Displaying 1–36 of 616 book jackets
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Oscar Hijuelos,
1993
Farrar, Straus & Giroux
First Edition,
Hardcover
ISBN:
9780374158156
The title’s fourteen sisters (there's also one son) are the offspring of immigrants, an Irish man (a photographer), and his Cuban wife. It's a sprawling tale covering generations. This might be the last book jacket that Fred ever designed, following his award-winning cover for the author's previous success “Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love.”
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Fred Kaplan,
1992
William Morrow and Company
First Edition,
Hardcover
ISBN:
9780688090210
When commissioned to create a cover for a biography, Fred felt that the best solution had to be the use of a photographic portrait wherever possible. But his artistry had to find an outlet, so, as was the case here, the typography was often a tour-de-force.
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Matt Kramer,
1992
William Morrow and Company
First Edition,
Hardcover
ISBN:
9780688104368
Most of the time, Fred was hired to create covers for novels, which meant reading the manuscripts, searching for levels of meaning, and probing ways to crystallize ideas in visual form. Designing book jackets like this one was like taking a vacation.
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Milan Kundera,
1991
Grove Press
First Edition,
Hardcover
ISBN:
9780802111111
Fred was honored to provide jackets for the first editions of four Milan Kundera novels: “The Joke,” “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting,” “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” and “Immortality.” For this one, he created a masterful trompe l’oeil painting.
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Stanley Elkin,
1991
Simon & Schuster
First Edition,
Hardcover
ISBN:
9780671673246
Fred fought hard to get the publisher to eliminate the italic repetition of the title, “The MacGuffin.” After all, the whole point of a MacGuffin is neglecting to notice what’s in plain sight. He wanted the reader to find the name of the book! Alas, the marketers won.
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Charles Dickinson,
1991
William Morrow and Company
First Edition,
Hardcover
ISBN:
9780688102258
Fred achieved an astonishing sense of scale and dimension for this novel’s jacket by using simple elements: two newspapers coming together with graduated tone, and type in bands of color. Look at the changing shapes as the shadows descend down the page.
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Bette Pesetsky,
1991
HarperCollins
First Edition,
Hardcover
ISBN:
9780060183028
This novel is about a poet who, facing a fatal illness, decides to catalogue her life by packing away her journal entries in a series of boxes. For this first edition’s cover, Fred took an unusual step, for him. He set up these props in his office and painted them from life.
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David Noonan,
1991
Simon & Schuster
First Edition,
Hardcover
ISBN:
9780671689803
A seventeen-year-old protagonist from a small town in the 1960s comes of age by way of a summer job on the Jersey shore. For the book’s first edition, Fred captured the humor and pathos for this author’s debut novel. Don’t miss the dot on the “i.”
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Amy Ehrlich,
1991
Viking Press
First Edition,
Hardcover
ISBN:
9780670837335
This is the tale of a 17-year-old who lives near Atlantic City. Deeply troubled by her mother’s recent death, she dresses up in her clothes, and begins to explore the casinos. Fred set up a stack of cards, asked a friend to pose, and painted this image from life.
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Varley O’Connor,
1991
William Morrow and Company
First Edition,
Hardcover
ISBN:
9780688094447
Set in East Hampton, this novel tells the tale of two dysfunctional families, and their unlikely alliance. For its first edition jacket, Fred tinted a rather dour beach photo, juxtaposing it with a discordant, fanciful, in-your-face hand-lettered panel.
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David Leavitt,
1991
Warner Books
First Edition,
Paperback
ISBN:
9780446393263
“An astonishing collection of short stories—set deep in the twisted heart of middle-class America...” said the New York Times. Fred’s evocative footprints manage to capture the very ordinariness of the book’s times and places, in conjunction with that ominous shadow.
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R. S. Jones,
1991
Viking Press
First Edition,
Hardcover
ISBN:
9780670835911
For this first edition jacket, Fred appropriately began with one of M. C. Escher’s convoluted and improbable interiors. This is a tale about mental illness. Its protagonist, drowning in the routine tasks of daily life, quietly loses his sanity, taking the reader along for the ride.
