Books, Design and Culture
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
All This Could Be Yours by Jami Attenberg; design by Catherine Casalino (Hougton Mifflin / October 2019)
Big Bang by David Bowman; design by Jamie Keenan (Corsair / August 2019)
This makes me think of the décollage art of folks like Mimmo Rotella.
The cover of the US edition published by Little, Brown was designed by Gregg Kulick and takes a different pop art approach…
Dead Astronauts by Jeff Vandermeer; design Rodrigo Corral (MCD / December 2019)
The cover of the UK edition, out in January 2020 from Fourth Estate, was designed by Jo Walker with an illustration by Alycia Rainaud.
Driving in Cars with Homeless Men by Kate Wisel; design Catherine Casalino (University of Pittsburgh Press / October 2019)
The Factory by Hiroko Oyamada; design by Janet Hansen; photography by Arthur Woodcroft (New Directions / October 2019)
Feminist City: A Field Guide by Leslie Kern; design by Ingrid Paulson (Between the Lines / October 2019)
The flaps are fun…
Geometry of Shadows by Giorgio di Chirico; design by Atelier Bingo (Public Space Books / October 2019)
Ghosts of Berlin by Rudolph Herzog; design by Marina Drukman (Melville House / October 2019)
Gorgeous War by Tim Blackmore; design Michel Vrana (Wilfred Laurier University Press / October 2019)
The Grace Year by Kim Liggett; design by Kerri Resnick; illustration Hsiao Ron Cheng (Wednesday Books / October 2019)
Humiliation by Paulina Flores; design by Nicole Caputo (Catapult / November 2019)
I Hope You Get This Message by Farah Naz Rishi; design by Erin Fitzsimmons; illustration by Adams Carvalho (HarperTeen / October 2019)
This makes a nice pair with the Adams Carvalho illustration on the cover of We Are the Lost and Found mentioned last month…
Nightmareland by Lex “Lonehood” Nover; design by Linet Huamán Velásquez (TarcherPerigee / October 2019)
Nothing To See Here by Kevin Wilson; design by Allison Saltzman; art by Christian Northeast (Ecco / October 2019)
Not Me by Marianne Dissard; design by Jamie Keenan (October 2019)
One of the more disturbing covers of the year I think…
One Day by Gene Weingarten; design by David Litman (Blue Rider / October 2019)
Sonnets to Orpheus by Rainer Maria Rilke; design by Anne Jordan & Mitch Goldstein (Open Letter Books / December 2019)
Space Struck by Paige Lewis; design by Alban Fischer (Sarabande Books / October 2019)
Suspect Communities by Nicole Nguyen; design by Matt Avery (University of Minnesota Press / October 2019)
Redaction on covers is most definitely in…
The Topeka School by Ben Lerner; design by Rodrigo Corral (Farrar, Straus & Giroux / October 2019)
What Happened? by Hanif Kureishi; design Jonny Pelham (Faber & Faber / October 2019)
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…
Mister Miracle by Tom King and Mitch Gerads was unexpectedly one of my favourite comics this year. I hadn’t previously read any books set in the ‘Fourth World’ despite it’s massive influence on comics and films. I’ve always found Jack Kirby’s grandiose, dialed up to 11, vision of the New Gods to be a little too much, even for Jack Kirby.1 But the constant overwhelming ridiculousness of it all is one of the themes of Mister Miracle. How do you stay sane, let alone have a normal life with a family, when you are constantly ground down by the world you find yourself in, and confronted daily with situations that are tragic, absurd, and just so much bigger than you?
At the Daily Beast, Entertainment Editor Melissa Leon talks to author Tom King about how his experiences as a CIA counterintelligence officer and his personal struggles with stress and anxiety shaped the book.
“The book started when I had one of those first-episode-of-the-Sopranos panic attacks and I ended up in the hospital,” he says. “It was one of those things where you ask the doctor, ‘Am I dying or am I crazy?’ And they tell you you’re crazy and you’re like, woo-hoo! Oh, wait a second.” He laughs. “I thought I was a pretty tough guy. I’d been to war twice, I’d had three kids. In my own little nerdy corner of the world I was pretty successful. But there was something brittle inside of me.”
Mister Miracle was his chance to write about those brittle parts—and about the creeping suspicion in the age of Trump that reality is fundamentally, metaphysically even, coming undone… Unremarkable events [unfold] in heightened, surreal circumstances; sometimes touching, funny, or grim. The juxtapositions are essential to King, who likens the scenes to the memory of debriefing a source in Iraq in 120-degree weather. “We were both sweating and talking about a guy getting his head chopped off. It was horrible,” he remembers. “But it was my wife’s birthday.” He recalls shuffling into a corner, calling his wife, and singing “Happy Birthday” in half-hushed tones. “That’s what life is, right? The mundane lives right next to the crazy.” …
It sounds all very grim, but somehow it isn’t. At least not completely. There is a lot of humour and affection in it too, which is why I think it works. Somehow King finds a way to be (just about) life-affirming in the end.
