OUGD404 - Previous Book Cover Research

OUGD404 - Previous Book Cover Research

Pablo Neruda

With the primary subject of Neruda’s poetry being love, a lot of his covers by penguin books literally depict this with photographs of the female form and an image of a couple. The typography is light, serifed and commonly white in order to not overpower the image. The cover of the bilingual edition of his selected poems simply shows a black and white image of him, which seems to be a common safe option for poetry books.

E.E. Cummings

The covers for books by Cummings vary slightly more than Neruda’s; ‘Selected Poems 1923 - 1958’ utilises an expressive red and blue print which is abstract in nature with no clear visual links to the subjects matter of any of his poetry  while ‘The Enormous Room’ shows a cubist painting which links to Cummings admiration of the cubist and futurist art movements which inspired his visual poetry. A more modern collection of his poetry - ‘Complete Poems 1914 - 1962’ employs type on a larger scale with bright multicoloured overlapping sans serif typography, which departs from the standard application of serifed type on poetry book covers that visually depicts the heritage and literary prowess of the poets. ‘E.E. Cummings Selected Poems' is more complex; its shows a bird in a green shrubbery of leaves reminiscent of the work of William Morris. This cover clearly has more visual ties to one or more of Cummings’ poems for example a line from one of his poems is - “I’d rather learn from one bird how to sing, then teach ten thousand stars how not to dance”.

Leonard Cohen

Examples of some of Cohen’s boom covers simply show an image of him; This is presumably done for a lot of poetry books because a lot of the time there is no single prevailing theme when it is a book of selected poems. While one cover uses an ornate gold border and thin, decorative serifed type - both contributing to an overall visual tie to art nouveau, another cover uses rounded sans serif type and edits together 3 black and white photographs of him into an eerie ethereal composition. ‘Book of Longing’ subverts the more mature and toned down themes of these covers and shows a bright drawing of a bird in a tree, done by Cohen himself. This directly juxtaposes the dark mood of this collection of poems which he wrote towards the end of his life and looks almost like a children's book. This adds an element of hope and brightness to this book in spite of his death.