Cover Love: The Melville House ‘Art of the Novella’ series

Question: What do you get when you cross a PANTONE colour chart with a leading publishing house?
Answer: This gorgeous set of titles from Melville House Publishing, which celebrates with spectral majesty, the particular book form that is the novella.

When it comes to book covers simplicity is always a winner in my eyes (one of the reasons I love the Murakami covers I featured in my last ‘Cover Love’ post so much), and it probably don’t come much more simple in design than this set published by Melville House as part of their ‘The Art of the Novella’ series. Uncomplicated these covers may well be, but they possess a certain eloquence and allure that for me makes them stand out as being simply divine!

I had originally planned a ‘Cover Love’ feature for later in the week, on an entirely different theme (which will still be happening), but after Stewart of the Booklit blog and the World Literature Forum drew my attention to this Melville House series earlier today (he was telling me he bought a particular title from a particular author who I said I wouldn’t mention again for a few days )), I just had to share them with the world of the unknowing; those like me who may never of had the pleasure of seeing them before. At first I was going to only feature a few of my favourites from the series, but given that the ‘Cover Love’ feature is all about decadence and unrestricted coveting, I couldn’t resist going overboard and subjecting everyone to a ‘rainbow overload’ – which I think I, or rather the book covers, have achieved admirably ).

If I did have to pick out particular favourites from this series based solely on aesthetics, then I would undoubtedly choose Tolstoy’s The Devil, Conrad’s Freya of the Seven Seas, Gogol’s How the Ivans Quarrelled, and Twain’s The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg. These are the shades of colour that stand out as the most enticing to me; the most alluring (especially the Twain title because orange is my favourite colour )). Of course on a literary level I would consider all of the titles worth buying. They are after all, all great works of classic literature (my kind of ‘thang’) served up in single-sitting portions, but this post isn’t anything to do with literary content, and everything to do with COVER ).

Anyway I’ve drooled enough over ‘The Art of the Novella’ series from Melville House, and hopefully I’ve got you salivating a bit too. If you’re interested in any more about the works featured, then clicking on a cover will take you directly to the publisher’s page for each title. As ever I should point out that all links are non-affiliate, and although you can buy directly from these pages, I’m not suggesting whether you should or shouldn’t.

Thanks again to Stewart for pointing me to this series in the first place!

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‘Cover Love’ offers me the one indulgence of pushing aside the old adage of ‘never judging a book by its cover’, and celebrating with an unadulterated passion, my incurable lust for book cover design.