CHECK out ol’ Wal (in the middle with the tusks). He is listening to a story about himself. The story is told by Philip Rose and a couple of kids are gathered for occasion. I show this cover because I like the lettering of the title. It reminds me a bit of the bubble-style in graffiti. Nice detail is the seagull resting on the last L. Picton Publishing brought out Tales of Old Wal in 1975.

IF you are a National Book Award Winner, you have to flaunt it. Like Saul Bellow and Bernard Malamud. The fact is printed on the covers of these paperbacks as some kind of stamp of approval. It was probably the idea of the publisher, but ok. The books were published in 1965 and both of the novels have colored pages, like these ones. I especially like the cover of ‘The adventures of Augi March’.

STEPHEN C. Henkel has a fixation on bicycles. He even wrote a book on the subject called Bikes ‘A How-to-do-it Guide to Selection, Care, Repair, Maintenance, Decoration, Safety and Fun on your Bicycle.’ And with a degree in Mechanical Engineering from Princeton I guess he was the right person to do that. The cool thing about the book is that the author also made the illustrations. For instance, he drew types of handlebars and the all the parts of a rear wheel hub. The Chatham Press published the book in 1972.

THE person who made the layout for these first pages of the Penrose Annual Volume 19 from 1966 was not afraid to use white space. The Penrose Annual was a London-based review of graphic arts published by Lund Humphries. The annual wrote about the artistic aspects of design but also on the technical aspects of printing. The last Penrose Annual hit the shelves in 1982. See more pages from volume 19 here.

THESE old Penguin paperbacks were published in the late thirties. In those days genres were distinguished from each other by color. Mystery & Crime, for instance, had a green cover. Travel & Adventures used magenta and orange was reserved for Fiction.

SUMMERTIME and the living is easy. Especially on top of the Sheraton Motor Inn, near the Hudson in Manhattan. Photographer Andreas Feininger pointed his camera eastwards when he took this picture. The book is called ‘New York’. Feininger made the photos, Kate Simon wrote the text. It is the second printing, the first one was published in1964.

TRAVEL literature is nice reading, but it gets boring after a while. You can only take that much of descriptions of landscapes, the towns and its inhabitants.  That is why the ‘Great Journeys’ series from Penguin are so good. They only published a part of a famous travel story. Next to the journeys, the covers are great too. David Pearson did the design and Victoria Sawdon made most of the illustrations. Pearson worked as an in-house designer for Penguin, check out his flickr account to see material from the archive of the publisher.  See the all the covers of the Great Journeys series here. ................................ ................................ ................................ ................................

TO understand the complete oeuvre of Gerard B. Odell one has to read Neonatal Hyperbilirubinemia. The key work of Odell deals with all the aspects of the subject Neonatal Hyperbilirubinemia. Odell  is an expert in the field of Neonatal Hyperbilirubinemia and knows how to get readers, who are not familiar with Neonatal Hyperbilirubinemia, interested in Neonatal Hyperbilirubinemia.

FROM time to time, it’s good to help your books out of their dust jackets. Just to see what’s underneath. Judging the books below, it’s worth giving dust a chance. Without ISBNs, blurbs, the name of the publisher and so on, these covers are linen deserts with typographic oases.

GREEK statues don’t have to be ancient. Illustrator Miroslav Sasek brought them into modern times by introducing them to telephones, cocktails and press conferences. The drawings are part of a book called ‘Stone Is Not Cold’.  Miroslav Sasek (1916–1980) was born in Prague and escaped to the West when the Communist Party in 1948 came to power. Sasek in more known for his ‘This Is’ books. In each one he portrayed a city like Paris, London and San Francisco with his illustrations.