A few weeks ago, I mentioned Stuart Wilson’s unsettling redesigns for the Picador (UK) editions of the Patrick Melrose novels by Edward St. Aubyn. Here’s the full the set:
Published May 1, 2012
Tag: Picador
Published December 5, 2011
Raincoast Spring Books
I was out west for the Raincoast Books spring 2012 sales conference last week. Sadly I didn’t get to see much of Vancouver or catch up with half the people I meant to, but I did get to hear about a lot of great new books including one about building (and losing) an android Philip K. Dick. It’s non-fiction. Thanks Henry Holt!
Henry Holt also have a new novel by Herta Mueller, winner of the Nobel Prize in 2009, called The Hunger Angel, and the latest from John Banville’s alter-ego Benjamin Black, Vengeance.
Picador are publishing a collected edition of Edward St. Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose trilogy in January — the first time they’ve all been properly available in the US I believe — to coincide with the US edition of his new book At Last (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux). They also have a collection of essays by Siri Hustvedt, Living, Thinking, Looking.
While there was nothing on the list quite of the magnitude of this season’s long-awaited Saul Bass: A Life in Film and Design, there are a few art and design titles that caught my eye. Princeton Architectural Press are publishing Woodcut, a book of beautiful prints by artist Bryan Nash Gill (you have surely have seen his work even if you don’t recognise the name immediately) and Up on the Roof, a collection of photographs by Alex MacLean of New York’s hidden rooftop spaces. They are also publishing a long overdue paperback edition of Michael Bierut’s Seventy-Nine Short Essays on Design, and a paperback edition of the beautiful, if overlooked, Typography Sketchbooks by Steven Heller and Lita Talarico. Lawrence King are publishing a new book on the history of picture books, Children’s Picturebooks: The Art of Visual Storytelling by Martin Salisbury and Morag Styles, and a new edition of The End of Print by David Carson.
On the comics side, Drawn & Quarterly are publishing Jerusalem: Chronicle from the Holy City, the latest travelogue from Guy Delisle who previous books include The Burma Chronicles, Pyongyang and Shenzhen. D+Q are also publishing a new edition of Chester Brown’s controversial, scatological and long out-of-print comic Ed The Happy Clown.
I’m also looking forward to finally seeing more of Baby’s in Black: Astrid Kirchherr, Stuart Sutcliffe, and The Beatles in Hamburg by Arne Bellstorf which is being published by First Second in April (I just wish they’d gone in a different direction with the typography on the cover — the German and UK edition’s have lovely swooping hand-drawn lettering).
And lastly — because I am big nerd and recently finished his earlier book Batman Unmasked — I’m excited about Will Brooker’s Hunting the Dark Knight: Twenty-First Century Batman, which is being published by I. B. Tauris in July.
Now, back to the Toronto grindstone…
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Published August 2, 2011
Humiliation | Henry Sene Yee
Just too good not to share, here’s an unused comp for Humiliation by Wayne Koestenbaum designed by Henry Sene Yee for Picador’s Big Ideas // Small Books series. The photograph is by Jon Shireman.
You can see the final cover and read details the design process on his Henry’s blog.
And for the sake of full disclosure, Picador are distributed in Canada by my employer Raincoast Books.
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Published July 19, 2011
Richard Price Paperbacks | Henry Sene Yee
Columbine and A Wall in Palestine: cover designs by Henry Sene Yee
Henry Sene Yee is a designer and art director at Picador USA. The very of his best work (and all of it is good) — his cover designs for Columbine by Dave Cullen and A Wall in Palestine by René Backmann to pick two recent examples — combine judiciously selected and smartly cropped photographs with bold typographic choices.
Given the poignancy of the images he chooses and the respect he gives to them within his compositions — the room he gives them to breath — it isn’t surprising that Henry is a photographer himself, regularly capturing scenes of daily life in his beloved New York through a lens.
Photo by Henry Sene Yee
The author Richard Price, who has also written for the HBO series The Wire, was born in and raised in the Bronx. Several of his novels, including Clockers and Freedomland (both adapted to movies), are set in the in fictional town of Dempsy, New Jersey.
