Monday, April 4, 2011

Fuuuturist Pattern Poetry

The picture you see below is the book cover designed by gray318 for The Mayor's Tongue, a novel written by Nathaniel Rich
The Mayor’s Tongue begins when two guys who work for a moving company in New York form an unlikely friendship...Alvaro speaks only Cibaeño, “virtually incomprehensible to natives of the other Spanish-speaking countries in the Caribbean”; Eugene speaks English and Italian. The friends are unable to communicate, and yet they converse feelingly, or at least they think they do. Alvaro is writing a novel that he asks Eugene to translate, and Eugene believes that he is able to capture the essence of the story, even without knowing the language. 


I really enjoyed following the words across the cover; I think it goes well with the subject of communication that appears in The Mayor's Tongue. When I first saw the cover design, its animated quality reminded me of Filippo Marinetti's pattern poetry in his Les mots en liberté futuristes (Futurist Words-in-Freedom) of 1919:


On a side note, this is also a great book whose cover text takes the shape of a hand: 

It's Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.

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