Gerads layered artwork is also extraordinary and, at times, beautiful. Laid out on the page in a metronomic 9 panel grid, the glitches, blurs, and repetition add to the sense of dislocation and detachment from reality, like life is being filtered and replayed through a screen.
2 CommentsPart of Mister Miracle’s ambition is to capture a feeling many know intimately, but which can be hard to put into words. King and Gerads articulate that dread succinctly, often with a single phrase: “Darkseid Is.” Panels black out without warning, flashing the phrase in typewriter lettering. It interrupts moments of loneliness or disassociation. But it can also be a punchline, or a shrug: When Big Barda says it, for example, she could just as well say “shit happens.”
OK, this is super-late even by my standards of lateness, so let’s just get on with it because we’ve all got stuff to do…
Arctic Smoke by Randy Nikkel Schroeder; design by Michel Vrana (NeWest Press / September 2019)
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)
The Dutch House by Ann Patchet; design by Robin Bilardello; painting by Noah Saterstrom (HarperCollins / September 2019)
The Enlightenment of Bees by Rachel Linden; design by Kimberly Glyder (Thomas Nelson / July 2019)
Frankly in Love by David Yoon; design by Owen Gildersleeve (G. P. Putnam / September 2019)
From the Shadows by Juan José Millás; design by Tree Abraham (Bellevue Literary Press / August 2019)
In Her Feminine Sign by Dunya Mikhail; design by Janet Hansen (New Directions / July 2019)
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.
Inland by Téa Obrecht; design by Jaya Miceli; art by Tamara Ruiz (Random House / August 2019)
The Innocents by Michael Crummey; design by Emily Mahon; art by Diana Dabinett (Doubleday / August 2019)
Listening to the Wind by Tim Robinson; design by Mary Austin Speaker (Milkweed / September 2019)
De New York Trilogie by Paul Auster; design by Moker Ontwerp (De Bezige Bij / August 2019)
This reminded me of Evan Gaffney‘s 2012 ‘film noir’ covers for the Vintage paperbacks of James M. Cain.
Permanent Record by Mary H. K. Choi; design by Lizzy Bromley; illustration by gg (Simon & Schuster / September 2019)
This reminded me of the panels of Tony Abruzzo romance comics that Roy Lichtenstein liked to lift from.
gg also illustrated the cover of Mary H. K. Choi’s previous novel Emergency Contact.
Oh and Koyama Press is publishing a new book by gg called Constantly in January 2020. It looks beautiful.
Quichotte by Salman Rushdie; design by Gray318 (Jonathan Cape / August 2019)
Rail by Miranda Pearson; design David Drummond (McGill-Queen’s University Press / September 2019)
Safe Houses I Have Known by Steve Healey; design by Alban Fischer (Coffee House Press / September 2019)
One to add to the redacted covers list.
Shame On Me by Tessa McWatt; design by Allison Colpoys (Scribe / August 2019)
This has some nice Alvin Lustig / New Directions vibes.
Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory by Raphael Bob-Waksberg; design by Tyler Comrie; illustration Justin Metz (Knopf / June)
For some reason this made me think of the 2015 cover for I Am Sorry to Think I Raised a Timid Son by Kent Russell designed by Peter Mendelsund (with hand lettering by Janet Hansen and photography by George Baier IV)
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).
To The Island of Tides by Alistair Moffat; Art by Andy Lovell; art direction Gill Heeley (Canongate / August 2019)
It’s lovely to see contemporary landscape art featuring prominently on book covers of late…
The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates; design Greg Mollica; art Calida Garcia Rawles (One World / September 2019)
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?
We Are the Lost and Found by Helene Dunbar; design Nicole Hower; illustration by Adams Carvalho (Sourcebooks / September 2019)
The World Doesn’t Require You by Rion Amilcar Scott; design by Laywan Kwan; art by Fahamu Pecou (Liveright / August 2019)
And I am definitely here for the contemporary figure painting on book covers trend…
In April this year, AIGA posthumously honoured designer Alexander Girard (1907-1993) with an AIGA Medal, recognizing “his effortless ability to move across innumerable surfaces and scales, his life-long innovative and inspirational cross-disciplinary design practice, and his undeniable impact on mid-century modernism in America.”
Alexander Girard was a designer who defied easy categorization, mostly because he worked—and excelled—in every field. Tireless, creative, and immersive, Girard was most comfortable when absorbed in a project, and he managed to complete a staggering catalog raisonné in his lifetime: houses, department stores, trendy restaurants, less trendy restaurants, logos, a terrazzo material, an airline, a folk art museum, even an imaginary land with its own language…
…Girard’s colorful, geometric, typography-driven, and folk-inspired personal aesthetic became indistinguishable from the midcentury look still sold by the Michigan-based company [Herman Miller]. As later brand director… Sam Grawe wrote back in 2008 for Dwell, “colors hitherto considered gauche—magenta, yellow, emerald green, crimson, orange—became a part of the company’s formal vocabulary, and in time, the world’s.”
