Books, Design and Culture
A new Penguin Modern Classic edition of Mortal Engines by Polish science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem is available in the UK this week. Art directed by Jim Stoddart, this is the third of Lem’s books in the Penguin Modern Classics series featuring cover art by illustrator and designer by Haley Warnham.
You can read more about Warnham’s collages in an interview with illustrator on AIGA’s Eye on Design blog.
I’m a little late to work of Welsh novelist Cynan Jones, but I recently finished reading his award-winning 2014 novel The Dig, and it’s not hard to see what all the fuss is about. The writing is beautifully spare and intimate, and the story is devastating.1
The stark, illustrated cover of The Dig and Jones’s earlier books, recently republished by Granta, also caught my eye. The striking designs are, it turns out, by the brilliant Australian designer Jenny Grigg, which seems obvious once you know. Her previous covers for Peter Carey and Ernest Hemingway have similarly bold simplicity and tone.
Grigg has also designed the cover of Jones’s new novel, The Cove, which will be published by Granta in November.
It’s September. It’s busy.
All We Shall Know by Donal Ryan; design by James Paul Jones (Transworld / September 2016)
Art of Memoir by Mary Karr; design by Robin Bilardello (Harper Perennial / September 2016)
Before by Carmen Boullosa; design by Anna Zylicz (Deep Vellum / August 2016)
The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning and the Universe Itself by Sean Carroll; design by Jamie Keenan (Oneworld / September 2016)
Cannibal by Safiya Sinclair; design by Nathan Putens; artwork by Wangechi Mutu (University of Nebraska Press / September 2016)
Cannibals in Love by Mike Roberts; design by Na Kim (FSG Original / September 2016)
Carousel Court by Joe McGinniss Jr.; design by Ben Wiseman (Simon & Schuster / August 2016)
Drinks: A Users Guide by Adam McDowell; design by Danielle Deschenes (TarcherPerigee / September 2016)
Dr. Knox by Peter Spiegelman; design by Oliver Munday (Knopf / July 2016)
Gold from the Stone by Lemn Sissay; design by Pete Adlington (Canongate / August 2016)
The Good Immigrant edited by Nikesh Shukla; design by James Paul Jones (Unbound / September 2016)
Little Nothing by Marisa Silver; design by Rachel Willey (Blue Rider Press / September 2016)
Looking for the Stranger by Alice Kaplan; design by Isaac Tobin (University of Chicago Press / September 2016)
The Nix by Nathan Hill; design by Oliver Munday (Knopf / August 2016)
Notes from the Shadowed City by Jeffery Alan Love; cover art by Jeffrey Alan Love (Flesk / September 2016)
Phantom Limbs by Paula Garner; design by Matt Roeser (Candlewick / September 2016)
Raindrop covers could be a new thing…
Pour Me Life by A. A. Gill; design by Jason Booher (Blue Rider Press / September 2016)
Reputations by Juan Gabriel Vásquez; design by Alex Merto (Riverhead / September 2016)
Sex and Death edited by Sarah Hall and Peter Hobbs; design by Luke Bird (Faber & Faber / September 2016)
The Strange Case of Rachel K design by Paul Sahre (New Directions / September 2016)
This paperback cover is a nice contrast to last year’s hardcover, also designed by Mr. Sahre:
Stranger Father Beloved by Taylor Larsen; design by Anna Dorfman (Gallery Books / July 2016)
Substitute by Nicholson Baker; design by Spencer Kimble (Blue Rider Press / September 2016)
33 Artists in 3 Acts by Sarah Thornton; design by David Drummond (W.W. Norton / September 2016)
Timekeepers by Simon Garfield; design by Pete Adlington (Canongate / September 2016)
Concentric circles… still a thing (see here for more examples).
Time Travel by James Gleick; design by Peter Mendelsund (Pantheon / September 2016)
War and Turpentine by Stefan Hertmans; design by Oliver Munday (Pantheon /August 2016)
Welcome to the Universe by Neil Degrasse Tyson, Michael A. Strauss, J. Richard Gott; design by Chris Ferrante (Princeton University Press / September 2016)
Loving these minimal black and white covers for books about the universe…
Wolf Boys by Dan Slater; design by Grace Han (Simon & Schuster / September 2016)
The Wonder by Emma Donoghue design by Kimberly Glyder (Little, Brown & Co. / September 2016)
The Wonder by Emma Donoghue design by Jo Thompson (Picador / September 2016)
The UK and US covers actually make a lovely pair…
The smart and talented Isabel Urbina Peña talks to Girlboss about YES, EQUAL and her work as a book cover designer:
you go to the editorial meeting and you hear the editors talk about the book. After that, you tell your art director which books you want to work on, and sometimes she would suggest stuff to us. You didn’t always get the book that you wanted, but you kind of had an idea. But sometimes it doesn’t go that way. Like for Dave Eggers. No one wanted to take his book! He has very specific taste. But I was like, “Fuck it! I’ll do it.” Because when am I going to be able to design for Dave Eggers again?! And it went really well, actually. One round and it was done, which never happens [laughs]… normally, it’s a battle. You want to try and see what will get through. So you’re like, “Well I’m only going to show three things, because if I show more…” Like for example, for All Our Names, we only showed one. I’d made a bunch of other options, but Peter Mendelsund, who was art directing was like, “Nope. Let’s just show this one”… Sometimes it works like that. But I mean, for another project, I came up with 20 different ideas, and nothing came of it. It was a paperback and they just ended up adapting the hard cover.
