The BOOK COVER PROJECT

Who We Are

We are five Masters students from the English Department of Paris Nanterre University. We created this website as part of a workshop entitled “The Book Cover Project”, taught by Dr Anne-Pascale Bruneau-Rumsey during the second semester of our first year.

How is a book cover imagined, designed, and adapted to a specific readership? What are the different roles involved in the creation of book covers? How does a book cover attach a book to a specific publishing house? These are some of the questions that we studied in the course of the workshop. We had a choice of tasks to do freely and we decided to present some of our work and research here.

What you will find here:

• First of all, you will find a short French and English Glossary divided into four sections: The Book as Object, The Book's Contents, From Publishers to Books, and Literary Genres.

• In the "Book Cover Analyses" section, you will find our first project: "International Variations (One Book, Several Covers)", in which we each analyzed the covers of one book published in different countries. This includes our work on different editions of Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Caroll, The Shining by Stephen King, Educated by Tara Westover, Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, and Dune by Franck Herbert. Our second project "Publisher and Author" looks into the specific treatment that some publishers have chosen to give to a series of books by one author. There we explored versions of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde published by different Penguin imprints; we also surveyed the evolution over time of Penguin's covers for Animal Farm, looked at various publishers' series of books by F. Scott Fitzgerald, and at different designs for the cover of The Picture of Dorian Gray.

• The last section, "About Book Designers", focuses on two designers. It includes an interview with Catherine Casalino and a presentation of the work of Isabel Urbina Peña.