{"id":2057,"date":"2025-07-30T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-07-30T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/laurenhwhite.com\/?p=2057"},"modified":"2025-10-06T10:51:12","modified_gmt":"2025-10-06T10:51:12","slug":"23-of-the-best-book-covers-of-july-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/laurenhwhite.com\/index.php\/2025\/07\/30\/23-of-the-best-book-covers-of-july-2025\/","title":{"rendered":"23 of the Best Book Covers of July 2025"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is a book cover column\u2014and thus it seemed like a wildly egregious oversight to not feature a new book that manages to pull off two<\/em> hardcover covers in a single volume. Confused? We were, too. So we asked McSweeney\u2019s art director, Sunra Thompson, to riff on the double cover to Mostly Everything: The Art of Tucker Nichols<\/em>. Below, he does just that\u2014and the rest of our favorite cover finds published or revealed in July follow.<\/p>\n

\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n
\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Official publisher description:<\/strong>
The first career-spanning book from Bay Area artist Tucker Nichols, Mostly Everything: The Art of Tucker Nichols<\/em> attempts to capture, in one extravagant volume, decades of the artist’s varied work, from drawings with words, drawings without words, paintings and sculpture, to large- and medium-scale public works, editorial illustrations, picture books, doodles, notes, charts, lists and more. Bound in a luxurious, hard-to-describe double-hardcover book, with two spines and two overlapping cover boards, and clocking in at over 300 full-color pages, Mostly Everything: The Art of Tucker Nichols<\/em> contains a lifetime of making that can’t quite be contained.<\/p>\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

Before we discuss the cover, what was the brief for this project at large?
<\/strong>Mostly Everything<\/em> was intended to be (and is) the first big career-spanning book of Tucker Nichols\u2019 work. He\u2019s an artist who works in lots of different mediums, with lots of different materials\u2014more than I realized before I worked on this project\u2014so the real challenge for the book was how to show the reader the various ways Tucker Nichols makes art, and have it all make sense together. In our first official meeting about the book, Tucker arrived with a stack of green and yellow notecards, and each one had a word written on it: “notes,” “sculptures,” “artwork my mother saved,\u201d \u201cblue.” The cards were intended to show all the different ways his work might be categorized. How do you make all this disparate stuff work together in a book?<\/p>\n

The solution we came up with was to make a book that was trying, but kinda failing, to categorize an artist\u2019s work. There would be categories in the book, and most of the work in those categories would make sense there, but then, every once in a while, there\u2019d be something that didn\u2019t seem to fit. The flora category, for example, has paintings of flowers, large-scale floral murals, and a photo of multicolored ropes and wires \u201cblooming\u201d from a rusty tin can.<\/p>\n

How did you (and\/or Tucker) arrive at the double-cover concept?<\/strong>
The idea for the cover flowed directly from this idea that the categories in the book would sometimes fail: If the person editing the book didn\u2019t know how to categorize this artist\u2019s work, maybe the person who actually manufactured the book also didn\u2019t know how to construct a book. My first idea for the cover was to put it on the book the right way, so that it opens toward the left, but have the interior open the wrong way, toward the right. A printer made a dummy of a book like this for me, but it wound up being awkward, because the book would have to be read backwards. I carried this dummy around with me for a while, and it naturally got flipped upside down all the time, and at a certain point I thought that if the cover opened the wrong way (to the right) but the interior opened the usual way (to the left) it might convey the same idea, but without the awkward reading experience.<\/p>\n

How did you (or Tucker) select the image that would appear on the \u201cmain\u201d cover?
<\/strong>Tucker suggested that particular cover image. We knew we wanted an image on the front, and I\u2019m sure we tried many, many images, but the earplug sculpture complemented the colors on the cover very well. <\/p>\n

How did you decide on the composition and the elements of the \u201csecond\u201d cover?
<\/strong>I wanted the second cover to feel a little like a table of contents, so it started with descriptions of the work that Tucker wrote out by hand. I arranged all the handwritten text and asked Tucker to draw a series of lines so I could make a grid around the words. \u2026<\/p>\n

Early on, I really wanted the cover to just be filled with handwriting, like these funny handwritten signs he made for the SFMOMA. I kinda fell in love with these signs he made. We decided the front cover needed an image, but these signs he made were really the basis for the cover art. <\/p>\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

