Peter Mendelsund

Peter Mendelsund has enjoyed years as a much-sought-after book cover designer and art director. Among the many recognizable jackets he has created are those for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo; collections of the works of Joyce, Kafka, Dostoevsky, de Beauvoir, and Foucault; the contemporary works of Martin Amis, Tom McCarthy, Ben Marcus, Jo Nesb, and James Gleick; and many more. All have greatly benefitted from the care and touch Mendelsund gave them.Cover abounds with Mendelsunds completed book jackets along with ephemera from his previously unseen creative method, including jacket sketches, interior art and editorial illustrations, and scores of rejected drafts. These images are punctuated by Mendelsunds reflections on his work and his process, as well as by texts from writers with whom he has worked and designed for.Cover is a compendium of beautiful design and a beautiful design object itself; a profile and celebration of one of the publishing worlds most talented and prolific contemporary creators, and a brilliant showcase of his deft touch for balanced and innovative design.

From acclaimed designer and novelist Peter Mendelsund, a deeply personal reflection on depression and the redemptive power of art, interspersed with 100 original paintingsIn the early days of the pandemic, Peter Mendelsund and his family traveled up to a secluded New Hampshire farmhouse to weather the chaos. There began his journey through a crippling and seemingly intractable depressionwhich differed in degree but not in kind from episodes that have recurred periodically throughout his lifethat brought him to the brink of suicide. Relief came from an unlikely source: painting, something Peter had never contemplated doing before. And yet it became the thing that may very well have saved his life. Bleakly funny, profoundly moving, andagainst all oddstruly inspiring, Exhibitionist is not just an account of a mind thinking through its own suffering in real-time, and of the authors reckoning with his fathers tortured legacy; its also the story of the birth of an artist, and a portrait of an artist at work.

In the shifting sands of the desert, near an unnamed metropolis, there is an institute where various fellows come to undertake projects of great significance. But when our sort-of hero, Percy Frobisher, arrives, surrounded by the simulated environment of the glass-enclosed dome of the Institute, his mind goes completely blank. When he spills something on his uniforma major faux pashe learns about a mysterious shop where you can take something, utter the command same same, and receive a replica even better than the original. Imagining a world in which simulacra have as much value as the realso much so that any distinction between the two vanishes, and even language seeks to reproduce meaning through ever more degraded copies of itselfPeter Mendelsund has crafted a deeply unsettling novel about what it means to exist and to create . . . and a future that may not be far off.

A gorgeously unique, fully illustrated exploration into the phenomenology of readinghow we visualize images from reading works of literature, from one of our very best book jacket designers, himself a passionate reader.A playful, illustrated treatise on how words give rise to mental images. The New York TimesWhat do we see when we read? Did Tolstoy really describe Anna Karenina? Did Melville ever really tell us what, exactly, Ishmael looked like? The collection of fragmented images on a pagea graceful ear there, a stray curl, a hat positioned just soand other clues and signifiers helps us to create an image of a character. But in fact our sense that we know a character intimately has little to do with our ability to concretely picture our belovedor reviledliterary figures. In this remarkable work of nonfiction, Knopfs Associate Art Director Peter Mendelsund combines his profession, as an award-winning designer; his first career, as a classically trained pianist; and his first love, literaturehe considers himself first and foremost as a readerinto what is sure to be one of the most provocative and unusual investigations into how we understand the act of reading.

Un libro ilustrado único sobre el acto de leer, escrito por uno de los mejores diseñadores de cubiertas del mundo.¿Describió Tolstói a Ana Karenina? ¿Nos contó Melville alguna vez cuál era el aspecto de Ismael? ¿Como nos imaginamos el Londres de Dickens o el Dublin de Joyce? Peter Mendelsund, uno de los mejores diseñadores de cubiertas de libros del mundo, ha escrito una exploracion unica del fenomeno de la lectura que nos revela hasta que punto leer es un acto creativo.