Friday, May 18, 2018

Book Cover Trends - Just One Letter

V by Thomas Pynchon, 1963
Z by Vassilis Vassilikos, 1966
G by John Berger, 1972
C by Anthony Cave Brown, 1988
S by John Updike, 1988
H by Elizabeth Shepard, 1995
Q by Paul Nigro, 2003
Q by Luther Blissett, 2004
Z by Michael Thomas Ford, 2010
C by Tom McCarthy, 2011
Q by Evan Madery, 2011
F by Franz Wright, 2011
H by Jim Elledge, 2012
Y by Marjorie Celona, 2012
 
Z by Therese Anne Fowler, 2013
HHhH by Laurent Binet, 2013
S by JJ Abrams and Doug Dorst, 2013
F by Daniel Kehlmann, 2014
J by Howard Jacobson, 2014
X by Ilyasah Shabazz, 2015

2 comments:

  1. i wonder if this is in any way related (just incidentally/coincidentally/culturally) to Google showing a single letter for a user's avatar in some contexts. e.g. in gmail's inbox on Android i might show up as "S" and you might show up as "A".

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  2. That's a good question, Stephan Beal. As an actual "trend" - and not just something that a few authors decided to do independently of each other - I would guess this one started in 2011 with the success of C leading to a few other authors (or their publishing companies) trying out single-letter titles. Where Tom McCarthy got the idea though, I'm not sure.

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