Books, Design and Culture
Continuing with the recent series design theme here on The Casual Optimist, creative director Paul Buckley let me know about new set of covers for the Pelican editions of Shakespeare. The covers were designed by newcomer Manuja Waldia, who studied Graphic Design at NIFT, New Delhi and the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design. Waldia has been commissioned to design the entire series (which is a lot of book covers!), and as a Paul said, “she gives the last two male icon artists to do that (Milton Glaser and Riccardo Vecchio) a run for their money.”
Freelance illustrator and paper artist Kevin Stanton recently contacted me about his book illustrations for the new Signature Shakespeare editions of Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth.
Art directed by Ashley Prine at Sterling Publishing, and with additional typography by the immensely talented Chin-Yee Lai, both books have laser-cut covers, as well as five laser-cut interior illustrations per book, and more than 30 other illustrations.
The results are beautiful and the project sounded like fascinating undertaking, so I thought I would ask Kevin a little more about it.
We corresponded by email.
How did the project come about?
Two years ago, at the very beginning of my foray into freelancing and just a month after graduating from Pratt, I received an unsolicited email from Pamela Horn, a Editorial Director at Sterling Signature. It turns out that a higher-up in the company had seen my work at Pratt’s Annual Pratt Show and passed my portfolio on to her!
After we met a few times, she mentioned that she’d been looking to do a project with a paper artist, and that when the right one came along she would let me know. Initially this had meant a series of Classics book covers, but that fell through. Nine months after our first interview, I got the call — Pam wanted to do a series of Shakespeare plays, starting with Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth, each with a cover and fifteen plates! And that was a dream job right there! And after some discussion with my Art Director, Ashley Prine, it got even better, even more unreal: today it is a hardcover book with a laser-cut cover, five interior two-layer laser-cut illustrations, and almost forty printed spots, spreads, act openers and motifs. And my name on the cover to boot!
How did you approach such a big project?
The process was interesting to figure out. After hand-cutting a great deal of the book, we realized that scans of the pieces didn’t look good and there was no quick-fix for turning them into vectors. Enter my friend and assistant, Victoriya Baskin. Since my sketches before I cut are like maps of everything (I don’t freehand anything), she was able to vector it all together so that we had a product that could be printed on the pages and sent to the laser-cutter with clean, expert lines! And the work can be edited, which was our primary concern with paper.
How you feel about the final results?
It’s been an absolute dream. As a young illustrator, and one that works in paper, I couldn’t have hoped for a better display of my work than these books. I am so happy with them, although seeing them on the shelves in a book store is the most surreal experience for me. It’s a privilege to work with my entire team, and an honor to have been a part of such a phenomenal production! Much Ado about Nothing and Hamlet are next in line to be published in November!
Thanks Kevin!
You can see more of Kevin’s work on these books on his blog.
7 CommentsHey. Here are the book covers that have caught my eye online this month. I hope that they bring a little joy in this very grim time.
If you have the means to buy books at the moment (and I appreciate that is not going to be the case for everyone), please consider supporting your local bookstore. I know a lot of stores are taking orders by email even if they are not answering the phone, and many are offering local delivery if curbside pick-up is not currently an option. The situation seems to be changing daily, so if a store wasn’t accepting orders yesterday, they might be today. We are all figuring this out on the fly.
If you are in the US and don’t have access to a local bookstore, there is Bookshop.org who are trying to provide some financial support to independents. If there are similar initiatives elsewhere, let me know — I’m happy to share the link.
Afterlife by Julia Alvarez; design by Jaya Miceli (Algonquin Books / April 2020)
Barn 8 by Deb Olin Unferth; design by Kimberly Glyder (Graywolf / March 2020)
The Beauty of Your Face by Sahat Mustafah; design by Grace Han (W.W. Norton / April 2020)
Becoming George Orwell by John Rodden; design by Monograph / Matt Avery; illustration by Lauren Nassef (Princeton University Press / February 2020)
I wonder where the eye — particularly the combination of the colour red and the eye — as a symbol of Orwell and Nineteen Eighty-Four originated? Does it go back to the 1960s and the Penguin paperback designed by Germano Facetti?