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Molly Best Tinsley,
1991
Houghton Mifflin
First Edition,
Hardcover
ISBN:
9780395577851
No, not that Darwin, although the heroine is married to a philanderer name Darwin Charles. Her memories as the daughter of missionaries, and the tribal woman who cared for her, help her understand that sometimes the survival of the fittest depends on the quality of forgiveness.
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John L’Heureux,
1991
Viking Press
First Edition,
Hardcover
ISBN:
9780670829194
A New England teacher’s life is tested by accusations of impropriety that will destroy his career and transform his life. For the jacket of this acclaimed novel’s first edition, Fred hinted at the main character’s swirl of confusion with his wrap-around title treatment.
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Josef Skvorecky,
1991
Alfred A. Knopf
First Edition,
Hardcover
ISBN:
9780394572208
The hero of this comic novel dozes in a rural Bohemian church when a statue of St. Joseph begins to move on its pedestal. The clergy call it a miracle, but the Communist secret police declare it a fraud, which culminates in the torture and murder of the attending priest.
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Russell Lucas,
1991
Summit Books
First Edition,
Hardcover
ISBN:
9780671727468
These stories are centered on Bombay, the city of the author’s birth, during the raucous ‘40s and ‘50s.When publishers asked Fred to place multiple critical blurbs on a jacket, he was undaunted.
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Rebecca Goldstein,
1991
Viking Press
First Edition,
Hardcover
ISBN:
9780670835560
When an eccentric novelist moves to New England to focus on her current book, she’s plagued by phone calls from her silly but dangerous sister. Fred enjoyed the beauty of tinted photographs, and unusual period typefaces.
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William Wright,
1991
Simon & Schuster
First Edition,
Hardcover
ISBN:
9780671684594
Christina Onassis was always famous, born to staggering wealth, but plagued with grave personal misfortunes. Fred chose to simply present a lovely tinted photo, but surrounded it with clashing, stylized forms and type.
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Philip F. O'Connor,
1991
Summit Books
First Edition,
Hardcover
ISBN:
9780671731557
The main character in this novel, a young man with Down’s syndrome, struggles to join the outer world after having been confined to an institution where he was punished by placement in solitary confinement. Fred's jacket illustration suggests the torment of that quiet isolation.
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Claude Manceron,
1991
Touchstone Books
First Edition,
Hardcover
ISBN:
9780671732936
Fred was commissioned by the publisher to create covers for the five books in this acclaimed series on the French Revolution. He loved going to the Public Library’s picture collection to do research. An obsolete practice, no doubt.
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Thomas Coraghessan Boyle,
1990
Penguin Books
First Edition,
Hardcover
ISBN:
9780670814893
This is a complex, layered, novel about three families in the Hudson Valley. Fred loved to poke holes in reality and did so on many occasions. And he could never resist a sky. Note the shadows cast by the title, another persistent element in his visual vocabulary.
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Edward Sklepowich,
1990
William Morrow and Company
First Edition,
Hardcover
ISBN:
9780688091804
Fred’s year in Venice as a Fulbright scholar greatly influenced his visual vocabulary throughout his life. This first edition jacket was an invitation to savor “La Serenissima,” its symbols and its romanticism, even artfully spilling over onto the book’s spine.
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Judith Rossner,
1990
Summit Books
First Edition,
Hardcover
ISBN:
9780671648589
Again, here’s the “big book look,” with the author’s name greatly overpowering the title, for this first edition. The novel is an update of Louisa May Alcott’s classic, but takes place in Hollywood. Fred managed to marry the two elements with his clever bookmark.
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Christoph Ransmayr,
1990
Grove Press
First Edition,
Hardcover
ISBN:
9780802111678
The hero may or may not be Ovid. The action takes place in ancient and modern times. There’s politics, literature, ecological disaster.... well, it couldn’t have been easy to synthesize. But, Fred certainly managed to make the jacket a beauty.
