I always feel a bit guilty about this post. Readers seem to like it, but I don’t actually see a lot of young adult books day-to-day, so I am far too reliant on the covers people put in front of me to make it a really representative list. To make matters worse, it is now very late and very rushed. Nevertheless, there are some really great YA (and middle-grade!) covers here that I wanted to share. Feel free to tell me about all the ones I missed in the comments! Happy New Year!
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.
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)Inland by Téa Obrecht; design by Jaya Miceli; art by Tamara Ruiz (Random House / 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.
Aug 9 — Fog by Kathryn Scanlan; design by Na Kim (Farrar Straus & Giroux MCD / June 2019)
Also designed by Na Kim:
Lie With Me by Philippe Besson; design by Na Kim (Scribner / April 2019)Mother Winter by Sophia Shalmiyev; design by Na Kim (Simon & Schuster / February 2019) High School by Tegan & Sara; design by Na Kim (MCD / September 2019)
Muscle by Alan Trotter; design by Gray318 (Faber & Faber / February 2019)
Also designed by Gray318:
Quichotte by Salman Rushdie; design by Gray318 (Jonathan Cape / August 2019) Grand Union by Zadie Smith; design by Gray318 (Hamish Hamilton / October 2019)Salt On Your Tongue by Charlotte Runcie; design by Gray318 (Canongate / January 2019)
What We Really Do All Day by Jonathan Gershuny and Oriel Sullivan; design Matthew Young (Pelican / September 2019)Artificial Intelligence by Melanie Mithcell; design by Matthew Young (Pelican / October 2019)
One Day by Gene Weingarten; design by David Litman (Blue Rider / October 2019)
Oliver Munday wrote about designing the cover for New Directions at Literary Hub earlier this year.
He also designed a lot my favourite covers this year…
Riots I Have Known by Ryan Chapman; design by Oliver Munday (Simon & Schuster / May 2019)The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead; design by Oliver Munday (Doubleday / July 2019)Thick by Tressie McMillan Cotton; design by Oliver Munday (The New Press / January 2019)White Flights by Jess Row; design by Oliver Munday (Graywolf / August 2019) Harbart by Nabarun Bhattacharya; design by Oliver Munday (New Directions / June 2019)
The Revolutionaries by Joshua Furst; design by Tyler Comrie (Knopf / April 2019)The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa; design by Tyler Comrie (Pantheon / August 2019)Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory by Raphael Bob-Waksberg; design by Tyler Comrie; illustration Justin Metz (Knopf / June)
The Volunteer by Salvatore Scibona; design by Rachel Willey (Penguin / March 2019)
Also designed by Rachel Willey:
The New Me by Halle Butler; design by Rachel Willey (Penguin / March 2019) The Need by Helen Phillips; design Rachel Willey (Simon & Schuster / July 2019)
Oh hey, it’s October, AKA the best month of the year, so this is the last of my monthly cover round-ups for 2019. My look back at the year will be coming soon, so if I have shamefully overlooked your work for the past 10 months, or you want to share a cover design for a book that is coming out in November or December, now would be a really great time to drop me a line! High resolution images are always appreciated. This goes double if you design or illustrate YA covers. 1
Are we seeing the beginnings of a psychedelia revival? There are a couple of covers coming in 2020 in addition to these three that make me think we might be…
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?
Here are your August book covers of note. Another good month, I think?
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath; design by Gray318 (Faber & Faber / July2019)
This is apparently available now (according to Faber’s Instagram at least!), but I haven’t been able to find it online. If anyone cares to share the ISBN, I will try to add a link.
The new design is inspired by the 1966 cover designed by Shirley Tucker.
This is an interesting change in direction from the cover of The Infatuations by Javier Marías designed by Isabel Urbina Peña and published by Knopf in 2013.
(The UK covers for Javier Marías’ novels published by Hamish Hamilton are photographic. If anyone can supply me with the design/photo credits, I’d be happy to add them in here for reference!).
Thank you to the good folks on Twitter who helped me identify the designer and then the typeface. It turns out the type is “Lydia” from Colophon Foundry — a revival of the Bold Condensed styles of (you guessed it!) Lydian.
Tree also designed the cover of the UK edition published by And Other Stories last year. She wrote about the process of designing both covers for Spine not so long ago (they really are doing a better a job of this than me, aren’t they?).
Michel has also dusted off his comics publishing endeavour Black Eye Books if you’d like to support him. There is a new book by Jay Stephens planned for next month.
