Cover for Brett Easton Ellis's Rules of Attraction (Vintage Contemporaries)

I previously wrote about the book design for Vintage Contemporaries' edition of Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis.  I've since decided to read through all of Ellis's books in order.  So I went to the Strand to see if I could find a cheap copy of The Rules of Attraction.  They had a copy, but the cover was garish and ugly and I asked myself if I would be willing to pay a few extra dollars for an edition that looked nice.  I came to the conclusion that I would.  So I went to Barnes & Noble and found the Vintage Contemporaries edition.  The cover design is by David J. High and the cover photograph is by Chris Hiller, the same team that did the cover for Less Than Zero. 

I like this cover a lot too.  I was surprised it was a photograph; I initially thought it was a charcoal drawing.  It's a great study in grey value scale.  And only seeing a part of the bed makes you wonder what's going on in the rest of the room, hidden and out of sight.  It also could be an allusion to the harrowing opening scene of the book. 

I believe this is David J. High's website for his design studio, which appears to focus solely on book design.  Check out their portfolio, they've done some great stuff.

Book design for the paperback Less Than Zero

This is an example of my buying a book mainly because of how intriguing the cover was.  Time and place are important in fiction, and I particularly like novels that are set in a city and give the reader a sense of what it was like to be in that city at a certain moment in its history.  So the picture of Los Angeles vanishing in mist, or smog rather, and the description of the story on the back cover as "set in Los Angeles in the early 1980s," together piqued my interest.  In a nutshell, the novel is about the boredom, drug-use, apathy, and nihilism of a group of Hollywood kids during the early stages of the MTV era.  The cover photograph, and the abundance of white/nothingness, does a good job of evoking this "lost generation."  Now, having read most of the book, it also hints at one of the images repeated throughout the story: a billboard that states, "Disappear here."

There are numerous editions of Less Than Zero, all with different cover art; this one is published by Vintage.  The cover design is by David J. High and the cover photograph is by Chris Hiller.