I understand that the eye is a short-hand for the surveillance state. But it is almost as if that is now considered the only element of the book worth visualizing (David Pearson’s cover is in an interesting exception in that it cleverly focuses on censorship rather than surveillance).
I haven’t read Nineteen Eighty-Four in years, but my memory is that the infamous “Big Brother is Watching You” poster is a face whose eyes seem to follow you when you move — something I think Matt’s cover above captures quite nicely — not an all-seeing, omniscient eye. The first time I read the novel, I imagined Big Brother looked something like Lord Kitchener / Uncle Sam in the recruitment posters. I was more traumatized by Room 101 to be honest… Has anyone put rats on the cover of Nineteen Eighty-Four?
The Book of Longings by Sue Monk Kidd; design by Sara Wood (Viking / April 2020)
Los Falcón by Melissa Rivero; design by Adalis Martinez (Vintage Espanol / April 2020)
The cover of the English-language US edition published by Ecco last year was designed by Allison Saltzman with lettering by Boyoun Kim.
Godshot by Chelsea Bieker; design by Nicole Caputo (Catapult / March 2020)
I actually read Godshot in manuscript form last year and liked it a lot. It is set in drought-stricken California, but I had Ry Cooder’s soundtrack to Paris, Texas playing in my head the whole time I was reading it.
I also wanted to give a quick shout-out to Nicole who was diagnosed with breast cancer at the end of last year and bravely shared her story on social media recently. Stay safe, and get well soon, Nicole. :-)
Grief by Svend Brinkmann; design by David A. Gee (Polity Press / April 2020)
David has designed the covers for a number of books by Svend Brinkmann, including Standpoints, which featured on the blog back in March 2018.
Hinton by Mark Blacklock; design by Jamie Keenan (Granta / April 2020)
Inkheart by Cornelia Funke; cover art by Karl J Mountford (Chicken House / April 2020)
Mountford has also created covers for the other two books in the series, Inkspell and Inkdeath. I love these.
A Luminous Republic by Andrés Barba; design by Mark R. Robinson; illustration by Carly Miller (Mariner Books / April 2020)
The cover of the UK edition of A Luminous Republic, which Granta is publishing in a couple of months, was designed by Luke Bird. It’s a really interesting contrast!
Misconduct of the Heart by Cordelia Strube; design by Michel Vrana (ECW Press / April 2020)
Sigh, Gone by Phuc Tran; design Henry Sene Yee (Flatiron Books / April 2020)
This is Shakespeare by Emma Smith; design by Linda Huang (Pantheon / March 2020)
Throat by Ellen van Neerven; by design by Design by Committee / Josh Durham (University of Queensland Press / April 2020)
2 CommentsSome of the most interesting and innovative book covers in the last few years have been designed as part of a series — designers and art directors seem to have more leeway with backlist titles (especially so if the author is no longer in the picture!) — and 2016 was no exception. Here are some of my favourite series designs from past year…
The Angelus Trilogy by John Steele; designed by Jason Booher (Blue Rider Press / 2016)
Inspector Littlejohn Mysteries by George Bellairs; design Stuart Bache (IPSO Books / 2016)
The Birds and the Bees; cover art by Timorous Beasties (Vintage / 2016)
Read more about the series on the Creative Review blog.
Virago Modern Classics Daphne Du Maurier; designs by Jamie Keenan, Neil Gower, Gray318, and Nico Taylor (Virago / 2016)
Vintage Eliot; cover art by Zeva Oelbaum (Vintage /2016)
Read more about the series on CMYK, Vintage book design tumblr.
Found on the Shelves / The London Library; design by David Pearson; illustration by Joe McLaren (Pushkin Press / 2016)
Read more about the design of the series at The Bookseller.
