Design a New Cover for Lolita

Here's an interesting contest for all you literate artists and designers out there. The blog Venus febriculosa is having a contest to design a new cover for Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov. There is even a cash prize! As far as I can tell, this blogger is just doing this out of a sense of disappointment with the covers this novel has gotten from publishers in the past. In particular, he writes,

I am disappointed, as interesting as the various depictions of Lolita are, by how very few correspond thematically to the novel. Nabokov’s work is masterful in its clarity and overflows with powerful and finely-wrought imagery and yet so few of the covers attempt to capture any of this richness, and many of them are merely absurd, or banal or a laughable combination of both.

I love this. A blogger hosting a very specific art contest, with a significant prize, just for the hell of it--damn, that appeals to me a lot!



This Italian edition comes from the site Covering Lolita. I suspect that if one wishes to win this competition, one should avoid imitating any of the 154 covers displayed there.

(Hat tip The Millions)