Hey. I hope you’re keeping safe and well, especially my friends and colleagues in snowy NYC. Thanks to everyone who helped with images and design credits this month — it’s been a really busy month so I really appreciate it!
Oliver’s own novel, Head of Household, is out from Simon & Schuster in the US this month too. The cover was designed by Christopher Brand, and you can read a conversation between the two about the design process at LitHub.
Favorita by Michelle Steinbeck; translated by Jen Calleja; design by Henry Petrides (Faber & Faber / February 2026)
At the turn of the year, writer and activist Cory Doctorow coined the term “enshitification.” Although he was specifically describing the process of online services getting worse for users, it was hard not to see it everywhere in 2023.
In his annual look at the year’s best book covers for the New York Times, art director Matt Dorfman recounts a friend describing 2023 as a “year of survival”, a year of “no growth, no withering, just getting by.”
This year saw a centuries-old business contending with rounds of buyouts and layoffs, alongside an endless news cycle involving two brutal wars from which no authors, friends, enemies or strangers were immune from accountability for any unrehearsed sentiment they might voice in passing. Add to this the ongoing concern about how artificial intelligence will affect a business historically dependent upon human creativity — yet through it all, there was still the matter of making books, and their covers, to get on with.
I read Matt’s piece the same day I read an article by Kyle Chayka in the New Yorkerabout his search foran epochal term to “evoke the panicky incoherence of our lives of late.” The suggestions range from the bland ‘Long 2016,’ to the incredibly ominous-sounding ‘Chthulucene,’ the Lovecraftian ‘New Dark Age,’ and the frankly terrifying and plausible ‘Jackpot’ from William Gibson’s 2014 novel The Peripheral.
This was the context of life and work in 2023.
Matt notes some designers found inspiration in the zeitgeist. He’s not wrong. But, ironically perhaps, I feel less optimistic about the overall picture than he does.
At the risk of repeating what I’ve written in the past couple of years, it’s like we’re stuck in a holding pattern, circling the same design ideas. Trends have stuck around. A lot of covers feel safe. Some of this was the books themselves. I’m not sure exactly how many celebrity memoirs is too many, but I’m pretty sure we reached that point and sailed right past it in 2023. No doubt some of it is sales and marketing departments sanding down all the edges and demanding the tried and true (see Zachary Petit’s alternative best of 2023 piece on killed covers for Fast Company). But I would not be surprised if it designers were just getting caught up in the churn — too many books, too many covers, and too much other stuff to worry about.
Or maybe it’s just me.
Rouge by Mona Awad; design by Oliver Munday (Simon & Schuster / September 2023)Silver Nitrate by Silvia Moreno-Garcia; design by Regina Flath (Del Rey Books / July 2023)Our Share of Night by Mariana Enriquez; design by Donna Cheng (Hogarth / September 2023)
One of the themes of the year was nostalgia, which I’m sure can also be put down to the present being pretty fucking awful. It was apparent across almost all genres, including literary fiction, but nowhere more so than in the resurgent supernatural suspense and horror categories. There were creative stylistic mashups with retro vibes, along side fastidious Stranger Things-like homages to the 1980s and Stephen King.
Looking Glass Sound by Catriona Ward; design by Katie Klimowicz (Tor / August 2023)The Only One Left by Riley Sager; design by Kaitlin Kall (Dutton / June 2023)Come Closer by Sara Gran; design by Caroline Johnson (Soho Press / September 2023)
One genuinely pleasant surprise was the number of interesting covers from Canadian publishers this year. They’ve been quietly risk-averse in recent years, so it was nice to see a few bolder design choices getting approved. I was happy to see a Canadian cover was one of the top picks on Literary Hub’s (very, very long) list of the best covers of 2023.
There were other things to cheer this year too.
The Lights by Ben Lerner; design by David Pearson (Granta / September 2023)Total Reset by Sinéad Brady; design Steve Leard (HarperCollins / March 2023)How to Build a Boat by Elaine Feeney; design by Zoe Norvell (Biblioasis / November 2023)
Spine continued to give space to designers to talk about their work in a way I’ve never been able to do consistently here. You can find their 2023 cover picks here.
David Pearson started the Book Cover Review, a website for short reviews of book covers.
Zoe Norvell’s I Need A Book Cover, a resource for book cover inspiration as well as place for authors and publishers to connect with designers, also went live.
Steve Leard launched Cover Meeting, a podcast series of in-depth interviews with cover designers (including David and Zoe among others). As Mark Sinclair notes in his piece on book cover design this year for Creative Review, Steve’s conversations shed light on wider concerns in the industry as well as each designer’s individual process. Have a listen if you haven’t already.
