Two new Eisenbrauns books published

Eisenbrauns has just published two new books:

From the Rivers of Babylon to the Highlands of Judah
Collected Studies on the Restoration Period
EIS - Eisenbrauns
by Sara Japhet
Eisenbrauns,2006
x + 469 pp.,English
Cloth,6 x 9 inches
ISBN: 1575061214
List Price: $49.50
Your Price: $44.55
www.eisenbrauns.com/wconnect/wc.dll?ebGate~EIS~~I~JAPFROMTH

And

Deuteronomic Theology and the Significance of Torah
A Reappraisal
EIS - Eisenbrauns
by Peter T. Vogt
Eisenbrauns,2006
xii + 242,English
Cloth
ISBN: 1575061074
List Price: $37.50
Your Price: $33.75
www.eisenbrauns.com/wconnect/wc.dll?ebGate~EIS~~I~VOGDEUTER

Andy, the person who designed the covers on these, has this to say about cover design in general, and these books in particular:

Cover design for Eisenbrauns titles is a bit of a challenge. Unlike other academic publishers who just print an unrelated design or simply stamp the title into the cloth, we try to give each book a cover that reflects the contents, a cover that makes you want to pick up the book and find out more—which sounds easy until you consider just how very esoteric many of these books are.

You have to get very creative. Archaelology books seem like the easiest ones at first blush, but there's only so many times you can put a krater on a cover. It's tempting to use Hebrew text as a mere background on language titles. The easy covers have already been done, for the most part—the longer you keep at this, the more creative you have to get. You have to make abstract ideas concrete, concrete ideas abstract, and most of the time, you have to do it using only two inks!

When I'm talking with the authors and editors, I'm constantly looking for visual language: hooks that I can hang a picture on. The recent Japhet book was easy; the very title had the image built in. The colors readily leaped to mind. The Vogt cover was a bit more difficult; I had to talk with the editor for quite a while on that one. The resulting image is actually a bit more Exodus than Deuteronomy; it's the people of Israel surrounding the pillar of fire at night. I imagined how that must have looked from the sky, a great pillar, with the shadows of the surrounding peoples gathered, streaking away into the darkness of the desert. That's the basis for this cover.