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Cold Start: Inadvertent Book Cover

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Sometimes you may encounter an old car ad and realize that the design of it could lend itself very well to something completely different. In this case, this 1958 Ford Zodiac ad, with its rich, saturated colors, striking dress on the model, and evocative name with understated typography justĀ feelĀ like something you’d see on modern book cover design.

Here, look:

Vidframe Min Top
Vidframe Min Bottom

See? That kinda works, doesn’t it? I’d pick up that book.

 

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Andreas JĆ¼ngling
Andreas JĆ¼ngling
2 years ago

PLEASE tell us more about Emily Clamscraps. Perhaps she’d be willing to write a column here on The Autopian.

Phantom Pedal Syndrome
Phantom Pedal Syndrome
2 years ago

752 LME, is that part of the Zodiac cypher? Itā€™s clearly a crime novel.

Trust Doesn't Rust
Trust Doesn't Rust
2 years ago

You really missed an opportunity to subtly promote “Robot, Take the Wheel” by placing it on that table.

MrBalrog
MrBalrog
2 years ago

Am I the only one disappointed the other book wasn’t called Plantopian?

btw “Diseases of Trees and Shrubs” helped me get to sleep last night. No cars in the book*. I’ll give it a one star rating.

*excepting the unindicted red car in Plate 163(F) “A honey locust repeatedly assaulted by automobile bumpers”

Nic Periton
Nic Periton
2 years ago

The twenty six Emily Clamscraps novels are sadly, now all out of print although you are more likely to find a second edition copy as they had a print run of over 25 following the brief burst of academic enthusiasm after it was revealed that “Emily Clamscraps” was the collaborative pseudonym used by Hunter S Thompson and the 14th Dalai Lama.

EricTheViking
EricTheViking
2 years ago
Reply to  Nic Periton

Thanks for pointing it out! I was wondering why I couldn’t find any of her books in the online stores.

Sean O'Brien
Sean O'Brien
2 years ago

My very personal car-related book cover gripe:

My wife is an author who wrote a book last year where the fact that the heroine drives a Stutz Bearcat is a fairly important plot point. Initially, her publisher went to the trouble of finding someone who owned one and was willing to have some pictures of his lovely yellow car taken for the book cover. They sent her a fantastic version with the car edited into a picture that we took of a windswept headland on a Scottish island very much like the setting of much of the book with models who looked very much like her characters. It was great!

Then they scrapped that and replaced it with generic characters in a generic location and the car barely visible on the back cover. We still don’t understand why they went to so much time and trouble only to switch to something demonstrably worse.

Bob Rolke
Bob Rolke
2 years ago

Slightly off topic, but that dress is fantastic.

Maymar
Maymar
2 years ago

I still stand by this being the cover for a lesser known Franz Ferdinand single.

D.B. Platypus
D.B. Platypus
2 years ago

Any graphic artists here? I’m looking at how the woman seems to have an outline drawn around her. That’s kind of weird.

Thi
Thi
2 years ago
Reply to  D.B. Platypus

Graphic Designer here.

Way back in the day and well before my time things were printed with multiple plates when you wanted something to be color.

What this looks like to me is the car is printed in black and white while the woman is in color. So they have a black and white print of the image, and then a 3 color plate print of yellow/blue/red to colorize her.

With that said the plates are not perfectly lined up and that is what is giving the outline effect.

Vetatur Fumare
Vetatur Fumare
2 years ago
Reply to  Thi

Beat me to it. You can get a similar effect when using quick photoshop masks to desaturate parts of a picture.

Dave Horchak
Dave Horchak
2 years ago
Reply to  Thi

Wrong I was around back then it was called 4 process color. You had black, process red, process blue, and process yellow. The printers newspapers could only handle 4 different colors. The different process colors had 2 colors and like modern day printers you added or reduced the mix based on the desired design and the better pressman could actually create a photograph quality picture. This photo has a lady wearing a hoop skirt design that has a ack pleat and looks like an outline but if you look close that outline is only around the skirt not the whole model. I appreciate your education but this goes back before graphic design was a thing and more along the lines of a true artist requiring a good eye and an artist touch as opposed to a computer expert with all the tools available today.

Robert Kirchner
Robert Kirchner
2 years ago
Reply to  D.B. Platypus

It was the fifties. People took their outlines with them everywhere, for fear of being seen “outside the lines” and therefore being thought to be a communist.

Dave Horchak
Dave Horchak
2 years ago
Reply to  D.B. Platypus

Nope just dress design with hoop skirt

MATTinMKE
MATTinMKE
2 years ago

I’ve been an Emily Clamscraps fan since the beginning!

Sid Bridge
Sid Bridge
2 years ago

IMHO, Emily Clamscraps hasn’t had a great novel since “Taunus: The Foot Paster” but many critics were fond of her semi-autobiographical piece, “Clio: Her Own Eyes.”

I'm an Evil Banana
I'm an Evil Banana
2 years ago
Reply to  Sid Bridge

And who could forget her classic “Anglia – Quest for Spark.”

DysLexus
DysLexus
2 years ago
Reply to  Sid Bridge

And the little known masterpiece “Edsel — The face almost single handedly destroyed the family name”

Troggy
Troggy
2 years ago
Reply to  Sid Bridge

Also “Lucas: Prince of Darkness” if you’re into that sort of thing.

Cool Dave
Cool Dave
2 years ago

Iā€™m sure itā€™s one of the reasons youā€™re fascinated with these too but modern car ads just donā€™t have the same level of cool graphical style or color choice.

I bought a brochure off eBay for my ā€˜73 D100 and I love flipping through it!

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