From a production standpoint, how difficult was this to execute?
<\/strong>The printer mostly understood what I was trying to do with this backwards-opening cover. But there were lots of little things I had to solve. The first major problem with the book was it bulged along the spine. Originally, I thought the yellow spine (on the left, where the signatures meet) could be flush with the covers, but that caused the covers to bulge on that side, and it was very obvious (to me, at least). I found out by accident that this is one reason why hardcover books have those flexible hinge areas between the spine and cover boards\u2014to allow some space for the signatures to expand into. So I decided to move all the cover boards 0.25\u201d away from the spine, and that solved the bulging issue.<\/p>\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

The other heart-stopping moment came late in the process when I got the first printed sample of the cover, attached to a blank interior. The cover looked great, but when I opened the pages, the spine instantly cracked, leaving really unsightly creases in the spine material and lettering. The spine was glued to the signatures, so the spine material bent with the signatures and essentially crushed the spine. Devastating. So I asked the printer to try a layflat spine, so that the spine would separate from the signatures when the book opened. The printer\u2019s first few attempts at making this layflat spine were worse than the original. The photos they sent are actually kind of funny now, but at the time, I was horrified. The printer eventually figured out how to make a layflat spine that didn\u2019t immediately get crushed by the book, but it was a scary couple weeks.<\/p>\n

How did you select the color palette?<\/strong>
The colors came directly from Tucker\u2019s labeling system at his studio. A lot of the work in his studio is archived in boxes and labeled with very bright strips of tape. The colors on the spine, outer cover, and inner cover were colors I noticed on these strips of tape.<\/p>\n

What other comps did you explore?<\/strong>
I think the other direction we seriously explored was related to the strips of tape I just mentioned: We thought about covering the book with strips of tape and printing Tucker\u2019s handwriting on those strips. In fact, a lot of our earliest cover mockups came from Tucker sticking tape on a blank book and writing titles on the tape. He made dozens of these\u2014I have a bunch of photos.<\/p>\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

Does this go down as one of your favorite covers you\u2019ve ever worked on?<\/strong>
Top three, absolutely. <\/p>\n

\n
\n
\"\"
Cover design by David Pearson<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n
\n
\"\"
Cover design by Gregg Kulick<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n
\n
\"\"
Cover design by Suzanne Dean<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n
\n
\"\"
Cover design by Nicole Caputo<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n
\n
\"\"
Cover design by Kit Schluter<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n
\n
\"\"
Cover design by Erik Carter<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n
\n
\"\"
Cover design by Matt Broughton<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n
\n
\"\"
Cover design by Matt Dorfman<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n
\n
\"\"
Cover design by Nicole Caputo<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n
\n
\"\"
Cover design by Duncan Blachford<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n
\n
\"\"
Cover design by Giacomo Girardi<\/a> \/ Rodrigo Corral Studio, painting by Felix Edouard Vallotton<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n
\n
\"\"
Cover design by Kid Ethic<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n
\n
\"\"
Cover design by Chris Bentham<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n
\n
\"\"
Cover design by Jack Smyth<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n
\n
\"\"
Cover design by Tom Etherington<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n
\n
\"\"
Cover design by Emily Mahon<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n
\n
\"\"
Cover design by Rodrigo Corral Studio<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n
\n
\"\"
Cover design by Jon Gray<\/a>, photo by Inez and Vinoodh, Trunk Archive<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n
\n
\"\"
Cover design by Jet Purdie<\/a>, illustrations by Ernst Haeckel and Adolphe Millot (egg)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n
\n
\"\"
Cover design by Emma Moore<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n
\n
\"\"
Cover design and illustration by Jonathan Bush<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n
\n
\"\"
Cover design by Vivian Lopez Rowe<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

The post 23 of the Best Book Covers of July 2025<\/a> appeared first on PRINT Magazine<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is a book cover column\u2014and thus it seemed like a wildly egregious oversight to not feature a new book that manages to pull off two hardcover covers in a single volume. Confused? We were, too. So we asked McSweeney\u2019s art director, Sunra Thompson, to riff on the double cover to Mostly Everything: The Art […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2059,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[14],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/laurenhwhite.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2057"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/laurenhwhite.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/laurenhwhite.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/laurenhwhite.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/laurenhwhite.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2057"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/laurenhwhite.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2057\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2088,"href":"https:\/\/laurenhwhite.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2057\/revisions\/2088"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/laurenhwhite.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2059"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/laurenhwhite.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2057"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/laurenhwhite.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2057"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/laurenhwhite.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2057"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}