You can read my 2014 Q & A with Isabel here.
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At Observer, Penguin creative director Paul Buckley, talks about his new book Classic Penguin: Cover to Cover. I particularly enjoyed this epic rant on designing covers for new books:
New books, this piece of writing, everything is riding on that new cover. Is the mood right? Does the imagery hint at what is going on in the text? Did you tell too much? Did you tell too little? Yes, it takes place in the winter, but we want it as a summer read, so try to avoid seasons; she would never dress like that, or maybe she would, but it makes an off-putting cover; I know everyone in the book dies – but that image is so depressing no one will buy it; is the author’s name prominent enough? The type has to be much, much larger. We understand the word has sixteen letters, make it larger. No, it can’t go sideways, people can’t read sideways. I know spines read sideways, that’s not the same. No, no it’s not, and no, this word cannot be broken. We realize the title is part of the problem, we know it’s confusing, we can’t change it. Ok, the type is too condensed; it’s ok if it goes smaller if we can get a nicer font. Have you tried it sideways? The author hates it sideways and is suggesting you try championing condensed 87, do you have that font? I don’t know who designed this, I think it was one of his students, he asked that we show it to “the art dept;” I know, I know, now I can at least say I did. It’s approved! Sales didn’t like the cover, we have to change it. Was it just one person? Bob, how many in sales disliked the cover? Oh, it was just Jim, he’s always out in left field, never mind, glad I asked. Or, yes it was just Sally, BUT she looooves this book. I know you did too, we all do, we still need a new cover by next Tuesday’s deadline. Huge chain “X” wont commit to this book with this cover, I know we all loved it maybe you can save it for something else, here are some suggestions from the buyer, at least they are trying to be helpful.
You can read my 2009 Q & A with Paul here, and my 2010 interview with Paul and Christopher Brand about their book Penguin 75 here.
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The latest additions to Penguin’s ‘Essentials’ series, released this month, have some rather splendid new covers, including Jon Gray‘s wonderful design for Embers by Sandor Márai, Julian House’s typographic design (with echoes of Robert Brownjohn) for The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, and David Foldvari‘s illustrated design for How Many Miles to Babylon by Jennifer Johnston.
You can see more of the new Penguin Essentials covers, and read about the design process, at Design Week.
Comments closedBack from vacation and back to the grind… August is traditionally a slow month in publishing, but that isn’t to say there aren’t plenty of great covers around at this time of year…
Ashes of Fiery Weather by Kathleen Donohoe; design Brian Moore (HMH / August 2016)
Behold the Dreamers by Imbolo Mbue; design by Jaya Miceli (Random House / August 2016)
The Best Kind of People by Zoe Whittall; design by Alysia Shewchuck (House of Anansi / August 2016)
The Book by Keith Houston; design by David High (W.W. Norton / August 2016)
A Burglar’s Guide to the City by Geoff Manaugh; design by Nayon Cho (Farrar, Straus & Giroux / April 2016)
Compartment N0. 6 by Rosa Liksom; design by Kimberly Glyder (Graywolf Press / August 2016)
The Comet Seekers by Helen Sedgwick; design by Chloe Giordano (Harvill Secker / August 2016)
Cuckoo by Keren David; design by Jack Smyth (Atom / August 2016)
Enter Title Here by Rahul Kanakia; design by Maria Elias (Hyperion / August 2016)
The Fire This Time by Jesmyn Ward; design by Na Kim (Scribner / August 2016)
The Hate Race by Maxime Beneba Clarke; design by Allison Colpoys (Hachette Australia / August 2016)
Inexperience and Other Stories by Anthony Macris; design by Alissa Dinallo (UWAP / August 2016)
Making Literature Now by Amy Hungerford; design by Anne Jordan and Mitch Goldstein (Stanford University Press / August 2016)
Impossible Modernism by Robert S. Lehman; design by Anne Jordan and Mitch Goldstein (Stanford University Press / August 2016)
These two look rather nice side by side…
Marx 2020 by Ronaldo Munck; design by Daniel Benneworth-Gray (Zed / August 2016)
The Nordic Theory of Everything by Anu Partanen; design by Milan Bozic (Harper / June 2016)
Playing Dead by Elizabeth Greenwood; design by Alison Forner (Simon & Schuster / August 2016)
Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett; design by Alex Merto (Riverhead / July 2016)
The jacket art for Pond is apparently a detail from ‘Fair is foul and foul is fair’ by artist Margriet Smulders.
