Artist Animates Famous Book Covers in an Elegant, Understated Way

Javier Jensen, an artist liv­ing down in San­ti­a­go, Chile, has breathed a lit­tle life into some beloved book cov­ers. And when I say lit­tle, I mean lit­tle. His ani­mat­ed touch­es are nice­ly under­stat­ed, hard­ly dis­tract­ing from the orig­i­nal cov­er designs.

To the 1851 cov­er of Her­man Melville’s Moby Dick, Jensen added a lit­tle flip­ping whale tale (above). A plan­et shim­mers and a star sparkles on the cov­er of Antoine de Saint Exu­pery’s Le Petit Prince. Wisps of smoke rise from a pipe on Conan Doyle’s The Adven­tures and Mem­oirs of Sher­lock Holmes.

See more cov­ers, includ­ing how Jensen reworked Fran­cis Cugat’s orig­i­nal cov­er design for The Great Gats­by, here.

You can find many of these clas­sic works in our twin col­lec­tions:

800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kin­dle & Oth­er Devices

and

1,000 Free Audio Books: Down­load Great Books for Free

via Boing­Bo­ing/Slate

Relat­ed Con­tent:

83 Years of Great Gats­by Book Cov­er Designs: A Pho­to Gallery

600+ Cov­ers of Philip K. Dick Nov­els from Around the World: Greece, Japan, Poland & Beyond

Illus­tra­tions for a Chi­nese Lord of the Rings in a Stun­ning “Glass Paint­ing Style”

10 Won­der­ful Illus­tra­tions from the Orig­i­nal Man­u­script of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Lit­tle Prince

Ralph Steadman’s Evolv­ing Album Cov­er Designs: From Miles Davis & The Who, to Frank Zap­pa & Slash (1956–2010)