Zachary Petit

Zac Petit takes on the best book covers of the month, with a short interview with Tom Etherington about his haunting cover for the UK edition of Jacquelyn Stolos’ “Edendale.”

For the Best Book Covers of July 2024, Zac interviews the designer of one of the buzziest books of the summer in addition to his rundown of the best 18 covers this month.

As Craig Cutler and Craig Frazier put it— We have no idea what we are doing. And, well, we’ll be damned if that’s not one of the most concise and accurate descriptions of the creative process at large. Because in those eight words, the photographer and illustrator, respectively, strike at the heart of the joy that can be found within it—the beauty of experiment, and the brilliant chaos of creative play. It’s something that’s utterly on display in their new project, aptly dubbed “2Crai…

Stylistically, this month’s 15 best cover picks are all over the place, starting with Jonathan Pelham’s enigmatic jacket for Cecilia. He gave Zac Petit a candid look at his process.

When I was 9 or so, I remember going on a drive with my father. … He pointed out a cross on top of a local church and said, ‘You see that up there? I did that.’ To this day, I still smile about it because I don’t know how true that is, but I like to believe that my father did do that. I remember looking up and seeing that cross as this blurred streak of white and red against the blue sky as we drove past—it really is a beautiful memory that I have of a turning point in my life that changed the w…

When we saw Math Monahan’s electrifying throwback cover for Perfume & Pain, we instantly wanted to know more about it. So, we asked him—something we’ll be doing with different book cover designers going forward. Dig into Monahan’s insights below—as well as the book’s synopsis, which reinforces how perfectly he captures the vibe of the novel—and then get lost in the rest of this month’s kaleidoscopic covers. Official description: Having recently moved both herself and her formidable perfume…

The stabbing of Salman Rushdie in 2022 was a uniquely horrifying event in the literary world, the real world, and, well, any world. And thus as someone who writes about design and publishing, I wondered how the cover to Rushdie’s memoir in the wake of the attack—Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder—would take shape. Given the weight of the assignment, it’s perhaps no surprise that it took a lot of work. Or, as designer Arsh Raziuddin put it, “5 options for weeks on end.” You can see…

The beginning of 2024 has birthed a bevy of book cover brilliance; we had an overflow from February’s list. Without further ado, our favorite book covers released this month(-ish)!

A fair amount gets written about book cover trends. And there are absolutely trends, stylistic themes and sales/marketing mandates at play in publishing—but whenever an editor asks me to write about them, I generally flee into the digital night. Not because I’m bad at spotting them (I am), but rather because when you lump work together, you miss out on all the outliers, exceptions and anomalous covers that will inevitably start the next wave of trends—not to mention the jackets that manage to pl…

In the wake of all those excellent but voluminous “Best Book Covers of 2023” articles that ran in December (which, indeed, I contributed to!), you might think we’d all have a collective jacket hangover. But: January is actually a fantastic month for cover coverage, if only because it’s a time when so much brilliant work is at risk of getting lost or overlooked in the post-holiday haze. To wit: Thomas Colligan’s cosmically beautiful, playful take on Marie-Helene Bertino’s Beautyland, which…

Throughout the year, I maintain an unkempt browser window bursting at the digital seams with a comical amount of tabs. It contains publisher catalogs, Instagram feeds, trade journals, newsletters and anything else tangentially tied to the subject of book covers—and, well, all roads eventually lead here: PRINT’s favorite book covers of the year. Wholly subjective? Yes! Utterly brilliant and inspiring literary eye candy? With hope, also yes. Dig in and enjoy—and afterward, for the best book…

Back in this column in August, I alluded to the fall publishing deluge to come … and, well, the deluge has deluged. The last few months have brought a wild bounty of brilliant cover work, again affirming my working nerd theory that we are in a golden age of book cover design. (I used to do annual collections of book cover finds a decade ago, which then became biannual, which then became quarterly … and which are now monthly.) What was once hailed as a dusty subset of design in a rapidly evolving…

Ever wonder what utter societal danger looks like? I did, too! So when PEN America announced the most banned books of the 2022–2023 school year, I began tracking down their jackets and covers. Why? I have a hunch that no one who bans books has actually read them. So what could be on the covers of these toxic verboten titles? Soon enough, I found out: The word “queer”! A hijab! Type made out of powder to look like drugs! A wallflower! Whereas the rest of us might see the makings o…

When we kicked this column off over the summer, one of my hopes was to go beyond my echo chamber of subjective book cover faves, and occasionally feature a working book designer’s subjective book cover faves. A few weeks back, I happened to touch base with Zoe Norvell, whose work I’ve included in different roundups over the years, and ran the idea by her—and she generously agreed to take part. In addition to the many fantastic covers Norvell has produced throughout her career—first working…

Dig into 10 of our favorite new cover finds.

Dig into 10 of our favorite new cover finds that will soon be gracing our bookshelves.

Creating a timely magazine is hard enough in normal times … and then there was the year 2020. An all-encompassing pandemic. The high-profile murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and other Black Americans by police. A president refusing to acknowledge the results of a Democratic election. And on and on. So in the span of such a year, how do you fit all the news that’s fit to print onto the covers of one of the world’s preeminent Sunday supplements known for said covers rising to the caliber o…

In 2020, that most decidedly damned of years, art and design were a poultice for many … or at least a worthy distraction from the goings-on of a global pandemic. In 2021, as the world begins to rebound and bask in the hope offered by vaccines and new leadership, visual culture has served to uplift, energize and surprise. That is readily apparent in a trip to the bookstore (virtual or otherwise). Regardless of whether there’s an optimism and energy packed into some of these jackets or it’s simply…

Book Cover of the Month deconstructs the design of one of our favorite new book covers—and features an interview with the creative mind behind it.Na Kim had a problem. She really loved the book. Well, books—Tove Ditlevsen’s Copenhagen Trilogy. The Danish master’s masterpiece was originally released in the late ’60s and early ’70s, and the three books (Childhood, Youth and Dependency) form a brilliant portrait of her life, via confessional writing. When the titles were reissued in English, they w…

In the ongoing corporate quest to keep the crown, Burger King has rebranded, serving up its first alternate look in more than two decades.