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Tag: patrick dewitt

Dan Stiles Covers for Undermajordomo Minor

undermajordomo-uk

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.”

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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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