Among nytimesbooks.blogspot.com writer Joseph Sullivan‘s favorite book covers of the year is this excellent revision of Walter Benjamin‘s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, designed by David Pearson:
Most self-conscious updates of classics are said to turn them on their heads. Pearson, instead, turns his subject on its side. In the process, the cover manages to appeal both to readers who find in Benjamin’s essay an implicit anxiety about the impact on craft by mechanization, and to those who find in the work an imaginative bridge to the contemporary pleasures of electronically mediated media. Either way, the aura of Mechanical Reproduction is burnished admirably.
The full list is at nytimesbooks.blogspot.com. Also included is a revised The Medium is the Massage, by Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore. Pearson’s site is davidpearsondesign.com.