Gollancz William Gibson ‘Sprawl Trilogy’ and Burning Chrome; design by Sinem Erkas; cover art by Daniel Brown (Gollancz / 2016-2017)
Read more about the books and the design on the Gollancz blog.
Patrick Hamilton reissues; design by Jack Smyth (Abacus 2016- 2017)
Sonya Harnett reissues; design by Marina Messiha; cover art by Maxim Shkret (Penguin Teen Australia / 2016)
New Directions Roger Lewinter; design by Erik Carter (New Directions / 2016)
Macmillan Classics; design by Neil Lang (Macmillan India / 2016)
This is just a fraction of the covers designed by Neil and he is working on even more to complete the series.
Beck and Mal Peet reissues; design by Jack Noel; illustration by Telegramme (Walker Books / 2016)
Pelican Shakespeare; design by Manuja Waldia (Penguin US / 2016)
Mortal Engines by Stanislaw Lem (Modern Classics); series design by Jim Stoddart; cover art by Haley Warnham (Penguin / 2016)
The Great Science Fiction by H.G. Wells (Modern Classics); series design by Jim Stoddart; cover art by Evan Hecox (Penguin / September 2016)
Penguin Essentials; designs by Kyler Martz, Gray318, David Foldavi, Julian House (Penguin / 2-16)
See more of the series at Design Week.
Penguin Galaxy series; design by Alex Trochut (Penguin /2016)
No Man’s Land Trilogy by Andy Remic; design by Christine Foltzer; illustration by Jeffrey Alan Love (Tor / 2016)
Read more about Jeffrey Alan Love’s work on the series on Tor.com.
New Directions W.G. Sebald; design by Peter Mendelsund (New Directions / 2016)
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All Things Cease to Appear by Elizabeth Brundage; design by Mario Hugo (Knopf / March 2016)
The Assault by Harry Mulisch; design by Oliver Munday (Pantheon / April 2016)
The Association of Small Bombs by Karan Mahajan; design by Matt Vee (Viking / March 2016)
Beloved Poison by E. S. Thomson; cover art Jordan Metcalf (Little, Brown & Co / March 2016)
Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space by Janna Levin; design by Janet Hansen (Knopf / March 2016)
Dada Presentism by Maria Stavrinaki; design by Anne Jordan & Mitch Goldstein (Stanford University Press / April 2016)
Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain by Barney Norris; design James Paul Jones (Doubleday / April 2016)
In the Name of Editorial Freedom edited by Stephanie Steinberg; design by Isaac Tobin (University of Michigan Press / September 2015)
I’m so embarrassed that I missed this great type-only cover by the brilliant Isaac Tobin last year that I’m including it here.
Speaking of which, I also missed this rather fine David Drummond cover from late last 2015 too…
Life and Other Near-Death Experiences by Camille Pagán; design by David Drummond (Lake Union Publishing / November 2015)
A Man Lies Dreaming by Lavie Tidhar; design by Marina Drukman (Melville House / March 2016)
Ben Summers’ cover design for the UK edition of A Man Lies Dreaming published by Hodder and Stoughton was a book cover of note waaaaay back in October 2014!
The Miles Between Me by Toni Neale; design by Alban Fischer (Curbside Splendor / April 2016)
Model Disciple by Michael Prior; design by David Drummond (Vehicule Press / April 2016)
Olio by Tyehimba Jess; design by Jeff Clark / Quemadura (Wave / April 2016)
The One-In-Million Boy by Monica Wood; design by C. S. Neal (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt / April 2016)
A Pillow Book by Suzanne Buffam; design by Alysia Shewchuk (House of Anansi / April 2016)
She Weeps Each Time You’re Born by Quan Barry; design by Joan Wong (Vintage / February 2016)
A Study in Charlotte by Brittany Cavallaro; jacket art Dan Funderburgh; design Katie Fitch (Katherine Tegen Books / March 2016)
Sudden Death by Álvaro Enrigue; design by Stephen Parker; photograph Mark Vessey (Harvill Secker / April 2016)
The cover of the US edition published by Riverhead and designed by Rachel Willey was in last month’s post.
