Thursday, April 10, 2008

Book Covers: Lost Books Resurrected (2006)



In early 2006, I think, Jeff VanderMeer was working on an article for SFsite about the lost or forgotten books by various well-known and respected authors. The trick was that the books were all made-up. He asked me if I'd design some covers for these bullshit books. It sounded like something right up my alley, so I agreed. Jeff supplied the authors and titles and I was free to do whatever I wanted.

Since it was just for fun and there wasn't any money exchanging hands, I decided that I'd try and spend under 30 minutes on each one and just try and make something cool in that amount of time. It actually worked pretty well. Some are stinkers, like The Original Laura and Dictionary of the Khazars: Hermaphrodite Edition, but the others I kind of like. The Messiah is kind of cheating, since it's basically a poster that I did for an improv show and just repurposed. In any case, it was a fun project, that made me think more about not worrying so much about details and trusting in the "happy accident."