In my morning-coffee-stumble-through-the-internet-while-waking-up ritual today I came across a fantastically cool / I can’t believe that I didn’t know about this before blog, called 50 Watts, run by Philadelphian (yay! My hometown!) Will Schofield.

50 Watts is great little space of the web covering the intersection of book collection, design, and illustration. Sounds like heaven to me.  What caught my eye was an image from a post on now vintage book covers from the 40 year span from 1964 – 1984. Here, I’ve posted a few of my favorites, but definitely check out the full post at 50 Watts here.

And yeah, part of me wishes that I could read the text on these beauties. At the same time, they still speak quite clearly and the other part of me loves being able to make up stories about what these stories are about.

Mostly, I just adore the flatness of the color fields, the kapow! of their graphics and layout, and symbolic style of the illustrations. Being a silkscreen printmaker, there is something so excellently familiar about the way that these were printed, probably cheaply, probably in a spot, or one color at a time process like screenprinting. You can see the areas where pieces aren’t in perfect register, or where colors overprint one another, and the use of halftones to mimic saturation levels of a color. All make my heart do little flips. The limitations of this type of printing force incredibly creative and freeing design and illustration choices, which, clearly I love and have embraced as a career. So, no. It’s no surprise that I dig these. I hope that you do too.