books with stickers

in response to Tinka & co.'s bibliophile posting, let me just say those little award stickers have been the bane of my existence since childhood. Growing up as a library brat and firmly beginning my life-long tradition of spending far too much time amongst bookshelves and not enough in sunlight, I had an unfortunate habit as a youngster to attempt to pull the stickers off the books. (Due to watchful parents and guardians, I was never successful. But I came close.) Personally it seems silly to grant a book an award for its magnificent illustrations (such as Maurice Sendak's gorgeous Where the Wild Things Are) and then cover up those illustrations with a faux silver/gold/bronze things that instinctively you wish you could pull off instead of ineffectually scratch to no avail.

It's a continuing problem with children's literature, apparently; Marvelous Math: a Book of Poems unfortunately has a gold sticker covering half the face of a very cute elephant with a second indignity covering his upper leg. Poor Dumbo. Adult literature is not free from these fake stickers, either: recent Pulitzer winner The Known World has an unnecessary circle hovering in what used to be an open sky on its cover. The designer obviously has more taste than the previous children's book designer; they at least try to get the sticker to match the rest of the overall design. But still, it's invasive and off-putting. Write a line or two on the back that says how special it is. I don't want to see a circle blemishing my nice cover...

Jincy Willett's recent book on book awards has one of the more hideous and unimaginative covers I've seen in awhile and yet, I can't make up my mind if the shiny gold blob that graces the lower half is self-affacing and funny or just more bad design. I'll leave that to your own personal opinion, dear Reader.

Lastly, all this talk about labels reminded me that there are some books that use a trump l'oeil/sticker effect to the benefit of the overall design. The one that immediately popped into my head was Lenin's Brain, as designed by the great Michael Ian Kaye, which intentionally uses a label to cover up the most interesting part of the cover to up the tension/dramatic effect. (I might be biased because I'm a fan of his work, and I've heard him speak about his designs, including this one. But whatever.) In a similar vein, but maybe not as successful is the design for A Time of Our Singing. A very creepy kind of label-cover up seems to work well in Readerville's selection Back from the Dead but I personally enjoy the overlapping bits in a low-brow paste-up kind of way in 52 McGs more.

Any one else wish to address the stickers-on-book-covers issue??