Photo by Henry Sene Yee
Over the last couple of years Henry, who also happened to grow up in New Jersey, has designed covers for Picador’s recent reissues of Price’s novels.
Bringing his understanding of photography and type to the designs Henry has, like Price himself, avoided the expected crime fiction clichés.
As fan of Price’s work as well as Henry’s, I thought I would take to the opportunity to ask the designer how he approached the covers.
Here is his reply:
Lush Life: cover design by Aaron Artessa
It started when Picador published the paperback edition of Richard Price’s bestseller Lush Life. Because of its success, the FSG cover was reproduced in ads and displayed prominently in bookstores. Repackaging the cover for paperback would not take advantage of the public familiarity with it so it was decided to keep the original jacket design [by Aaron Artessa].
Clockers final cover by Henry Sene Yee
Clockers: unused designs by Henry Sene Yee
Clockers, probably Price’s most well known backlist was also acquired by us and was reprinted to coincide. It was designed as a stand alone. I couldn’t see how I would or need to relate it to Lush Life.
Bloodbrothers final cover by Henry Sene Yee
It was followed by his next backlist title Bloodbrothers, which was also designed as a stand alone. That book’s themes reminded me of photographer Bruce Davidson’s beautiful 1970s NYC Subway photos. I found this great Davidson photograph from his gang series and kept the colors simple.
The Breaks final cover by Henry Sene Yee
We later acquired The Breaks and Ladies’ Man and I had no intention to follow any previous Price’s look since there was none. Photo research found some great images similar in look to the Davidsons. My two favorite photos happen to both be horizontal and the initial layouts looked similar to Bloodbrothers. I tried to distinguish them by using different colors in the background, type. But in the end, it was just distracting from the great photos. So I decided to have them match Bloodbrothers, keeping the type and same palette of black, warm gray duotones, cream and warm red.
Ladies man final cover by Henry Sene Yee
The Breaks and Ladies Man: unused designs by Henry Sene Yee
Thanks Henry!
Disclosure: As of Fall 2011, book published by Picador will be distributed to independent bookstores and libraries in Canada by my employer Raincoast Books as part of a new distribution arrangement with Macmillan US. For the record, Henry and I discussed featuring his work on The Casual Optimist several times well before details of this deal was known to either of us.
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Published March 24, 2011
Picador Spring 2011 Covers
Picador have just posted all their Spring 2011 covers to Facebook. There’s some lovely work. Here are a few favourites:
The Fever: Cover design by LeeAnn Falciani
Watching the World Change: Cover design by Henry Sene Yee • Cover photograph by Patrick Witty
Winterland: Cover design by Keith Hayes • Cover photograph by eyespy/GettyImages
(Thanks Henry).
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Published December 11, 2009
Something for the Weekend
It’s been a slightly shite week in the book trade this week.
Amidst the plethora of end of year/decade “Best of…” lists and gift guides, it was announced that Kirkus and Editor & Publisher Magazine are going to close (are we surprised? No); B&N’s Nook e-reader turned out to be not be quite as good as it was cracked up to be (are we surprised? No); and Simon & Schuster, Hachette, and HarperCollins upset the usual suspects (for all the usual reasons — only Moby Lives seemed to get that it might be about something else) by announcing their decision to hold back the release of a few e-book editions (are we surprised? No)… Is any of this particularly interesting? No. (Although — for the record — I am grateful to the WSJ‘s Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg for reporting on the e-book developments, and to indefatigable Largehearted Boy for compiling a comprehensive list of Best of… lists)…
So needless to say, there isn’t much about the book industy in today’s links. Ah well…
Another addition to the weirdly brilliant (or brilliantly weird?) vintage book/pop culture mash-up phenomenon: Web Services Book Covers by French illustrator Stéphane Massa-Bidal AKA Hulk4598, or Rétrofuturs. They’re sort of like Olly Moss meets Cristiana Couceiro. (First seen at Design You Trust and then just about everywhere else this morning).
