sliding titles

Another gem: the cover of Lloyd C. Douglas's 1929 novel Magnificent Obsession, which was later adapted for two films. For an intro to cinema course, I recently assigned the 1954 Douglas Sirk version as part of a study on "surgical melodrama" (the other film was Kim Ki-Duk's Time, from 2006). I think the steep incline of the letters in this title design points to how quickly things can come undone in that sharp-edged subgenre. It's like a door half-open, words spilling out before the story's even begun.

ornaments

I recently discovered, via a Google image search for the frontispiece on a rare edition of Borges' Library of Babel (I love the fortuitous linkages that can happen while searching for things online, like a Surrealist party game), the smart and delightful feuilleton blog. There I found some of the loveliest ornaments I've ever seen on the cover of a 1945 edition of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray.

In addition to the repetition of the motif, the uneven delicacy of the ornament offers a sense of a hand-picked bouquet carefully arranged around an afternoon table, or an archaic stringed instrument that produces a thin reedy lilt. As John Coulthart notes, the backwards-swinging "y" is especially enchanting, and is so cleverly employed for this story of wayward time and its consequences.