"Sacre Bleu" by Christopher Moore

I wanted to mention this book I've been reading. It's a novel by Christopher Moore set in France and featuring Toulouse Lautrec, Vincent Van Gogh, Monet, and other artists as the main characters.

I must admit, the storyline was fun but a bit convoluted for me to follow (I was reading this before bed each night and maybe my mind was too fuzzy) but I really enjoyed the visual aspects of it. Copyright page says designed by Jamie Lynn Kerner.

This is a book from my local library. I haven't seen this cover anywhere else.
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I was so taken with it that I searched for some info on it, and found this site from Christopher Moore in which he'd asked for fans to vote on possible covers.

http://www.sacrebleu.info/2011/08/29/vote-for-your-favorite-cover/

(The tab called Chapter Guide has some great stuff in there about the making of the book and the artists and pictures)

Here's a link to his whole cover gallery, all his books. http://www.chrismoore.com/covergallery.html

(i'm going to post this to see how big that image is) (oops too big, i thought i'd cut it down enough) (mod help?)

It's not just the cover I liked - the typography is *special* - I don't know proper words -

It just seems like a lot of care was taken with the entire experience of packaging this novel.

The page numbers are in a pale blue, as is the first larger letter of each chapter and chapter headings.

The little images separating scenes are artist palettes.

Color endpages, a map of Paris.

I counted 35 color images of paintings, some as large as 1/3 the page, some quite small.

I don't know, maybe this isn't that special to anyone else. Maybe I read too many paperbacks and don't know about the quality of hardcovers these days. Maybe I'm naive about this.

This just all struck me as wonderful, though - I'm going to post some more photos when I can resize them smaller.

Here's the blurb from Amazon if you want to know what the story's about:

On July 1890, Vincent van Gogh went into a cornfield and shot himself. Or did he?

Vincent’s friends, baker-turned-painter Lucien Lessard and bon vivant Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, have their doubts. Now they’re determined to answer the questions surrounding van Gogh’s untimely death—like who was the crooked little “color man” Vincent claimed was stalking him across France . . . and why had the painter recently become deathly afraid of a certain shade of blue? Ooh la la, quelle surprise, and zut alors, what follows is a surreal odyssey and brothel-crawl deep into the art world of late-nineteenth-century Paris, as the one, the only, Christopher Moore cooks up a delectable confection of intrigue, passion, and art history . . . with cancan girls, baguettes, and fine French cognac thrown in for good measure.

Sorry, thought it looked big but the file size said it was ok. I think this one is ok, eh?