The Sixties — Another fantastic new cover by Henry Sene Yee for Picador’s BIG IDEAS // small books series.
Type for the Tube — an interesting history of Edward Johnston’s typeface for the London Underground from its design to current usage.
And finally…
F is For Fail — A really charming “alphabetical odysessy through the creative process” by Brent Barson (via the lovely Aqua-Velvet):
Can I go home yet?
(Have a great weekend!)
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Published October 14, 2009
Missed Things: Wednesday
Henry Sene Yee, Creative Director of Picador, discusses the elegantly understated cover design for Time by Eva Hoffman, the latest addition to Picador’s BIG IDEAS // small books series.
And I’ve mentioned this before but it bears repeating: Picador are putting their catalogues — and, therefore, their outstanding cover designs — on their Facebook page.
Logicomix by Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos H. Papadimitriou reviewed in The New York Times, The Guardian, and FT. It sounds kind of awesome. The book also has a nice website with lots of content.
The Inevitable Frontier — Jennifer de Guzman, editor-in-chief at the independent comics publisher SLG Publishing, on digital comics in PW:
Right now, sales from digital comics aren’t going to mean we can pack up print publishing. Not even close. But despite being in the midst of it rather than a wide-eyed observer, I can see that in the near future digital comics are going to be playing a bigger role for all publishers than they do now. And it’s better to be so integrated in the change that you don’t notice that it’s happening than to find yourself left behind and marveling at “the things they can do now.”
“Issues” — A less than warm reception for the Kindle in Australia:
Jeremy Fisher, executive director of the Australian Society of Authors, said he was advising his 3000 members to resist publishing through the Kindle.
“As I understand at this point in time, Amazon asks for a very, very big discount from publishers for their works to be included in Kindle so that the return coming back to the publisher is smaller and the return coming back to the author is smaller,” he said.
“The person making the most money is Amazon.”
Hmm… Yes, well, moving swiftly on…
Jacket Whys — A really nice blog about children’s and YA book covers.
And on the subject of kids books…
Who The Wild Things Are –Artist Roger White looks at the inspiration Maurice Sendak’s Wild Things for the Boston Globe:
The Wild Things looked like nothing ever seen in a children’s book. Rendered in simple ink-hatch over watercolor sketches, they evoked a perfect mixture of proto-adult dread and anarchic, childlike glee – an eternal, platonic form of the kindly monster. From the moment they appeared in 1964, they seemed bracingly and completely original. But in fact Sendak’s monsters had a long series of ancestors and descendants…
But according to Bruce Handy, deputy editor at Vanity Fair, (and his children) kids don’t actually like Where the Wild Things Are… Umm… What?
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Published August 21, 2009
Something for the Weekend, August 21st, 2009
Picador Paperback have posted their fall catalogue to Facebook. Apparently they also did this with their spring list too . Needless to say, I think this is a great idea. Is any one else doing it? (via Arthur’s Design)
Control — An interview with Alan Rapp, former senior editor of art, design, and photography at Chronicle Books and the new Associate Director of Hey, Hot Shot!:
for all the possible flaws in the trade publishing model, one thing I always liked about it is the collaborative process. It defies the auteur model; the author is almost never the sole creator. I suppose that this could sound like the ex-editor making a case for the value of his role in an industry that is really undergoing massive and fundamental changes, but I stand by the principle: all content benefits from editing. The author, whether a verbal or visual one, is almost always too involved with the material to see how it can be best adapted to another form. And the design and production processes are also critical to making the best book possible; one thing [that] I think is in danger of getting lost in self-publishing is the production potential. The physical aspects of books make important, and often subliminal, effects on the reader, but we are getting a much more homogenized offering through the current self-publishing models.
Final Crisis — A short Q & A with Chip Kidd about designing comic book covers at the NY TImes‘ ‘The Moment’ blog.
And finally, thinking of comics, Will Kane (The World of Kane) recently posted some mind-blowing pop-art pages from French comic “La Vie Privée de Dyane” drawn by Michel Quarez, published in 1968 (pictured below). Also check out Will’s post on Quarez’s 1967 Mod Love.
