Of Innocence and Intrigue

This isn’t about crime fiction, but it does have to do with book fronts. If you click on over to the Caustic Cover Critic, you’ll find blogger James Morrison’s interview with John Bertram, a Los Angeles-based architect who has co-edited, with Yuri Leving, a work titled Lolita--The Story of a Cover Girl: Vladimir Nabokov’s Novel in Art and Design (2013). That 256-page project, Morrison explains, is “a fascinating examination of the history of design approaches to this brilliant and problematic Nabokov novel, and it also contains numerous new covers designed for the book, which demonstrate just how many ways there are to visualize a book.” My personal favorites among those shown are the jackets conceived by Suzene Ang, Jamie Keenan, and John Fullbrook III, but your tastes may be different.