Classic Book Cover Design
This book cover is designed for the classic Vladimir Nabokov novel, Pnin:
“Professor Timofey Pnin is a haplessly disoriented Russian émigré precariously employed on an American college campus in the 1950's. Pnin struggles to maintain his dignity through a series of comic and sad misunderstandings. Whether taking the wrong train to deliver a lecture in a language he has not mastered or throwing a faculty party during which he learns he is losing his job, the gently preposterous hero of this enchanting novel evokes the reader’s deepest protective instinct.”
- Penguin Random House
This cover design was inspired by the beginning and end of the novel. In Chapter one of Pnin, the professor boards the wrong train on his way to give a lecture. In a circular fashion, the narrator again repeats the story of Pnin boarding the wrong train at the end. Along with the train motif, the design is also accompanied by hand-drawn typography, and an illustrated interpretation of the main character based on the likeness of Marc Szeftel, a colleague of Nabokov who served as inspiration for the character.
Contemporary Book Cover Design
This book cover is designed for the contemporary novel Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan:
“It is 1972, and the Cold War still lingers. Serena Frome is a math student at Cambridge University but finds herself recruited by the British secret service. As an employee of MI5 she receives her first real assignment: a major role in Sweet Tooth, a covert operation to fund writers who will give voice to the agency’s preferred politics, in order to steer the cultural conversation and control the political-cultural mood. Serena falls in love with the author she is assigned to shepherd and becomes entangled in a tricky theater of seduction and deception that culminates with a deliciously shocking twist.” - Penguin Random House
This cover design is inspired by the main themes of the novel: espionage and literature. Elements of this book cover include distorted book pages, and collaged typography which evokes the spirit of ciphers and ransom notes, all in a 70s-inspired color palette.
