your favorite of these imaginary Nabokov covers (in specimen boxes)

but most of these are great

I'm actually really taken with the perspective stuff going on in Invitation to a Beheading

xpost - yeah, the Glory one is on a whole other level from most, right? It's odd, because it feels like the one that most resembles an actual modern paperback cover (well and maybe sorta Laughter in the Dark), whereas I get the feeling doing Nabokov led all the others to this spare fusty "what proper books used to look like" minimalism. (though of course books never really largely looked like that, did they?)

haha nice of none of them to put "a novel" in the design

You know the typeset and design of the cover of Speak, Memory is pretty much exactly the same as the 1966 Revised Edition Putnam hardcover that I have.

Well "Speak Memory: An Autobiography Revisited" is exactly the same- they changed the "Vladimir Nabokov" around and moved it to the center, took some green matter off the "Memory," added the off-white gauzy square and put the whole thing in a specimen box.

I guess the "Memory" is remembering previous editions of the book- it is haunting its own reverie, wheels within wheels.

http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/01/ciu/75/0b/5544419328a0e43b4733e110.L.jpg

Awesome quadruple post.

You should see some of mine sometime!

bend sinister was such a weird book, kind of like the slightly deranged stuff in that collection of pynchyon's first short stories or something. I only read half of it though so who knows what happens.

despair or the eye

or pnin

I don't really like any of them to be honest (sorry), but The Luzhin Defense is the best of the lot, I think.

i like all of them, i voted for king, queen, knave

I love these! Voted for The Luzhin Defense.

I wonder if the new Speak, Memory has the SKETCH MAP OF THE NABOKOV LANDS IN THE ST. PETERSBURG REGION prepared by V.N. on a scale of 1 inch = 1 verst.

"I don't really like any of them to be honest (sorry)"

i don't either. i would make up nice things to say about them though if they were the work of shy high school students. you know, to be nice.

I think most of them are a lot more attractive than a lot of the books I have. Most of them, maybe?

They would all make reasonably attractive book covers if they were simple 2D designs. At least as good as (and in some cases much better than) the various packaging's Nabokov's gotten over the years. I quite like The Eye, King Queen Knave, Pale Fire and Pnin. That said, in most cases, these seem like 3D mock-ups of planned 2D designs. By which I mean that the specimen box device isn't really being exploited all that well/fully.

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Voted despair - Glory is underrated tho I think! I guess it is kind of vector art/Ed Hardy T-Shirt but that is an aesthetic I really like.

voted Bend Sinister
Also, "Look at the Harlequins!" reminds me of...
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/1/11/Michaeljacksondangerous.jpg

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I should've voted. I might've given Ada a vote.