Herman Miller — the company with which Girard is most closely associated — recently posted an extended cut of the tribute video made for the AIGA’s celebration of Girard’s life and work:
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I’ve been in a bit of reading slump of late so I can relate to this recent cartoon by Grant Snider for the New York Times Books Review (although, thankfully, I’ve not been banned from the library!).
Grant has a couple of new books coming out that are available for pre-order. What Color is Night? will be published by Chronicle Kids in November, and I Will Judge You by Your Bookshelf will be published by Abrams in April 2020.
Comments closedThe Guardian has an essay by American cartoonist Art Spiegelman on the events that shaped the original ‘golden age’ superheroes and their creators, and why these characters still resonate with readers and movie-goers:
The young Jewish creators of the first superheroes conjured up mythic – almost god-like – secular saviours to deal with the threatening economic dislocations that surrounded them in the great depression and gave shape to their premonitions of impending global war. Comics allowed readers to escape into fantasy by projecting themselves on to invulnerable heroes.
Auschwitz and Hiroshima make more sense as dark comic book cataclysms than as events in our real world. In today’s all too real world, Captain America’s most nefarious villain, the Red Skull, is alive on screen and an Orange Skull haunts America. International fascism again looms large (how quickly we humans forget – study these golden age comics hard, boys and girls!) and the dislocations that have followed the global economic meltdown of 2008 helped bring us to a point where the planet itself seems likely to melt down. Armageddon seems somehow plausible and we’re all turned into helpless children scared of forces grander than we can imagine, looking for respite and answers in superheroes flying across screens in our chapel of dreams.
Apparently a version of this essay was originally intended to serve as the introduction to a Folio Society collection called Marvel: The Golden Age 1939–1949, but was rejected for not being ‘apolitical’.
Comments closedHere 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.
Berta Isla by Javier Marías; design by Kelly Blair (Knopf / August 2019)
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!).
The Case Against Reality by Donald Hoffman; design by Sarahmay Wilkinson (W. W. Norton / August 2019)
The Catholic School by Edoardo Albinati; design by Rodrigo Corral (Farrar, Straus & Giroux / August 2019)
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.
Chances Are… by Richard Russo; dsign by Kelly Blair (Knopf / July 2019)
Doxology by Nell Zink; design Jack Smyth (Fourth Estate / August 2019)
And you can read a recent interview with Jack about his work at It’s Nice That.
Ether by Evgenia Citkowitz design by Henry Sene Yee (Picador / July 2019)
You can listen to Henry discussing his work with Holly Dunn on the latest Spine podcast.
Follow Me To Ground by Sue Rainsford; design and illustration Beci Kelly (Transworld / August 2019)
The cover of the US edition, which will be published by Scribner in January 2020(!) was designed by Jaya Miceli featuring a collage by Toon Joosen.
Lithium by Walter A. Brown; design by Keith Hayes (W. W. Norton / August 2019)
The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa; design by Tyler Comrie (Pantheon / August 2019)
More Noble Than War by Nicholas Blincoe; design by Steve Leard (Constable / August 2019)
This reminded me of Henry’s cover for A Wall in Palestine by René Backman published by Picador in 2010…
The Need by Helen Phillips; design Rachel Willey (Simon & Schuster / July 2019)
I stopped keeping track of ‘flora-intertwined-with-type’ covers a while ago, but this would be a nice addition to that list.
One Giant Leap by Charles Fishman; design by Richard Ljoenes (Simon & Schuster / June 2019)
Our Women on the Ground edited by Zahra Hankir; design by Rosie Palmer; hand lettering by Lily Jones (Harvill Secker / August 2019)
The cover of the US edition published by Penguin was designed by Na Kim.
The Perfect Plan by Bryan Reardon; design by Jason Booher (Dutton / June 2019)
I like this cover a lot, but it is surprisingly un-bonkers for Jason. I would not have guessed he was the designer!
The Remainder by Alia Trabucco Zerán; design by Tree Abraham (Coffee House Press / August 2019)
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?).
The Revolutionaries by Joshua Furst; design by Tyler Comrie (Knopf / April 2019)
I think it’s kind of interesting to see these two designs side by side….
Speaking of Summer by Kalisha Buckhanon; design Jaya Miceli (Counterpoint / July 2019)
Sadly this image doesn’t quite do justice to just how brilliantly orange this cover is in IRL. And apparently flowery collages are the new thing…
The Western Alienation Merit Badge by Nancy Jo Cullen; design by Michel Vrana (Buckrider Books / May 2019)
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.
White Flights by Jess Row; design by Oliver Munday (Graywolf / August 2019)
This is one of my favourite covers of the year so far, I think.
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