DESIGN STUDY: PETER MENDELSUND'S KAFKA COVERS
Considering I'm about to marry an author, books have become part of my everyday world. Especially those of literature. Recently, while discussing the literary magazine , The Modern Review, I started researching book cover designs and stumbled upon these great Kafka covers by Peter Mendelsund for Schocken Books, released in 2011.
As a kid, I often discovered music or authors simply because I thought the cover was cool. If I had no idea who Kafka was, I'd read these books based on their cover design alone. Mendelsund's work with this series reminds me of a cross between Calder, a bit of May Ray and Bauhaus... Only a few of my favorite things!
After an internet wormhole with Mendelsund, I also discovered that he designed a series of covers for my current hero, Simone de Beauvior.
Though I've barely scratched the surface with de Beauvior, I'm pretty into the fact that Mendelsund did covers for her books too. (The BF is currently writing an essay on her work, The Second Sex, so I've gotten to know her philosophy by proxy and am sort of obsessing over her ideas about being female. Ahem, why wasn't I taught her in college)???
Anyway, Mendelsund, my kind of guy.
Courtney Bagtazo, © Bagtazo, 2015