John Gall at Random House invited me to take part in a project whereby 21 designers are invited to create a cover for reissues of Nabokov’s books … but within the prescribed format of creating a specimen box (Nabokov collected butterflies) with pins and “paper”, to create the cover.

Ten of these new designs are just being issued now, with wonderful covers by Carin Goldberg, Sam Potts, Michael Bierut, Stephen Doyle and the ever-amazing Martin Venezky, among others.

My book was “Transparent Things” so I used the pins to suspend 4 layers of acetate, with dots of transparent ink on each later.

And below is the picture I took of it, in sunlight.

You can view all (or almost all) of the covers here, at Design Observer. (Including a more eloquent description of the project, by John Gall.)