Radiance by Catherynne M. Valente; design & illustration by Nathan Burton (Corsair / August 2016)
Nathan’s design is a nice compliment to Will Staehle‘s cover for the US edition published by Tor Books last year:
Riverine by Angela Palm; design by Kimberly Glyder (Graywolf / August 2016)
The Summer That Melted Everything by Tiffany McDaniel; design by Allison Colpoys (Scribe / August 2016)
Taduno’s Song by Odafe Atogun; design by Chris Gale (Canongate / August 2016)
Underground Airlines by Ben H. Winters; design by Oliver Munday (Mulholland Books / July 2016)
The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead; design by Oliver Munday (Doubleday / August 2016)
You Don’t Have to Live Like This by Benjamin Markovits; design by Jarrod Taylor (Harper / July 2016)
At The Literary Hub, the talented Jennifer Heuer on gendered book covers and being a woman designer:
1 CommentI love what I do and I’ve been fortunate enough to work with a lot of amazing art directors on a lot of great projects. I’m always grateful for the work I get. But I’ve talked to a lot of women in the industry over the years, and there is a clear pattern we’ve all experienced. One day a few months ago, I was commissioned to work on the backlist of a prolific women’s lit author. Minutes later, an art director called about a memoir in which the author was “always the bridesmaid.” Later that day: a novel about a wife dealing with her husband’s indifference while balancing her new career and motherhood. Three projects from three different art directors. All aimed directly at women readers.
I doubt that many of my male colleagues have had the same experience. And that day wasn’t an anomaly.
The talented art director and cover designer Catherine Casalino has told me, “When you’re on the receiving end of a project, it’s hard to say no, and even harder to explain why you don’t want to work exclusively on women’s fiction,” and continued with, “I think if we mixed things up a little more—hired women to design sports books and hired men to design cookbooks—we’d get some fresh and unexpected designs. And that would benefit all of us in the industry.” Another female designer has written to me saying, “It’s no surprise that women are assigned these topics—being women, it’s natural to assume we are interested in these things—but sometimes the associations are so tenuous that you start wondering if the gender bias is actually a form of laziness.”
Congratulations to the winners of this year’s 50 Books | 50 Covers competition organized by Design Observer in association with AIGA. All fifty winning books can be found here; the winning covers here.
Creative Review talks to Mark Ecob about his cover design for Paul Kingnorth’s new book Beast (Faber & Faber, July 2016), which incorporates “a series of folkloric linocut illustrations” by Alan Rogerson.
I love this cover.
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In this profile of Peter Mendelsund in the June issue of Rhapsody Magazine, there is a lovely bit about the designer’s architect-artist father:
Comments closedIn the living room of Knopf associate art director Peter Mendelsund’s Upper Manhattan apartment, inspiration is everywhere: a battered, sea-green first edition of Ulysses; a toy version of the rocket Tintin takes to the moon; the vertebra of a blue whale; and, on top of his baby grand piano, a wooden model of a convention center made by his father, in the mid-’70s, when he worked for a New York architecture firm. It was never built, because the firm didn’t win the competition (Renzo Piano did), nor were any of his other models, because, in his late 30s, Benjamin Mendelsund was diagnosed with a brain tumor and devoted the rest of his life—he died at 48—to sculpture and painting. “He cut out all the bureaucracy of architecture,” Mendelsund says, “and turned to this.” He points to a small canvas painted entirely black except for two rectangles—two faded photos of a barn’s loft, its window open to the bright of day.
That image of a window onto a window is central to the signature style that’s made Mendelsund one of our preeminent book jacket designers: geometric, fascinated with negative space, striving to capture infinity through simplicity. You see the painting echoed in his cover for Martin Amis’s 2006 novel, House of Meetings, for which he photographed a tiny simulacrum of a room, its perspective slanting toward a miniature door. You see it in his many book jackets with drop-cuts—holes carved out of an image—like the diamond torn from a woman’s face on an early cover for The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, back in 2005 when it was called The Man Who Hated Women. And you see it in his May 11, 2015, New Yorker cover, which features an American flag smashed like a storefront window, a single star-shaped hole evoking the myriad emotions of last year’s civil unrest in Baltimore.
His father’s second act as an artist also helps explain how, at 33, Mendelsund had the confidence to abandon his career as a classical pianist (“Eventually, I realized that I’d never truly be world class”) and reinvent himself. His wife suggested he try something visual—he was always drawing; he had designed their wedding invitation. “Sometimes the obvious things take a long time to see.”
Early this week I posted about the Robert Brownjohn online archive created by his daughter, Eliza. Today, a new website dedicated to the work of the graphic designer Roy Kuhlman curated by his daughter, Arden Kuhlman Riordan, has gone live.
Kuhlman is best known, of course, for the brilliant mid-century modern book covers he designed for Grove Press. The site is not comprehensive — at least not yet — but given the number of covers and other pieces Kuhlman must have designed over his career that is, perhaps, not surprising. Archiving his work must be a massive undertaking. Hopefully there is much more to come.
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