Susuzluk (Thirst) by Steven Mithen; design by James Paul Jones (Koc University Press / April 2016)
The Tempest by William Shakespeare; design by David Pearson (Penguin / April 2016)
Tuesday Nights in 1980 by Molly Prentiss; design by Rodrigo Corral (Gallery/Scout Press / April 2016)
To the Left of Time by Thomas Lux; design by Jackie Shepherd (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt / April 2016)
We’ll Always Have Paris by Emma Beddington; design by Justine Anweiler; lettering by Cocorrina (Macmillan / April 2016)
What Belongs to You by Garth Greenwell; design by Justine Anweiler (Picador / April 2016)
This is a variant on the cover of the US edition from FSG designed by Jennifer Carrow, which is also very nice (especially the zig-zag of the type), but I especially like the Andreas Gursky-like edge-to-edge grid and hyper-real colour of the UK edition.
Next month sees the publication of Undermajordomo Minor, the new novel by award-winning Canadian author Patrick deWitt.
An “ink-black comedy of manners”, it apparently involves an Alpine castle, a mysterious Baron Von Aux, and a lot of bad behaviour — including, if the Quill and Quire‘s Steven W. Beattie is to be believed, “an extravagant act of Hieronymus Bosch-like grotesqueness… perpetrated upon a large rat.”
It sounds a little like a horror movie directed by Wes Anderson. Or Terence Fisher doing something nasty to Gilbert and Sullivan.
While the cover for the US edition (published by Ecco) was designed by the talented Sara Wood, the UK and Canadian editions of Undermajordomo Minor feature the distinctive artwork of Dan Stiles, the American illustrator and designer who designed the covers of deWitt’s previous novels The Sisters Brothers and (the reissued) Ablutions.
Although Stiles has created different designs for Granta, and House of Anansi, the UK and Canadian covers (both featuring that unfortunate rat) have strong echoes of those previous books. According to the Canadian art director Alysia Shewchuk, this was a deliberate decision. “Dan Stiles created a very a distinctive look for The Sisters Brothers — highly stylized, dark yet playful — and we wanted to pick up these threads in our cover for Undermajordomo Minor.”
This is most apparent in the Anansi cover. Its bold geometric design is similar to Stiles’s theatrical cover for Granta, but its colour palette and texture bring it back to the The Sisters Brothers.
Interestingly, the focus of the Canadian cover is different too. “We’d seen early versions of the covers for both the US and the UK editions, and while we liked the different directions they’d each gone in, for our edition we thought it was important to feature the main character (Lucy Minor) and the castle where he lives and works,” says Shewchuk. “Dan understood exactly what we were looking for and he nailed it on the first go-around.”
Undermajordomo Minor will be published on September 3rd in the UK, September 5th in Canada, and September 15th in the US.
In the meantime, watch the slightly Monty Python-esque trailer made by artist Joanna Neborsky, with music by deWitt’s brother Nick deWitt, released today:
The same team made a similarly bizarre trailer for The Sisters Brothers.
Correction: When first posted, I stated incorrectly that the US cover was also designed by Dan Stiles. The final design and illustration for the Ecco edition of Undermajordomo Minor is by Sara Wood. The post has been amended and updated to credit Sara for her work.
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At the lovely Spitalfields Life blog, the Gentle Author reminisces about buying and selling used books in London, and shares some wondeful black and white photographs of the city’s secondhand bookshops taken in 1971 by Richard Brown:
Frustrated by my pitiful lack of income, it was not long before I began carrying boxes of my textbooks to bookshops in the Charing Cross Rd and swapping them for a few banknotes that would give me a night at the theatre or some other treat. I recall the wrench of guilt when I first sold books off my shelves but I found I was more than compensated by the joy of the experiences that were granted to me in exchange.
Inevitably, I soon began acquiring more books that I discovered in these shops and, on occasion, making deals that gave me a little cash and a single volume from the shelves in return for a box of my own books. In this way, I obtained some early Hogarth Press titles and a first edition of To The Lighthouse with a sticker in the back revealing that it had been bought new at Shakespeare & Co in Paris. How I would like to have been there in 1927 to make that purchase myself.
