Via today’s post by John Coulthart comes the artwork of presumedly British graphic designer David Pelham. Most Ballardians, says Ballardian and John Coulthart prefer the 1974 Penguin paperbacks covers by Pelham. Here is a Flickr gallery[1] of Pelham’s work.
Pelham also designed the cover of the British edition of 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, which has been replaced by the less interesting one shown below.
1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die (2006) – Peter Dr Boxall [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
Gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous.
I don’t buy a book because of a nice jacket but it definitely catches your eye and compels you to, at least, pick it up for a closer look.
I’m interested in 1001 BOOKS YOU MUST READ but I’m terrified if I get it, it will trigger some sort of obsessive quest to read ALL of them and then I’ll never have time to write another word…
Don’t be afraid, I read it in a week and now I feel I’ve read all 1001 one of ’em.
A great designer. There was another Pelham Ballard cover for The Four-Dimensional Nightmare which you can see on this CR page:
http://www.creativereview.co.uk/crblog/penguin-by-designers-david-pelham/
Great seeing him discuss his work there. Check out the cover for In Cold Blood as well. One reason the Ballard covers came out so well may have been because he was keen to do them himself rather than commission another illustrator.
I esp. like the slanted angle Pelham uses on each of these covers.
I haven’t been as enthused as since when I introduced French imprint Chute Libre.
You might be interested in heading over to Arukiyomi’s blog and picking up a copy of the new version of Arukiyomi’s 1001 books spreadsheet .
Along with calculating how many books you need to read a year before you die, there’s all the 2008 edition books, all those removed from the 2006 edition, links to wikipedia , amazon.com and .co.uk and Google books.
Happy reading!