Swishy retro fonts are definitely a ‘thing’ now. In this instance I believe the font is Cabernet JF — an unofficial revival of Benguiat Caslon — which has been mentioned here before. The sans is Futura of course. I rather rashly went on record not so long ago saying Futura is a little overused on university press covers (much to the chagrin of Robert Bringhurst!), but I think it works here.
(There is probably a post to be had of covers that feature ‘guns’ made of other things. Although I’m struggling to think of any other examples off the top of my head, so maybe I’m thinking of artworks and/or magazine covers? Or just imagining it?)
I would have have a hard time telling you which country these covers came from if I didn’t already know. Using the US spelling “Travelers” on the UK cover confuses the issue, but I don’t think either cover looks particularly American, which is kind of interesting. Michael Morris recently discussed his version with Spine.
The cover of the UK edition of Turbulence, published at the end of last year by Jonathan Cape, reminded me of Anne Twomey’s 2015 cover for Munich Airport by Greg Baxter…
Interestingly, the barcode on the front of the UK edition actually works. You can read an interview from earlier this year with designer Rosie Palmer about the UK cover over at Spine.
Very Nice by Marcy Dermansky; design by Janet Hansen; ice rendered by Justin Metz (Knopf / July 2019)
Apparently it is June already. I’m pretty sure it’s a terrible mistake.
Here are your book covers of note.
Aug 9 — Fog by Kathryn Scanlan; design by Na Kim (Farrar Straus & Giroux MCD / June 2019)
Cogito by Victor Dixen; design by Jim Tierney (Collection R / May 2019)
This reminded me of something. I’m not sure exactly what. The best I could up with was Nicole Caputo‘s stripey op-art cover for Liveblog by Megan Boyle, but that’s not it at all…
The Girl at the Door by Veronica Raimo; design by Julian Humphries (Fourth Estate / June 2019)
Are we seeing a trend for close cropped photographs of… arms? (Don’t get me wrong, these are both beautiful photographs / covers.)
Also of note in a compare-and-contrast sort of way, the cover of the UK edition of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous published by Jonathan Cape was designed by Suzanne Dean:
Another cover for the Lydian file. (I posted a link to this on Twitter, but I don’t think I’ve mentioned it here — Kaitlyn Tiffany recently wrote a piece on the Lydian phenomenon for Vox if you want to read a bit more about it)
Some lovely type there… Can anyone tell me what the title typeface is please? It seems like a good alternative for our old friend Lydian there… The Lady from the Black Lagoon by Mallory O’Meara; design by Erin Craig; art by Matt Buck (Hanover Square / March 2019)
Is this the first Harlequin book cover to feature on the site? Possibly…
It’s almost the first day of spring, the snow and ice have just about melted in Toronto (for now!), and everything is still awful, so it must be time for March’s book covers of note!
Bangkok Wakes to Rain by Pitchaya Sudbanthad; design by Grace Han (Riverhead / February 2019)
This is the Turkish edition of Men in Space by Tom McCarthy. I like how the composition and colour palette echo the cover of the US edition published by Vintage, designed by John Gall:
It also reminds of the golden leaf cover for ‘True Faith’ by New Order designed by Peter Saville.
The Cook by Maylis de Kerangal; design by Na Kim (Farrar, Straus & Giroux / March 2019)
(I feel like a Freudian could have a field day with this cover.)
The cover of the US edition published by Ballantine (I couldn’t find an image without the book club sticker… sorry), was designed by Caroline Teagle Johnson. The book is getting a lot of buzz so I’ve seen both versions of the cover a lot online. It’s a pretty striking photo. I’m curious about where it came from…
Daisy Jones and The Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid; design by Lauren Wakefield (Hutchinson / March 2019)
Daisy Jones and The Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid; design by Caroline Teagle Johnson (Ballantine / March 2019)
To mark the 100th birthday of J.D. Salinger, Amsterdam-based design studio Moker Ontwerp were asked by Dutch publisher De Bezige Bij to design brand new covers for four of Salinger’s most famous books.
There are longstanding requirements for J.D. Salinger covers. No photographs or illustrations can be used, and the title should always be above the author’s name and set in bigger type. To break the rigidity of these rules and bring more expressiveness to the design, the studio decided to write all the titles with a brush instead of using a font, while setting the author’s name “as seriously as possible” in stately Roman Capitals.
The results, I think, speak for themselves…
Thanks to Henk van het Nederend at Moker Ontwerp for letting me know about this project.
