It’s been a while since I did a post of David Pearson series design, so I am delighted to share his brilliant new covers for the Penguin UK editions of John le Carré’s George Smiley novels, available this month. The design is a collaboration with Nick Asbury who wrote the copy for the covers (I talked to Nick to ages ago about his Corpoetics book if you’re interested).
The small type is the lovely looking Gill Sans Nova, recently designed by George Ryan for Monotype as a contemporary digital typeface derived from Eric Gill’s original work. The large type is Stephenson Blake Condensed Sans, which is not available digitally and was pieced together from different sources by David himself. I’m sure it was a total pain in the ass to do, but it’s a pleasing contrast and well worth the effort, I think you’ll agree! Jim Stoddart was the clever AD here.
2019 has felt interminable. It has also felt like there are never enough hours in the day to keep up. You can’t talk to me about TV shows or movies. I haven’t seen any.
When it comes to books, I’m fortunate enough to work in the industry. But what hope do casual readers have of finding the good stuff when the same few titles dominate the conversation and there is so much else competing for their attention?
Daisy Jones and The Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid; design by Caroline Teagle Johnson (Ballantine / March 2019)
Daisy Jones and The Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid; design by Lauren Wakefield (Hutchinson / March 2019)
Daisy Jones and the Six had a glamorous, louche 1970s look. The US and UK editions, designed by Caroline Teagle Johnson and Lauren Wakefield respectively, took slightly different directions with the type, but the photograph (a stock image apparently) felt ideally suited to social media.
The Testaments by Margaret Atwood; design by Noma Bar (Chatto & Windus / September 2019)
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood; art direction by Christopher Moisan; illustration by Patrik Svensson (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt / April 2017)
The Testaments was everywhere and, like the recent Vintage Classics reissue of The Handmaid’s Tale, the cover illustration was unmistakably by Noma Bar. We live in an age where every cult movie and TV show gets a ‘minimalist’ poster now, and I found that The Testaments looked too familiar for me to find it engaging. It didn’t help that the cover of the 2017 US reissue of the The Handmaid’s Tale by Swedish illustrator by Patrik Svenson had already featured a similar 3/4s silhouette. Nevertheless, it was perhaps a bolder cover choice than I’m giving it credit for. If nothing else, it showed that bright green on book covers — once cursed and reviled — is suddenly all the rage!
In terms of trends, 2019 felt more like a continuation of previous years rather than a break with the past. There was a kind of conservatism to a lot of the covers I saw. My sense was that highly polished designs that looked comfortingly familiar were being approved over riskier ones that stood out from the crowd. The most interesting covers often came from small publishers, especially New Directions who seem to be giving a bit more creative license to the designers they work with (some of whom have 9-5s at much bigger publishers!).
Big centred blocks of utilitarian white type over elaborate backgrounds continued to be a mainstay. It’s the book cover as poster, and it works at any size, so I don’t think it’s going away any time soon.
Handwriting and hand-lettering remained popular too, although my sense is that enthusiasm is starting to wane as publishers are opting for greater legibility and designers are turning back to vintage type styles to give a sense of authenticity and craft. (I’m willing to admit the evidence might not back me up on this, however!)
Fun, swishy 1970s-inspired serifs like Benguiat Caslon revival Cabernet are back. People keep trying to make ITC Avant Garde — another iconic 1970s typeface — happen again too. I don’t think it works for the most part, but I can see why designers think it’s cool in a coked-up New York way. Warren Chappell’s earnest calligraphic sans serif Lydian, originally released in 1938, continued its unlikely rise as a go-to literary typeface. It even got an explainer at Vox.
Lie With Me by Philippe Besson; design by Na Kim (Scribner / April 2019) 19)
Black and white portrait photography has been the staple of biographies and classics for years, so it was interesting to see closely cropped black and white photographs used on the covers of a couple of new literary novels this year. This isn’t entirely new obviously. Black and white photography has long been used to signify that something is “art” (as opposed to, say, “pornography”). But I think the latest iteration of trend was started by Cardon Webb‘s 2015 cover for A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara which used a black and white photograph by the late Peter Hujar.
Coincidentally the cover of the US edition of Garth Greenwell’s new novel Cleanness, publishing early 2020, was designed by Thomas Colligan and uses contemporary black and white photograph by Jack Davison. (The UK edition, designed by Ami Smithson fits this trend a little less neatly, but features black and white photograph by Mark McKnight)
Something that I didn’t anticipate was the use of contemporary landscape and figure painting on the covers of some the big literary releases of the year. Like black and white photography, it felt almost pre-digital — a grasp at traditional values of craft. I don’t know if I would go as far as to say it is a rejection of post-modernism. But maybe it is? I don’t know. Discuss amongst yourselves.
The Innocents by Michael Crummey; design by Emily Mahon; art by Diana Dabinett (Doubleday / August 2019)
The World Doesn’t Require You by Rion Amilcar Scott; design by Laywan Kwan; art by Fahamu Pecou (Liveright / August 2019)
Thank you to all the designers and art directors who’ve been in touch and helped me identify covers for my posts. I’m sorry if I haven’t replied to your message. It’s been a year.
Farewell – etaoin shrdlu is a half-hour documentary about the last day of hot metal typesetting at The New York Times.
The 1978 film by Carl Schlesinger and David Loeb Weiss shows the remarkable nightly production process for a daily newspaper and the changes to come with the transition computers.
The title ‘etaoin shrdlu’ refers the words made by the letters of the first two columns of a type-casting machine keyboard. If I understand this correctly, the phrase was used by operators to create an ‘obvious’ mistake in a line of type to be discarded.
