Books, Design and Culture
The cover of the US edition of Salman Rushdie’s first adult novel in seven years. Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights (Random House, September 2015), was revealed on Buzzfeed last week.1 While the cover itself is perfectly fine, the most remarkable thing about it is how much it looks like a novel for young adults.
I was immediately reminded of the cover of The Fault in Our Stars by John Green, designed by Rodrigo Corral (Penguin 2012)…
…and the lovely hand-lettered YA covers of Australian designer and illustrator Allison Colpoys:
After some further thought, however, I realised that it is even more reminiscent of the cover for the novel Waiting for Doggo by Mark B. Mills, designed by Yeti Lambregts (Headline, November 2014), which made me wonder if, perhaps, we are starting to see more adult covers that look like YA?
Since the success of Harry Potter, publishers have known that adults read ‘children’s books’ for pleasure, and they will often try to appeal these to older readers with more mature covers. On Twitter last week, American YA cover designer Erin Fitzsimmons (interviewed on the blog here), identified this as ‘crossover appeal.’ But crossover appeal can go both ways, and it seems that adult covers are being designed to reach the widest possible audience too.
This trend is more pronounced in the UK where bright and whimsical illustrated covers are common for commercial fiction. The vibrant cover of the UK edition of Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights (and the accompanying backlist) — beautifully illustrated by Sroop Sunar and unveiled today — is a perfect example:
According to CMYK, the Vintage Books design blog, Sunar was inspired by printed ephemera found in India around the time of Independence, and the brightly coloured covers would work equally well for YA as for adult fiction:
US publishers have (I think) been slower to market adult fiction to younger readers in this way. Although hand-lettering has become very common on US covers for a while now, photographic images still dominate commercial fiction covers. Compare, for example, the UK cover of Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, illustrated by Nathan Burton (left), with US edition designed by Abby Weintraub (on the right):
From my own experience, I can also think of at least one quirky illustrated cover — for an upcoming literary novel that the publisher has very high hopes for — that was killed at the last minute in favour of a more traditional photographic one. The original design could easily have been for a gothic Young Adult fantasy. The new cover, much less ambiguous, is clearly intended for adult book clubs.
Even so, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights and a few other recent covers suggest that US publishers are willing to experiment, and as audiences for YA and adult fiction become harder to differentiate, we will only see more covers that blur those lines.
Comments closedPosting Kim Warp’s Moby Dick cartoon last week reminded me to post this The New Yorker cartoon by Mick Stevens from February:
(There’s probably a New Yorker book Moby Dick Cartoons, isn’t there?)
Comments closedThis post was updated April 4, 2015 with additional illustrations and commentary.
Earlier this week, the US and UK covers for the new Harper Lee novel, Go Set a Watchman, were revealed online to great excitement and — because design criticism is a spectator sport — no small amount of derision.
The US cover was designed by Jarrod Taylor for HarperCollins. An apparent homage to the classic post-war American book covers designed by the likes of W. A. Dwiggins, George Salter, and Ismar David, there was some suggestion, on Twitter at least, that it bore an uncanny resemblance to the dust jacket of the first edition of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged (published in 1957), designed by Salter himself.
Certainly, the covers do compliment each other — a testament to how well Taylor has captured the tone of the period — but the minor similarities grind to a halt at yellow train lines and the design of a headlamp. The composition, colour, and lettering are all quite different. More importantly in my opinion, the mood of the covers is in stark contrast. Go Set A Watchmen, with its (faux) hand-brushed letters, golden leaves, old-fashioned locomotive, and evening blue hue is wistful and nostalgic. The ruler-straight horizon and railway sleepers give it steadiness and calm. It evokes both the passing of time and the desire, perhaps, to return to the past.
Atlas Shrugged, on the other hand, is simply a period piece. The design itself, with its hot purple sky, rugged mountains, ominous dark tunnel, tilted railway sleepers, and — let’s face it — bloody enormous red warning light, is far from nostalgic. It’s all fear, urgency and speeding danger — the stencilled letters telling you (in case you hadn’t quite figured it out yet) that this book means serious business… Armchair psychoanalysts have at it.
In fact, the cover of Go Set A Watchman is an update of the original dust jacket of To Kill A Mockingbird (published in 1960) designed by Shirley Smith — the autumnal leaves making a nice allusion to both the author and her previous book, as well as an indication of where the new novel might take us.
But, for all the vintage styling, there is a kind of efficiency to new design that is, I think, unmistakably modern. The illustration, the colour palette, and even the brush-stroke typography, all have the feel of contemporary commercial fiction. It will not look out of place either online, or along side other bestsellers in Barnes and Noble.
