Everything Is Nice

Book covers:

• Caustic Cover Critic marvels at some wildly inappropriate book covers from Tutis Digital Publishing.
• Orbit do some in-depth research into what makes a fantasy book cover. Swords and glowy magic, apparently.
• Elsewhere Sherlock Holmes goes pulp.

Stuff in the paper:

• Peter Bradshaw doesn’t like The Time Traveler’s Wife but does like The Butterfly Effect. Me too.
• Adam Roberts reviews Kim Stanley Robinson’s new novel which strikes me as a better use of a couple of hundred words than these round ups. (Same contributor name fail though.)
• Jeanette Winterson has written a fantasy children’s drama for the BBC.

Torque Control has linked to the rather good Art of Penguin Science Fiction. James Pardey is to be congratulated for putting this to together but I would quibble over this remark:

One final point: the Penguin sf covers presented here are neither exhaustive nor intended to be. Aesthetics are every- thing for a website called The Art of Penguin Science Fiction, and in this regard many of the later covers have little to offer. Thus they are excluded, and from 1977 to 2009 all coverage (no pun intended) ceases. For as the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once wrote for very different reasons, “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”.

For example:

You will probably have seen at least some of the rash of imitation Penguin Classics cover designs doing the rounds. MS Corley has just done an excellent set for the Harry Potter books:

They really show how anaemic the adult covers Bloomsbury put out are. Corley has also done Lemony Snicket and The Spiderwick Chronicles.

A couple of years ago Chris Cleave published his debut novel, Incendiary, a thriller about a terrorist attack on the Emirates Stadium. It received a major marketing push, including adverts on the tube, but, unfortunately, happened to be published on the same day as the tube bombings.

I’ve not read the novel but by all accounts calling it a thriller is slightly misleading. The publisher was clearly happy to mislead though because the cover screams thriller. Just look at the typeface. So it was with considerable surprise that I came across the new paperback edition in Borders.

It is about as radical a change in design as you can imagine. They both directly relate to the contents of the novel but emphasise completely different aspects. It continues a re-positioning seen in the recent film adaptation, the audience the marketing is trying to attract has clearly shifted from men to women. This does make sense but it is still a startling contrast.

It hit her hard when she first saw it, the day after, in the newspaper. The man headlong, the towers behind him. The mass of the towers filled the frame of the picture. The man falling, the towers continuous, she thought, behind him. The enormous soaring lines, the vertical column stripes. The man with blood on his shirt, she thought, or burn marks, and the effect of the columns behind him, the composition, she thought, darker stripes for the nearer tower, the north, lighter for the other, and the mass, the immensity of it all, and the man set set almost precisely between the rows of darker and lighter stripes. Headlong, free fall, she thought, and this picture burnt a hole in her mind and heart, dear God, he was a falling angel and his beauty was horrific.

Don DeLillo, Falling Man, 2007

DeLillo’s character is discussing Richard Drew’s infamous photo from which the novel takes its name. It is the obvious cover for the book but at the same time it is not the sort of image that you can slap text over and use a sales pitch. Instead the publishers have used a photo by Katy Day Weisberger which takes the opposite approach, moving back, rising up, relegating the Twin Towers themselves to the back cover. It is an equally fitting companion to the work DeLillo has produced. (The UK paperback cover also removes the clever but perhaps ill-judged typographical trick from the original cover.)

There are a few assumptions about the Transatlantic publishing gap that quite a few people make: UK paperbacks are better quality than US ones, US hardbacks are better quality than UK ones and UK covers are better than US ones. The latter is certainly something that I’ve always believed but ajr has an interesting post about whether it is true any more. He was inspired by this Bookseller article but the original article loses points for not having a poll. It does contain an interesting quote from designer Jon Gray that suggests this is a recent change though:

In the US, the designer, art director, editor and author will create a cover that they feel is right for a book, and then that will be shown to a sales department. It would then be shown to the trade. This often means that your cover is first and foremost a nice piece of design, relevant to the book. In the UK over the past year or so, we’ve started to work backwards.

As always this is the fault of the supermarkets.

Anyway, I can’t say this new design-led approach in the US is one I have witnessed, particularly within the science fiction industry. Indeed when ever someone in the science fiction world pleas for slightly nicer covers there is always someone from the industry quick to pop up and say: “ugly covers are the way we’ve always done it, besides that is what the punters want and authors should be grateful just to be published”. That is not to say there aren’t plenty of good US SF covers but the overall standards are not very high and the lows are just so much lower than in the UK.

(I am obviously a corporate stooge because I have spent this entire post playing the man, not the ball…)