194: Scanlan’s
September 22, 2014
Scanlan’s Monthly was a New Left political/counter-cultural magazine that ran for eight issues and less than a year, March 1970 to January 1971. It was co-founded and co-edited by Warren…
Channel
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 
193: Curbstone Press, part V
September 15, 2014
For the first four weeks of looking at the output of Curbstone Press, I broke the books into semi-distinct categories: Roque Dalton and Curbstone’s origins, Claribel Alegría and other Latin…
192: Curbstone Press, part IV
September 8, 2014
Sometime in the late 1970s the editors at Curbstone must have crossed paths with a figure involved in political culture in Denmark. A series of poetry chapbooks by Danish authors…
191: Curbstone Press, part III
September 1, 2014
In 1981, Curbstone Press began publishing a series of small pamphlets of critical non-fiction writing by international practitioners of political art. This series, entitled Art on the Line, ran for…
190: Curbstone Press, part II
August 25, 2014
Curbstone was not just an independent poetry press, but it’s core mission was political, to publish and bring awareness to culture as a tool of struggle in Latin America. One…
189: Curbstone Press, part I
August 18, 2014
I was in a used bookshop in Denver in 1995 and I was looking in the poetry section for some reason. I have no memory as to why, I had…
188: Foreign Languages Press, part III
August 11, 2014
Here’s my final entry in the Foreign Languages Press series (not that there aren’t plenty more books put out by FLP—thousands, actually). You can see the other posts HERE. I…
187: Foreign Languages Press, part II
August 4, 2014
One of the main things that Foreign Languages Press books have in common is covers that attempt to meld the pastoral (peasants and peasant society) with the industrial (and technological),…
186: Foreign Languages Press, part I
July 28, 2014
Founded in 1952, three years after the Communist Revolution, Foreign Languages Press is one of the external propaganda arms of the Chinese Communist Party. They supposedly have published over 30,000…
185: Two from the Philippines
July 21, 2014
Over the past year I stumbled upon these two handsome books from the Philippines. Although they were published by different companies almost fifteen years apart, they both share a really…
184: The Hobo
July 14, 2014
I found this great book on a dollar rack here in New York City. It’s a 1961 edition (Phoenix Books, a division of the University of Chicago Press) of…
183: The Conflict Between Capital & Labor
July 7, 2014
This week I present to you this “Fair, Candid, and Impartial Treatment of the Subject [of the conflict between Capital and Labor] from a Non-partisan and Christian Standpoint”!! E.T. Russell’s…
182: The Golden Fleece
June 30, 2014
I’ve got a lot of longer-format book cover series in the works for the blog, but they are taking much longer than the one-week chunks I have been trying to…
181: Modern Arabic Writing, part II
June 16, 2014
Back in November 2013 I did a post on the cover designs of the American University in Cairo’s Modern Arabic Writing series circa 1990s (you can see it HERE). I…
180: Dover Science, part III
June 2, 2014
This week’s covers are from Dover Math books I’ve found over the past six months at Book Thug Nation bookstore. You can see the last two posts about Dover books…
179: Dover Science, part II
May 26, 2014
I keep running into more and more cool covers on Dover books about science and math (and some art…) from the 1950s/60s. I first looked at these almost a year…
178: Quebecois Authors
May 12, 2014
While I was in Québec City two weeks ago I found some nice examples of book covers from Québécois authors. I know very little about the Québec book trade, but…
177: Abstract Science Fiction
May 5, 2014
Finding the Science Fiction Book Club covers (see last week’s post HERE) got me thinking about abstraction as a representation of Sci Fi, and I started digging around for other…
176: Science Fiction Book Club
April 28, 2014
I recently stumbled upon a small handsome science fiction hardback at a used book sale. The cover of Wilson Tucker’s The Lincoln Hunters is entirely abstract, but still manages to…
175: Zamyatin’s We, part II
March 31, 2014
This week back to Zamyatin’s We, and a look at all the non-English editions. (You can check out all the English-language covers HERE.) When first written, the book was not…