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In the past, I’ve often included a few series designs in with my favourite covers of the year. This year, I saw so many great covers that were part of a series, I thought a they deserved a post of their own…
Erwin Mortier; design by David Pearson (Pushkin Press / 2014)
Tim O’Brien; design by Cardon Webb (Broadway / 2014)
Penguin Essentials; design various (Penguin / 2014)
The Southern Reach Trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer (Poland); cover art by Patryk Mogilnicki (Otwarte / 2014)
Jeff VanderMeer backlist; design by Crush Creative (Tor / 2014)
Verso Radical Thinkers; design by Rumors (Verso / 2014)
In November’s Vanity Fair, Bruce Handy profiles George Whitman, the late owner of Shakespeare & Company — “the most famous independent bookstore in the world” — and his daughter Sylvia, the current owner of the shop:
Comments closedIt is not true, as the store’s workers have sometimes overheard passing tour guides proclaim, that James Joyce lies buried in the cellar. (If only. He was laid to rest at a conventional, non-bookselling cemetery in Zurich.) But the store’s roots do indeed reach back to the Shakespeare and Company that Sylvia Beach, an American expatriate, owned in Paris in the 1920s and 30s. As every English major knows, her bookshop and lending library became a hangout for Lost Generation writers such as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, and Joyce, whose Ulysses was first published in its complete form by Beach because authorities in Britain and America deemed it obscene. She closed up shop during the Nazi occupation and never reopened. But her mantle was taken up by another American, George Whitman, who opened the present-day store in 1951, just as Beat Generation writers were finding their way to the Left Bank. (The so-called Beat Hotel, which would become a Parisian equivalent to New York’s Chelsea Hotel as a flophouse for writers, artists, and musicians, was only a few blocks away.) Writers who logged time at the current Shakespeare and Company, sometimes even sleeping there—Whitman was possibly keener on extending hospitality to authors, lauded or not, than on selling their books—include Allen Ginsberg, Henry Miller, Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, Lawrence Durrell, Anaïs Nin, James Jones, William Styron, Ray Bradbury, Julio Cortázar, James Baldwin, and Gregory Corso. Another early visitor, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, co-founded his City Lights Bookstore, in San Francisco, as a sister institution two years after Shakespeare’s opened. William S. Burroughs pored over Whitman’s collection of medical textbooks to research portions of Naked Lunch; he also gave what may have been the first public reading from his novel-in-progress at the store. (“Nobody was quite sure what to make of it, whether to laugh or be sick,” Whitman later said.)
Typgraphica’s favourite typefaces of 2012. There’s a lot to love about Balkan Sans by Nikola Djurek and Marija Juza. But check out the ligatures on Levato by Felix Bonge:
Chasing the White Rabbit — Francine Prose on dreams and literature, at the New York Review of Books blog:
Literature is full of dreams that we remember more clearly than our own. Jacob’s ladder of angels. Joseph saving Egypt and himself by interpreting the Pharoah’s vision of the seven fat and lean cows. The dreams in Shakespeare’s plays range as widely as our own, and the evil are often punished in their sleep before they pay for their crimes in life. Kafka never tells us what Gregor Samsa was dreaming when he awakens as a giant insect, except that the dreams were “uneasy.” Likely they were not as uneasy as the morning he wakes into. By the end of the first paragraph of “The Metamorphosis,” Gregor has noticed his arched, dome-like brown belly, his numerous waving legs. “What has happened to me? he thought. It was no dream.”
