I’m intrigued by the art of book design. Some designs are great, some less so. A few deserve to be placed in museums, they’re that good. I’m a huge fan of the Crude World cover that Peter Mendelsund designed for Knopf. Now comes the cover for the British edition of CW, which has just been published by the Allen Lane imprint of Penguin Books. It’s entirely different. Knopf’s is on the right, Allen Lane’s on the left. What do you think? In the months ahead, there will be more covers as editions are published in Germany, France, the Netherlands and Denmark.
I was born and raised in Los Angeles. In 1983, after graduating from the University of California at Berkeley, I went to Brussels as a copy editor for The Wall Street Journal/Europe. I left the Journal in 1985 to write for The New York Times and The International Herald Tribune, covering NATO and the European Union. In 1987 I moved to Seoul, South Korea, where I wrote primarily for The Washington Post. After three years in Asia I moved to Budapest to cover Eastern Europe and the Balkans. I spent most of 1992 and 1993 covering the war in Bosnia for the Post.
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