Everything Is Nice

Solaris are reissuing James Lovegrove’s back catalogue and, despite the fact they are only appearing as e-books, they have commissioned some lovely new covers by Pye Parr:

Worldstorm is my favourite but The Hope works really well on a dual level. Imagined Sleights and Provender Gleed are the weakest of the bunch – muddy and lacking an iconic image to really nail the title – but they are a vast improvement on the original Gollancz covers and Parr is to be applauded. So too are Solaris for commissioning him; it is nice to see a publisher taking both ebooks and design seriously and I’m looking forward to the two remaining covers. A mystery remains though: if Solaris are taking so much care with these re-issues, why have they given his current series such bloody awful covers? Maybe it is actually true what every publisher thinks and everyone who ever visits a bookshop is really blind and mentally ill. I’m not convinced.

Today I received two books from Orbit and, whilst I am looking forward to reading both, it was their covers that particularly struck me. Here is Lightborn by Tricia Sullivan:

And here is Version 43 by Philip Palmer:

The cover for Lightborn was designed by Nathan Burton and art directed by Duncan Spilling (more here, including larger image). The cover for Version 43 was photographed by Eric Westpheling and art directed by Lauren Panepinto (more here, including larger image). Both covers take radical yet radically different approaches to complimenting the work behind them

Lightborn has a stark, monochrome cover depicting light being split by a prism where, instead of producing a rainbow, it simply fans out in a grey wave. As well as harmonising with the title, it signals a novel with serious intent and presumably a dark future. It reminds me a bit of Gollancz’s paper space opera series but I’m worried it is too non-descript (the typeface is also very small for a novel). However, when I mentioned this cover on Twitter several people said that they thought it would stand out by virtue of the fact it is so different to other SF covers.

In contrast, I really do think Version 43 stands out. The cover is split between text and image and both are highly distinctive. The top half is a blue bold background with a really strong and unusual typeface (as well as a small element of graphic design). The bottom half is a photo an Action Man figure with several more in silhouette. Again, this harmonises with the title, a disposable figure in a conformist society. The protagonist of the novel is a cyborg cop, “more programme than man”, and the harsh light, stern expression and menacing shadows set a hard-boiled tone. It isn’t quite as instantly brilliant as the similar cover for his previous novel but it is pretty damn good. From comments elsewhere, it is also seems to be divisive though.

Fantasy readers tend to complain if their novels don’t come complete with a pretty map at the front. Non-fantasy readers tend to take the piss out of them for this. Best Served Cold by Joe Abercrombie laughs in the face of all this:

Having only seen it online, I had just thought it was a continuation of the imitation parchment covers for the First Law Trilogy. It was only when I had the thing in my hands I realised they had (brilliantly) put the map on the outside. It gets even cleverer. As the novel ranges across the continent of Styria, the page bearing the geographical title of each section is printed on a greyscale close up of the relevant area of the map. The jacket only credits the two illustrators but it appears to have been a real team effort:

Original concept from Simon Spanton (I believe), expanded upon by my editor Gillian Redfearn, who then put the brief together and assembled the team to carry it out (kind of like the A-Team, but with more artistic accumen and less mercy), and co-ordinated the project. The sword was painted by weapons expert Didier Graffet, the map was drawn by map-master Dave Senior, adapting my own scrawl, then the whole was combined and made to live by designer Laura Brett (also responsible for the First Law covers), who added the spatter, coins, parchmenty effects, and lettering.

The less said about the American version the better but at least the paperback edition had character. Anyway, I know I’m very late to the party but this is still worth saying. The book itself is bloody good too.

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…)