Krautrock on the Underground — An excerpt from Earthbound by Paul Morley, part of the Penguin Lines series for the 50th anniversary of the London Underground, at The New Statesman:
“Krautrock” was the convenient collective name given in a slightly jokey, slightly wary and affectionately patronising way to an eclectic collection of radicalised German groups from very different parts of the country that contained musicians who were born in the few years before, during or just after the Second World War. Another collective name for these groups, still frivolous but more descriptive of their mission to create sound never heard before on our planet and invent music that could make you feel you were leaving the earth behind, was “kosmische”. As well as Can, these groups included Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream, Amon Düül II, Cluster, Popol Vuh, Harmonia, Neu! and Faust, and they were looking for ways to repair their traumatic recent history, remove the crippling infection of fascism, break free of totalitarian artistic repression, negotiate turbulent social and emotional currents, and radically, romantically reinstate the positive, progressive elements of their mortified national psyche.
See also: Jonathan Gibbs looks at the design of the Penguin Lines series at The Independent.
And finally…
Fact-Checking at the New Yorker, an excerpt from a new book called The Art of Making Magazines:
When the new, remade The New Yorker of the last decade was gearing up and we started getting all these late-breaking stories, issues such as logic and fairness and balance—which previously had been the responsibility of the editors—began to fall on the checkers. This wasn’t by anybody’s design. It was because the editors were really busy putting these stories together and they wanted us to look at things from the outside and see how they were framed, and look at them from the inside and look at the logic and the way they were reported and the way quotes were used and many other such things.
That responsibility came to us not in the way of anybody saying suddenly, “You’re doing that.” It just became that when a problem arose, they would come to us and say, “Why didn’t you warn us?” And so it just became clear that there was this gap between editing and checking that had opened up under the pressure of later-breaking stories, and it just seemed logical that we should fill it. It made our job more challenging, and more fun.
(via Kottke)
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The Importance of the Unimportant — Dwight Garner interviews Clive James for The New Republic:
I was the first person to take unserious television seriously. There were plenty of people who were writing profoundly about profound stuff. I was first to spot the importance of stuff that was unimportant: the stuff in between the shows, the link material, the sports commentators, the trivia. I started writing about that. It was illustrative, and you could be funny about it. You start describing a culture by taking that approach. That was my contribution.
Savage Satire — Samuel Carlisle considers whether American Psycho would be better without the violence, at The Believer:
Ellis… had trouble with American Psycho’s violence while writing it: the murder scenes remained unwritten until the rest of the book was completed, at which point Ellis read FBI criminology textbooks detailing actual serial killings and returned to insert the scenes that would be most unsettling to author, reader, and public alike. “I didn’t really want to write them,” he told an interviewer later, “but I knew they had to be there.”
What this leaves us with is violence that is mostly self-contained in a handful of brief chapters. To remove that violence would more or less be a clean excision, leaving the rest of the savagely insouciant satire intact.
And on a related note: The LA Times theatre critice Charles McNulty on depictions of violence on stage:
What is the line between acceptable and unacceptable violence in art? If gruesomeness is the criterion, much of Jacobean drama would have to be banned, including Shakespeare’s “King Lear,” with its graphic scene of Gloucester’s eyes being mercilessly plucked out. Some may believe they can identify pornography at a glance, but violence places keener demands on our sensibilities. Its artistic validity isn’t a function of how many liters of blood are spilled or how many limbs are dismembered. The question is one of gratuitousness. Or to put it another way: How does the brutality fit into a work’s larger vision?
And finally…
Ahab — New research suggests that Fredric Wertham misrepresented his research and falsified his results for his controversial book on the corrupting influence of comic books The Seduction of the Innocent, published in 1954:
Michael Chabon, who researched the early history of comics for his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay,” said that while Wertham had been viewed as “this almost McCarthyite witch hunter,” he was actually “an extremely well-intentioned liberal, progressive man in many ways,” providing mental health services to minorities and the poor.
But of “Seduction of the Innocent,” Mr. Chabon said: “You read the book, it just smells wrong. It’s clear he got completely carried away with his obsession, in an almost Ahab-like way.”
(pictured above: The Phantom Lady drawn by Matt Baker was one the comics cited in Seduction of the Innocent. A reappraisal of Baker, one of the earliest African American comic book artists, has just been published by TwoMorrows Publishing.)
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