NYRB Classics: An Appreciation
Matthew Stevens / Design Inspiration
I don’t really collect anything. When I was a kid, I collected baseball cards, but so did everybody else. I do, however, have a growing stack of NYRB Classics at my house. What are NYRB Classics? They’re books. Specifically, they are “discoveries, the kind of books that people typically run into outside of the classroom and then remember for life.” Why do I have so many? In part, because the books are often fascinating reads. But mostly because I love their design.
The spines are one solid color, with just a small NYRB logo at one end and the title and author at the other. These spines jump out at you if you’re scanning shelves in a bookstore. The same spine color continues to the back where you’ll find only a description of the book and one or two quotes. That’s it.
Let’s judge a book by its cover. The primary color from the spine fills a rectangular box on the cover. Inside the box you’ll find the title and author again (in the same colors as the spine, but bigger). Next, my favorite detail. The border color from the front cover box fills both inside covers.
The box always sits on top of the cover imagery. Here the system breaks down elegantly. Some covers have photographs, others have paintings, and at least one that I know of features a frame from a movie. Without fail the imagery is striking.
All of the NYRB Classics have the same dimensions (in height and width, not length). Thus, they sit very well next to one another on a shelf.
I should note that Katy Homans is credited as the designer. Beautiful work, Katy.
Some of my favorite NYRB Classics include: Wheat That Springeth Green, The Tenants of Moonbloom, On the Yard, A Way of Life, Like Any Other, and In the Freud Archives.
For more information, there is the NYRB site, a blog, twitter, and a flickr group. If you like book design, I also recommend the Book Covers blog by FWIS.
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John Self
A fine appreciation of this fine series. For me, the quality of the paper and the resulting ‘heaviness’ of the book in the hand also plays a part in my aesthetic appreciation of them.
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