UnBeige, mediabistro.com’s design blog, discovered an article at the Financial Times revealing the visual joke in the dust jacket of Naked, David Sedaris‘s 1997 essay collection:
“Many of the stories in Naked explore ideas of vulnerability and self-exposure, so [Chip Kidd] chose for Naked‘s cover a photograph of loose white boxer shorts. The title is printed directly on the white book-binding rather than on the jacket, with the too-short jacket just touching the base of the word… When you slide the jacket down and off the book, what you see below the word ‘naked’ on the binding is an X-ray image of what’s inside the boxer shorts: hip, thigh and pelvic bones, with only the ghostliest outline of the body.”
Well, it was news to me, seeing as all the Sedaris I’ve read was in the New Yorker and I’ve never bothered picking up the books. And the article is just one installment of a series of articls on book jacket design by Barnard’s Mary Cregan at the FT. I wonder if I can get her to take a look at The Stewardess Is Flying the Plane…