Berlin by Bea Setton; design by Emily Mahon; cover image by Nataša Denić (Penguin Books / May 2023)
Also designed by Emily Mahon:
Lost Believers by Irina Zhorov; design by Emily Mahon (Scribner / August 2023)Do Tell by Lindsay Lynch; design by Emily Mahon; illustration and lettering by Studio Martina Flor (Doubleday / July 2023)
B.F.F. by Christie Tate; design by Ben Wiseman (Avid Reader Press / February 2023)
The Illiterate by Ágota Kristóf; design by Oliver Munday (New Directions / April 2023)
Also designed by Oliver Munday:
The Guest by Emma Cline; design by Oliver Munday (Random House / May 2023)Life on Delay by John Hendrikson; design by Oliver Munday (Knopf / January 2023)
Sublunar by Harald Voetmann; design by Jamie Keenan (New Directions / August 2023)
Also designed by Jamie Keenan:
The Dimensions of a Cave by Greg Jackson; design by Jamie Keenan (Granta / October 2023)Dr. No by Percival Everett; design by Jamie Keenan (Influx Press / March 2023)
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…
I was wondering why the weirdly wonderful art seemed familiar and then I remembered that the cover of Lisa Wells’ nonfiction book Believersdesigned 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…
I hope you’re keeping safe and well. There’s quite a nice mix of covers this month (I think?). There’s some fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Some paperbacks and some hardcovers. Inevitably there are books from the big folks in NYC, but there’s also some indie titles, and a couple of covers from the UK. There is even some Canadian content for those of you who care about that sort of thing.1
This is the third Rodrigo Corral cover for New Direction’s editions of Dazai. I’m curious — can anyone can tell me the typeface? UPDATE: it’s not a typeface, it’s lettering! Thanks to Erik at New Directions for letting me know (and for sending the final cover)!
Oh and if you’re curious about the enduring popularity of Dazai (who died in 1948), Andrew Martin wrote a piece about it for the the New York Times.
Trace Evidence by Charif Shanahan; design by Beth Steidle (Tin House / March 2023)
If one of the fine folks at Tin House would like to send me a higher quality image, I’ll be glad to add it in! Thanks to the fine folks at Tin House for sending over the cover!
Voyager by Nona Fernández; design by Kapo Ng (Graywolf Press / February 2023)
Sam by Allegra Goodman; design by Donna Cheng; photograph by Mariam Sitchinava (Dial Press / January 2023)
I’m not sure exactly why, but I just assumed this was a UK cover when I first saw it (despite it literally having “New York Times Bestselling Author” in all-caps at the top!).
Sing, Nightingale by Marie Hélène Poitras; translated by Rhonda Mullins ; design by Ingrid Paulson (Coach House / February 2023)
For some reason this makes me think of the ‘weird nature’ (including animals with human eyes!) in Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer, which is still one of my favourite novels of the last 10 years…
True Life by Adam Zagajewski; design by Jeff Clark (Farrar, Straus & Giroux / February 2023)
I also saw Pete Garceau’s cover for School House Burning by Derek W. Black recently, which snuck past me when it was published by PublicAffairs in September 2020 but still seems terribly au courant…
Wolfish by Erica Berry; design by Keith Hayes; illustration by Rokas Aleliunas (Flatiron / February 2023)
It started, innocently enough, with a tweet from my friend Steven Beattie, book review editor of Canada’s Quill & Quire magazine, about the cover of The Most Dangerous Book, Kevin Birmingham’s new ‘biography’ of Ulysses by James Joyce, designed by Ben Wiseman (Penguin June 2014).
That sparked a conversation with designer David Gee and Joseph Sullivan of The Book Design Review about books on book covers. Joe wrote a a post on the subject in 2009 on the subject, and I rather naïvely thought it would be easy (EASY!) to post a few contemporary examples of the trend, completely underestimating what an undertaking such a project would become.
What follows is an attempt to showcase some of different ways designers incorporate books into their cover designs. Along side covers from the past five years, I’ve included some earlier examples from Joe’s post, and this post about ‘meta-covers’ from HTML Giant. Many of the images of the older titles are small (and some are just not very good), but where I have been able to source a larger image, I’ve included it at full (or close to full) size. I’m indebted to the Book Cover Archive, which is still an invaluable resources after all this time, Ferran Lopez‘s (also mothballed) Jacket Museum, and all the designers and book folk who sent me cover images, and helped me in numerous other ways. Thank you. This isn’t comprehensive survey but, to be honest, I had to stop somewhere…
The Knowledge by Lewis Dartnell; design by Kris Potter (Penguin April 2014) Priceless by William Poundstone; design by Jennifer Carrow (Hill & Wang January 2010)
Publish Your Photography Book by Darius D. Himes & Mary Virginia Swanson; design by David Chickey & Masumi Shibata (Princeton Architectural Press March 2011)
And those of you with a good memory will remember Chip Kidd used also art by Thomas Allen for a series of James Ellroy titles publisher by Vintage in the US:
