Hey, I hope you are keeping safe and well. There’s a wide variety of styles this month, but pink, yellow and orange are something of a minor theme (although since writing this I’ve actually removed one of the covers that combined bright pink and yellow because the book isn’t out until September — you’ll see it in a couple of months).
I think we’re also starting to see a potential new trend with photographic covers for fiction. I don’t have the vocabulary to neatly identify the style of photography I mean (sorry photography people — I mostly studied paintings in school!), but it’s basically contemporary colour photographs of candid, and sometimes intimate, social moments. It’s different, if adjacent, to the more posed ‘stylish sad girl’ phenomenon, or the use of black and white photography for ‘serious’ literary fiction I think. Anyway, maybe it’s a thing? Time will tell…
American Ending by Mary Kay Zuravleff; design by Laura Williams; illustration by Nora Ayoagi (Blair / June 2023)
I feel like there should be more blackletter on book covers. Why isn’t this more a thing?
Bellies by Nicola Dinan; design by Beci Kelly; photograph by Bobby Doherty (Transworld / June 2023)
Cacophony of Bone by Kerri ní Dochartaigh; design by Rafi Romaya; illustration by Vasilisa Romanenko (Canongate / May 2023)
Forgiving Imelda Marcos by Nathan Go; design by Eric Fuentecilla (Farrar, Straus & Giroux / June 2023)
House Woman by Adorah Nworah; design by Jaya Nicely (Unnamed Press / June 2023)
Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck; design by John Gall (New Directions / June 2023)
La Tercera by Gina Apostol; design by Jaya Miceli (Soho Press / May 2023)
Lucky Dogs by Helen Schulman; design by Janet Hansen; photograph by Christopher Brand (Knopf / June 2023)
The Memory of Animals by Claire Fuller; design by Beth Steidle; art by Lisa Ericson (Tin House / June 2023)
I was wondering why the weirdly wonderful art seemed familiar and then I remembered that the cover of Lisa Wells’ nonfiction book Believers designed by Na Kim also makes use of Lisa Ericson painting…
I know I say everything gives me Annihilation vibes but Lisa Ericson’s art definitely gives me Annihilation vibes. And speaking of weird Vandermeer vibes…
The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Naylor; design by Alex Merto; illustration by María Jesús Contreras (Picador US / May 2023)
Paved Paradise by Henry Grabar; design by Ben Wiseman (Penguin / May 2023)
Ponyboy by Eliot Duncan; design by Luke Bird (Footnote Press / June 2023)
The cover of the US edition of Ponyboy, published by W.W. Norton this month, was designed by Richard Ljoenes. The cover photo is by Maria Molchanova.
The Rachel Incident by Caroline O’Donoghue; design by Nico Taylor; photograph by Ewen Spencer (Little Brown UK / June 2023)
The cover of the US edition of The Rachel Incident, published by Knopf, was designed by John Gall. The painting is by Gideon Rubin.
The UK cover also reminded me of the UK cover of Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart designed by Stuart Wilson which features a Wolfgang Tillmans photo.
(Oh and if anyone can tell me who designed and illustrated the Australian cover for The Rachel Incident — which is completely different again — I will be happy to add it in!)
Run Baby Run by Melissa Lenhardt; design by Olga Grlic (Graydon House / June 2023)
Soviet Self-Hatred by Eliot Borenstein; design by Philip Pascuzzo (Cornell University Press / June 2023)
Where I Slept by Libby Angel; design by W.H. Chong; photograph by Konrad Winkler (Text / May 2023)
Text have also just published a collection of W.H. Chong’s drawing and paintings called Portraits, which includes portraits of some designers you might recognize…
is everything looking the same these days, or is it me? Lucky Dogs is good and the Imelda Marcos clever but, it’s all blurring into one for me.
Maybe my selections are getting stale? I am starting to think having the same fundamentally basic person choose 10-20 book covers they like every month for literally years is less than ideal? Maybe this thing has run its course? That no one is paying to make these kinds decisions probably tells you all you need to know!
Are things starting to blur? Maybe. I think the design floor has been raised. Book covers are generally better but largely made with the same tools and resources by people taught the same stuff by the same people.
Publishing is a pretty conservative and imitative business run on Excel spreadsheets, and designing stuff with a title and an author in a 6 x 9 rectangle day after day in that kind of environment is probably going to lead to some pretty similar outcomes, especially if you don’t have much time or budget.
I don’t know… I like pointing out trends and doppelgangers as much as the next person, but I find the “all book covers look the same now” discourse kind of tiresome. I don’t think they do, and I kind of hope these posts show that. But maybe they don’t anymore (if they ever did), and in the immortal words of Big Maybelle, it’s quittin’ time?
(Sorry — I appreciate this is a longer, bleaker answer than you could possibly have wished for. I’m tired, man. So, so tired. I’m glad you like the covers for Lucky Dogs and Forgiving Imelda Marcos though! LOL)
French reader here. If asked how contemporary French book covers look like, I would have to answer: “same as 4O years ago” (for the most part; some innovative design here and there, mainly on the margins of mainstream publishing, and that’s it). So, each time I visit here, I feel like I’m on vacation on some exotic island. Thanks for that, Optimist!
Thanks Tororo! It’s interesting to see a British publisher like Fitzcarraldo Editions imitate traditional French book cover design. But I guess it works for them because it’s so different from the rest of English publishing?