And if this sort of thing is your bag, the video was posted to Vimeo by Linotype: The Film along with number of other archive films about typesetting that are worth checking out.
Aeneis by Vergilius; design by Gray318 (Jaguar / 2019)
Jon will surely not thank me for mentioning this, but the Aeneid cover reminds me of the brilliant 2007 Penguin Modern Classics editions of Kafka designed by Mother and Jim Stoddart (featuring photographs by Gary Card and Jacob Sutton), and I can’t pass up the opportunity to post them here. They still look extraordinary…
(And in the process of looking for images, I cam across a nice essay from a couple of years ago by designer Clare Skeats discussing the Kafka covers at Grafik)
High School by Tegan & Sara; design by Na Kim (MCD / September 2019)
The cover of the Canadian edition published by Simon & Schuster Canada (left) was designed by Emy Storey. The cover of the UK edition published by Virago (right) was adapted from the Canadian design by Nico Taylor.
Sontag by Benjamin Moser; design by Tom Etherington; photograph by Richard Avedon (Allen Lane / September)
The cover of the US edition published by Ecco was designed by Allison Saltzman. Title only appears on the spine (which, if my social media is anything to go by, gets big high fives from book designers everywhere).
The New York Times ran a short article about the genesis of this cover earlier this year.
For the font-curious, the typeface is Alias Harbour according to the folks at Fonts In Use. Another calligraphic type alternative to the ubiquitous Lydian perhaps?
I’ve been thinking about covers that feature one form of redacted text or another for a while, but this post has been sitting in my drafts folder gestating for far too long so I’m publishing now, as-is, because otherwise it is unlikely to ever see the light of day!
The covers of Censoring an IranianLove Story, designed by Peter Mendelsund, and Nineteen Eighty-Four, designed by David Pearson, are classics of the genre:
Censoring an Iranian Love Story by Shahriar Mandanipour; design Peter Mendelsund (Knopf / May 2009)
Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell; design by David Pearson (Penguin / January 2013)
I thought that this kind of bar redaction (is there a technical term for it?) might be a relatively new — post-The 9-11 Commission Report — phenomena, but (friend of the blog) Richard Weston, AKA Acejet170, recently posted this 1974 Penguin cover for Academic Freedom by Anthony Arblaster, designed by Omnific, on Instagram:
In a lovely design touch, the redacted words appear on the back cover:
Related to bar redaction is the strike-through. One of my favourite examples is Barnbrook‘s cover design for How to Run a Government by Michael Barber, published by Allen Lane.
How to Run a Government by Michael Barber; design by Barnbrook (Allen Lane / March 2015)
I’ve been seeing the straight strike-through used a lot recently. It does a neat job of doing two things at once. It allows you to not say something, while also emphasizing that you are pointedly not saying it.
That Perfectly Useless Concentration by Alan Shapiro; design by Isaac Tobin
Ten Myths About Israel by Ilan Pappe; design Isaac Tobin
I’ve seen it mostly used for nonfiction (as above), but Janet Hansen recently used the strike for the cover of Amitava Kumar’s novel Immigrant, Montana:
Immigrant, Montana by Amitava Kumar; design Janet Hansen (Knopf / July 2018)
Black text on a white background with a red strike-through is its own sub-genre:
The Courage of Hopelessness by Slavoj Zizek; design by Richard Green (Allen Lane / May 2017)
Now You See It by Michael Bierut; design by
In fact, using red — be it more artistic blocks, strikeouts or scribbles — is a popular way to highlight what is being crossed out:
Trust Me, PR is Dead by Robert Phillips; design by Jamie Keenan (Unbound / June 2015)
Silence Once Begun by Jesse Ball; design by Peter Mendelsund (Pantheon / 2014)
A Book of Untruths by Miranda Doyle; design by Donna Payne (Faber & Faber / June 2017)
And generally the hand-drawn strike-through or scribble seems to be the most popular way to cross something out …
Hope A Tragedy by Shalom Auslander; design by John Gall (Riverhead Books / January 2012)
Everything I Know About Love by Dolly Alderton; design Helen Crawford White (Fig Tree / March 2018)
Tell Me Lies by Carola Lovering; design Donna Cheng (Simon & Schuster / July 2018)
All Our Names by Dinaw Mengestu; design by Isabel Urbina Peña (Knopf / March 2014)
The Only Story by Julian Barnes; design by Suzanne Dean (Jonathan Cape / February 2018)
One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter by Scaachi Koul; design by C.S. Richardson (Doubleday Canada / March 2017)
If you have (constructive) thoughts on the matter, and/or other examples, please leave them in the comments.
The Last Word by Hanif Kureishi; design by Jaya Miceli (Scribner / March 2015)
We are increasingly being urged to create objects of desire and the cover obviously plays a key role here, especially when a book is aiming for pride of place in a bookshop. Designers visit them regularly, to note the common visual language of related or competing titles. It can be a source of frustration then, when presenting a contrasting or conflicting design aimed at standing out, only to be asked to produce a copycat cover intended to hitch on the success of the latest best-seller. Booksellers often create themed displays dedicated to the latest hot trend, see Hygge for example. Publishers are all-too aware of this and often the pursuit of a like-for-like cover is their priority… Being allowed to use ‘just type’ will always be dependent on what books are blazing a commercial trail… Jon Gray’s cover for Swing Time and John Gall’s for Norwegian Wood, to take two current examples, prove to publishers that the mass market can handle bold, type-driven design and so this approach will be validated for a time.
The tale of rediscovering Sherman, a typeface designed by American type designer Frederic Goudy in 1910 and revived by Chester Jenkins for Pentagram in 2016 for Syracuse University:
