Calvino

From Peter Mendelsund's visual essay exploring his own approach to the work of Italo Calvino – fascinating stuff, and a great use of tumblr: 

As the same moment that this design was taking shape, I was growing ever more nostalgic about several of the older editions of Calvino, and as a result of these pangs, an insight came to me: why not pick and choose amongst the previous Calvino editions, photograph them, and present pictures of them upon the new editions? Book covers repurposing other book covers. Which is to say: a catalog of readymades. Of course (and I think we all can agree on this) no publisher in his or her right mind would ever sign off on this concept. Imagine the cover meeting: ‘we are paying the designer for new covers—and here they are—the old covers!’ I doubted whether anyone would warm to the (I thought inspired) eccentricity of the idea. So these never made it past my computer screen. Though the concept did lead to another related idea, which was the construction of a library of imaginary book covers.