur…
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Judging Books by Their Covers
Judging Books by Their Covers is Josh MacPhee's ongoing series of writings and image collections of book covers. Although sometimes they feel marginal today, books have been a primary form of information and cultural exchange for almost 400 years. Book covers are often a person's first contact with the ideas inside, and in the hustle and bustle of contemporary life, cover designs are even more likely to shape the opinions of those that pick them up since many of us are too busy to ever read the entirety of the books. Judging Books by Their Covers largely focuses on—but is not exclusive to—the book covers and design coming out of the Left.
Josh is always looking for more book covers to feature. If you've got some gems he missed, or have ideas, drop him an email at josh (at) justseeds.org 
33: John Heartfield, part IV
November 22, 2010
Part four of the Heartfield covers, part two of the Upton Sinclair ones. Now we’re up to 1928, in which Malik Verlag published three separate Upton Sinclair books: Die…
32: John Heartfield, part III
November 15, 2010
One of the main authors Malik-Verlag published was Upton Sinclair, and Heartfield designed ALL of Sinclair’s covers. This week will do part one of Sinclair, next week the rest. Let’s…
31: John Heartfield, part II
November 8, 2010
Here’s the next batch of Heartsfield’s Malik-Verlag covers. The one to the right is a favorite, Franz Carl Weiskopf’s Umsteigen ins 21. Jahrhundert: Episoden von einer Reise durch die Sowjetunion….
30: John Heartfield, part I
November 1, 2010
Sometime in the early 1990s I was introduced to the photomontages of John Heartfield. The stark black and white collage work meshed well with my punk aesthetic tastes at the…
29: Spanish Civil War Publications
October 25, 2010
A couple years back I was checking out a Robert Capa exhibition at the International Center for Photography in NYC and they had a small backroom with an auxiliary exhibition…
28: Futurist Books, part II
October 18, 2010
Here’s part two of the Futurist books. Marinetti’s books in particular get more violent and aggressive in this period, with references to bombs, words exploding across the page, etc. There…
27: Futurist Books, part I
October 11, 2010
Now lets take a quick stop over in Italy. When I was in Rome a couple years back for an exhibition (at the excellent House of Love and Dissent), I…
26: Action
October 4, 2010
Let’s stay in France this week, and check out the covers of Action, the newspaper developed by the Comités d’ Action during May 68. The first Comités were developed as…
25: Roman Cieslewicz, Part III
September 27, 2010
Here’s the final installment (for now), on Polish poster artist and designer Roman Cieslewicz. In 1968 Cieslewicz was invited to design the cover style for a new line of philosophy,…
24: Roman Cieslewicz, part II
September 20, 2010
Part two on Polish poster artist and designer Roman Cieslewicz. Before leaving for Paris, Cieslewicz was the art director for the Polish cultural magazine Ty i Ja (You and I)….
23: Roman Cieslewicz, Part I
September 13, 2010
Let’s take a quick break from US publications and skip over to Europe. A couple years back I discovered the Polish poster artist and designer Roman Cieslewicz. Although well known…
22: Radical America
September 6, 2010
Here’s another installment of covers of a periodical, this time Radical America, which began as an organ of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in 1967, and then ran into…
21: The Drama Review
August 30, 2010
Back at the end of June I was in Toronto, strangely at an academic performance art conference to talk about the Spectres of Liberty project, and their was a table…
20: Westerns
August 23, 2010
Now for a slight break from the usual program. When I was out in Wisconsin a couple years back for a wedding we stumbled upon a small town library book…
19: B. Traven, part VI
August 16, 2010
Ahh, the final installment of the covers of Mr. Berick Traven, or Ret Marut, or Otto Feige, or Hal Croves? No one has yet been able to fully pin down…
18: B. Traven, part V
August 9, 2010
For part 5 of the B. Traven covers, I’m going to focus on a number of his lesser known novels (He wrote five or six outside of the Treasure of…
17: B. Traven, part IV
August 2, 2010
Recapping last week: In the decade from 1931 to 1940, B. Traven published a series of six books known as his Jungle Novels: Government (1931), The Carreta (aka The Cart)…
16: B. Traven, part III
July 26, 2010
In the decade from 1931 to 1940, B. Traven published a series of six books known as his Jungle Novels: Government (1931), The Carreta (aka The Cart) (1931), March to…
15: B. Traven, part II
July 19, 2010
Next up in the B. Traven book cover-athon is The Death Ship. My favorite Traven novel (well, maybe a tie with The Rebellion of the Hanged), The Death Ship is…