I was in Waterstone’s around Christmas time, browsing in the Fiction section, under C, and picked up an Angela Carter book and the cover looked suspiciously like the work of Dutch artist/designer Parra. I still haven’t read any Angela Carter novels, but her strain of gothic fiction tinged with explicit Freudian influences is on my reading list (along with a lot of other books, for that matter, including Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald and The Kool Aid Acid Test by Tom Woolfe). Parra’s Angela Carter covers, done in 2006, quite a few years back before he became the go-to guy for everyone from Alife to Toykyo to Nike, have strong typography although the illustration isn’t that expressive.

Then, last week, I borrowed my friend’s copy of City of Spades, part of Colin MacInnes’ London trilogy that also includes Absolute Beginners, the unparalleled account of young 1950s London from the POV of a young photographer. Although I’m not enjoying City of Spades quite as much as Absolute Beginners, I love the cover on this 1960s Penguin edition and found out that it had been designed by none other than Peter Blake, the designer of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club Band cover and a big influence on the visual language of a subsequent generation British designers.

Blake designed all three books in the Colin MacInnes trilogy, although I can’t find an image of Mr Love and Justice – I might have to ‘borrow’ my friend’s copy of that one too. More recently, More recently, Peter Blake was commissioned along with Zandra Rhodes and John Squire (Stone Roses) to redesign a number of titles for their 75th Anniversary.

Our friends over at WE ARE… recently posted some interesting book covers including this one.

Are there any other artists or designers who have done great design work for fiction, or any books for that matter? Ideas welcome.