Friday, April 15, 2011

Bad book covers XVIII


Quick Chess Knockouts, Hodgson, Everyman, 1996

[Bad book covers index]

8 comments:

Tom Chivers said...

Chess boxing inspiration?

rgh said...

Is that Top Cat?

Mark Crowther said...

This is a joke right? Its pretty bad but by and large not that much worse than a lot of chess books.

I was in Chess & Bridge for a meeting recently and making conversation, one of the things that struck me was the general appalling standard of chess book covers. One of the best books of recent times, Grandmaster Repertoire By GM Boris Avrukh for instance. Instead try great chess book covers, that's the real challenge.

This is shooting fish in a barrel time.

I buy a lot of technical books on web programming. The best ones just put really nice splurges of colours on the front done by a decent graphic artist, no pretence of being illustrative of the content. Maybe some chess publishers should try that. And I think the design of the cover does make a big difference to your confidence in the content.

Some decent covers:

Endgame: Bobby Fischer's Remarkable Rise and Fall

Attacking Manual By GM Jacob Aargaard

The latter being the same publisher of the Avrukh book.

Patzer Sees Check said...

I know what you mean. Okay, don't judge a book by its cover, but surely publishers would want their product to be attractive on the shelf? Hodgson has previous on this one, check out Chess Travellers Quiz Book. Everyman seem to be the best at the moment. Quality are sometimes beautiful sometimes awful.

ejh said...

Also, shouldn't it have an apostrophe?

Patzer Sees Check said...

Yes, it should, and doesn't. It wasn't my typo!

Patzer Sees Check said...

Couldn't help myself, wrote about bad covers here: Judging Book Covers

Jonathan B said...

Harvey,

I published your previous comment but blogger seems to have eaten it. Not sure what happened but the whole blogger system was down on Friday so that may have had something to do with it.

Sorry about that, but I just wanted to let you know we didn't delete it.

J