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David Leavitt,
1990
Viking Press
First Edition,
Hardcover
ISBN:
9780670821969
This jacket, for a collection of ten stories dealing with homosexuality, subtly reflects the content’s sensitivity. Fred created first edition covers for four of Leavitt’s books: “Family Dancing,” “The Lost Language of Cranes,” “Equal Affections,” and this one.
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Jonathan Penner,
1990
Poseidon Press
First Edition,
Hardcover
ISBN:
9780671664237
The main character of this novel is a beekeeper with multiple familial, marital and professional problems. For this first edition book jacket, Fred’s tinted engraving reflects the doings within a hive, an apt metaphor of the title, as well as the complexities of plot.
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Donald Hall,
1990
Oxford University Press
First Edition,
Hardcover
ISBN:
9780195038132
In 1908, Picasso gave a banquet for Rousseau, who insulted his host royally in one of this book’s fascinating anecdotes. Fred chose to illustrate the disgruntled Douanier, evidently observing that, with modern art, as in his masterpiece, it’s “a jungle out there.”
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Tor Seidler,
1990
Farrar, Straus & Giroux
First Edition,
Hardcover
ISBN:
9780374272517
Tor Seidler, was a good friend of Fred’s, as well as a collaborator on two children’s books, “A Rat’s Tale,” and “Wainscott Weasel.” Between those two projects, Tor wrote his first work of adult fiction. Needless to say, Fred was delighted to create its jacket.
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Nadine Gordimer,
1990
Farrar, Straus & Giroux
First Edition,
Hardcover
ISBN:
9780374217518
The novel’s setting is Johannesburg during apartheid. Sometimes Fred felt that a type treatment could convey a book’s mood as well as an illustration, as in this first edition jacket. As always, he designed the spine with as much care as the cover’s face. The very next year, the novel’s author, Nadine Gordimer was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, and the Swedish Academy explicitly cited My Son’s Story in their press release, calling it ”ingenious and revealing and at the same time enthralling.“
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Matt Kramer,
1990
HarperCollins
First Edition,
Hardcover
ISBN:
9780688086671
Fred designed several of these Matt Kramer “Making Sense of....” books on the ins and outs of wine. Note the subtle way in which the bottle’s curvature is described through the gentle shadows across the label.
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Anita Brookner,
1990
Pantheon Books
First Edition,
Hardcover
ISBN:
9780394584461
The author is famous for her Jamesian character studies of women poised on the threshold of life. But in this novel, she portrays of a man torn between the library and the senses. For its first edition jacket, Fred’s portrait seems to capture the title character’s confusion.
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Suzanne Farrell,
1990
Summit Books
First Edition,
Hardcover
ISBN:
9780671682224
By 1990, Fred’s attentions had turned to children’s books. But on occasion, he couldn’t resist taking a publisher’s request for a jacket design, as was the case here. He was an avid ballet fan, and great admirer of Suzanne Farrell in particular, so this contribution was a pleasure to him.
Displaying 1–36 of 616 book jackets
Oscar Hijuelos, 1993
Fred Kaplan, 1992
Matt Kramer, 1992
Milan Kundera, 1991
Stanley Elkin, 1991
Charles Dickinson, 1991
Bette Pesetsky, 1991
David Noonan, 1991
Amy Ehrlich, 1991
Varley O’Connor, 1991
David Leavitt, 1991
R. S. Jones, 1991
Molly Best Tinsley, 1991
John L’Heureux, 1991
Josef Skvorecky, 1991
Russell Lucas, 1991
Rebecca Goldstein, 1991
William Wright, 1991
Philip F. O'Connor, 1991
Claude Manceron, 1991
Thomas Coraghessan Boyle, 1990
Edward Sklepowich, 1990
Judith Rossner, 1990
Christoph Ransmayr, 1990
David Leavitt, 1990
Jonathan Penner, 1990
Donald Hall, 1990
Tor Seidler, 1990
Nadine Gordimer, 1990
Matt Kramer, 1990
Anita Brookner, 1990
Suzanne Farrell, 1990
