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

Not The Real Life of Sebastian Knight.

ada, or ardor OR luzhin defense OR real life of sebastian knight, i think. those are the ones that seem to do most w/ the spatial possibilities of a specimen box

Dammit, now I have to look at them again.

eh i actually meant king queen knave not sebastian knight

pale fire is quite pretty tho!

The Luzhin Defense or Speak, Memory.

Pale Fire kinda disappointing imo.

Because it has to do with the content of the book? I haven't read that book. Really, I should have known. Oh, now you've gone back on what you said.

MAX!

(but pretty)

I don't like Laughter in the Dark very much either. I'm saying what I don't like because I think most of these are really good.

I think for me it's the Speak, Memory one that gets that perfect match between the book and the visual medium

(although really I've only read like four of these, so I'm likely missing connections to the content of the majority)

(If You're Feeling) Bend Sinister

Speak, Memory is pretty clever, but not the most graphically interesting.

I don't mean that it's not graphically interesting, the way people say, "She's not the most careful person" to mean that someone is clumsy. I mean MOST.

glory

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.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

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

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

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