UK cover is, in the British fashion, being credited to the in-house design team at William Heinemann rather than to an individual designer1.
Also looking to evoke the past, it appears to draw inspiration from the typography of vintage film.
It’s a nod, perhaps, to the Academy Award-winning (and much beloved) film adaptation of To Kill A Mockingbird starring Gregory Peck (1962), but the burning orange background, red shadows and dark silhouettes suggest — unintentionally perhaps — an earlier literary film adaptation, Gone with the Wind (1939).2
The Art Deco-inspired typography is also perplexing. While To Kill A Mockingbird is set in early 1930s, Go Catch A Watchmen is apparently set 20 years later — well after the heyday of Art Deco (but firmly in the post-war period that inspired the US cover).
Stylistically too, there is something about the combination of illustration and type that feels rather inauthentic and, as a consequence, the cover has a sort of unsatisfying post-modernism gloss. It is much less successful at evoking the period than Ben Wiseman’s noir-inspired design for The Hilliker Curse by James Ellroy (published in 2010) for example.
Even so, there’s no getting away from the fact that it is vibrant and bluntly effective. Less book jacket than a glaring burnt orange advertisement, it is meant to be read at small sizes online (pre-orders, pre-orders, pre-orders….), or piled up at a distance. If you miss the author’s name and the silhouette of a mockingbird at the top of the cover, the words To Kill A Mockingbird loom large at the bottom.
This bold placement of the old title between the lines of the new triggered a slew of obvious jokes on Twitter, but it is actually rather ingenious — the designer neatly accommodates a remarkably large font size and, at the same time, slides in a wry allusion to the long shadow of To Kill A Mockingbird — a far wittier, nuanced joke than the repeated ‘Go Set A To Kill A Watchman Mockingbird’ gags online. For all its brash intent, it’s a cleverer cover than it first appears.
Ultimately, neither the UK cover or its American counterpart are going to win design awards. But neither are they terrible, and given the expectations for this book (and the controversy surrounding it), we should be grateful for that. Certainly we should not blame the designers who have produced surprisingly effective covers given the limitations they were surely working under. Covers for high-profile (and expensive!) books always involve compromises of one sort or another, and already risk-averse publishers become even more timid when so much is riding on a single title. As we saw in 2012 with The Casual Vacancy by J. K. Rowling, big books often get blandly familiar, easily recognisable (and readable) covers rather than conceptual, original designs. The book industry is behind readers on this who — after years of exposure to Apple products — are more sophisticated about design than ever before, but Go Set A Watchman was never going to be the book that brought publishers up to date.
UPDATE: If you’re curious about what designers think of the Go Set A Watchman covers, Peter Cocking, Brian Morgan, Ingrid Paulson, and Michel Vrana share their thoughts with the Globe & Mail, while at The Guardian, Stuart Bache gives his considered opinion.
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At BBC Arts, Brian Morton writes about 80 years of Penguin paperbacks:
The ubiquity of Penguin books in modern British publishing conceals a paradox best expressed by founder Allen Lane’s colleague and biographer Jack Morpurgo, who said that even in Allen Lane’s lifetime, Penguin became “the least typical member of the genus it was said to have created”.
There had been paperbacks before Penguin – all French books were paperback for instance and Woolworth’s, soon to be a key outlet for the new imprint, sold their own cheap editions – but few ranged so eclectically and wide.
And, in a second article, he looks at the legacy of their covers:
Comments closedNo other house had quite Penguin’s confidence in design. Pan Books, which began publication a decade after, in the mid 40s, were defined by a Mervyn Peake colophon of the god playing his pipes, a hint perhaps that here was a house that wasn’t going to trouble you with books on microeconomics or English churches… but with something more sensuous and possibly sensual…
…At the opposite extreme, but no less successful in their way, were the Fontana Modern Masters which began publication under Frank Kermode’s editorship in the 1970s, combining seriousness, a quick-crib approach to major thinkers and a stunning simple visual device, which was that each group of books featured a tessellating cut-up of an abstract painting by Oliver Bevan.
Buy them all, lay them out on your table and you had a bit of modern art. Painterly abstraction and san-serif typeface seemed to go together and seemed to fit as well as Bevan’s angles…
…But it was Penguin which continued to perfect the idea of cheap books as items that might be collected and displayed.
(H is for Hawk is actually on my reading list. And I would love a book about horology and depression to be honest)
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