Book Covers - A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines

Well-executed concept—you can follow the blocks of text around in true flowchart fashion. I only wish it had been even more complex.

Also notable: this is one of the rare books that messes with the Knopf dog logo—apparently you need to be very sly to get away with that.

— , 2006-08-25 16:12:00 -0400

Think he could have made better use of ‘a novel’ by taking the first line there and left out ‘A STORY’. Then need to balance the red somehow. Would also have liked it to be a bit more complex.

Going against the popular opinion, I’m glad the cover is not more complex. With several branching paths, the viewer is obliged to follow them all. Too many more and I think most viewers wouldn’t bother.

The thing that bothers me is the construction of the flowchart. There are some paths which seem redundant or don’t flow well. For example:

“A story—of coded secrets—told by a physicist—a story completely imagined—but entirely true—a novel.”

I was thinking about what everyone was saying and, just for fun, I played around with the cover with your ideas in mind. If you’re interested, click my name. Love the site, by the way.

Your Imageshack link isn’t working, but if you’d like to email the image to me I’ll post it.

The Knopfdog is on the bottom of the spine, Renee. You’ll have to find a copy at the bookstore.

Hey! That’s really fascinating, dekadetia! The flow of the text is much, much better in your “remixed” version.

With respect to dekadentia’s very interesting idea of trying a different layout, I would still prefer the original version. Note that in the original, the four colored circular elements (two red blurbs and two photo cutoffs) form an uneven line from upper right corner downwards and to the left. This constellation lays in very opposition to the highly ordered horizontal-vertical geometry of other elements. This is no accident but a thought of the designer. Regular grid of the computations flowchart is laid over with a network of human lives and relationships, the human network being more complex than the machine one. The design indicates fundamental unsolvability of the human relationships, I would like to belive. Turing and Gödel, of course, make very suitable characters to the type of study that the book’s cover suggests.

Dekadentia’s new version releases this configuration and moves author to foreground. However, dekadentia’s version has another interesting feature. In the new version, the visual triangle of Alan Turing, Kurt Gödel and Janna Levin is brought out clearly. This is remarkable indeed; and I think that is shows the strong potential of the flowchart design idea. Shift is made from By reading the book, maybe we can learn which of the two men author’s heart inclines to.