Book Jackets

You may recall that we love finding out why a book cover changes between the ARC and the published edition, so when we met playwright Victor Lodato at the launch party for his debut novel, Mathilda Savitch, a few weeks ago, we came prepared to ask him about the switch Farrar Straus Giroux made with his dust jacket.

"I met with the art department at FSG, and they were very open to my ideas," Lodato said of the cover selection process. "I mentioned a number of things, but I said that I really like silhouettes, and I mentioned that I thought something that looked like a strange storybook for children would really work." The art department came up with the illustration at left (which is still being used on certain European editions, hence the "Roman" tagline in the middle). "Both my editor, Courtney Hodell, and I thought this was a great cover," he recalled, "but maybe it just needed to be... sexier in some ways. It was a little cold. So they wanted to play with some other ideas."

Lodato spent two days looking through art books at Strand Books until he came across a copy of Travelers, a collection of photographs of snow globe sculptures created by Walter Martin and Paloma Muñoz. He brought the book to Hodell, and says she was as enthusiastic about the images as he was; FSG finally settled on "Traveler 48 at Night" for the final cover image.

Lodato explained that he still liked both covers, that they were both relevant to the novel's story of a young girl's journey into the underworld to find answers to her questions about her older sister's death. "I like the playful interpretation of this child going on a frightening adventure," he says of the original, "but this one..." He moved on to the final cover. "The novel's about a child alone in an emotionally frozen landscape, and she's trying to figure out lots of things, from where her sister went to death in general. And this just seemed very resonant to that." (New Yorkers can judge for themselves when Lodato reads from Mathilda Savitch at KGB Bar this Sunday [Oct. 25] at 7 p.m.)

We're hard-pressed to pick either one as "better" than the other, too—but what do you think?

When OR Books announced itself this summer, we were curious to see what publishing books with "a distinctive progressive edge, reflecting the new era of the Obama presidency and the economic and environmental challenges it faces," would look like. We could have looked to co-founder John Oakes's background as the former co-publisher of Nation Books, as Nation senior editors Richard Kim and Betsy Reed have assembled an essay collection called Going Rouge: Sarah Palin: An American Nightmare which OR will release as an ebook and trade paperback perfectly timed to compete with Sarah Palin's Going Rogue: An American Dream.

Among other Nation regulars showing up in the collection: Katrina vanden Heuvel, Patricia Williams, Jim Hightower, Joe Conason, and Katha Pollitt ; Salon is also well represented, as Rebecca Traister and Michelle Goldberg contribute pieces.

Janice Harayda thinks the cover to Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol is a "copycat" of Rhonda Byrne's The Secret. What do you think? Are the covers too close for comfort, or is Harayda reading too much into a pair of crimson wax seals?

Harayda goes on to point out how aspects of the "noetics" Brown talks about in his novel bears similarity to the "law of attraction" from The Secret, but we're willing to chalk that up to the fact that there's only so much New Age philosophy to go around.

Yale University Press has changed its logo after nearly 25 years, perhaps, as UnBeige reports, as part of a larger project to bring the press and the university together under a single brand identity. Not everybody likes the switch, though—so if you follow the link through, you'll see the "compromise version" that designer Chris Rubino created. We liked it, at any rate; what do you think?

Over the years, we've had a lot of enthusiasm for the Penguin Classics covers by comic book artists, but we're especially impressed with the forthcoming 25th-anniversary edition of Don DeLillo's White Noise, featuring artwork by Michael Cho and design by Penguin's Paul Buckley. "I am a DeLillo fan," Cho told us when we emailed him earlier this month after seeing the front cover reprinted in the Penguin catalog, "and White Noise was actually one of my favourite books when I was a teen... No joke—I was actually reading Libra when I got the call from Penguin."

"Paul was very generous," Cho continued, "and I was given complete freedom to come up with the concept, including both the front and back cover, the spine, and the french flaps." You can see the complete design as well as all the other Penguin Classics comics covers (including gorgeous Tony Millionaire artwork for Moby Dick), but we're going to pick out a few of the "comic book panel" images from the flaps, too, so keep reading...

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First off, all due honors to Alex Balk for spotting the horrible new Twilight-inspired cover art for Wuthering Heights and writing about it at The Awl. We confess, the intense horror of nightmare came upon us when we gazed upon that wretched, wretched cover, but, as a friend pointed out yesterday, that was only half the story... because what the British division of HarperCollins got so horribly, horribly wrong, the American division actually managed to get right.

Here's the thing: If you're going to imitate one of the most distinctive book cover themes of the last five years, you should at least do it accurately. What's most wrong with the UK cover of Wuthering Heights is where it deviates from the Twilight model: ugly typeface, tiny ugly flower, and an ugly background that isn't sheer black. Now look at the American version: The typefaces are sleeker, and the flower is properly sized and photographed in the same vaguely unsettling way. The American version even has the same taglines—"Bella and Edward's Favorite Book" and "Love Never Dies"—as the British edition, but they look better here. (We still aren't thrilled with the "Bella and Edward's Favorite Book" badge, but it's not as awful, at least.)

Of course, this doesn't resolve the question of whether Wuthering Heights even needs what Balk calls "a fresh vampirey makeover." But we'll see what happens when American bookstores get the new edition later this season...

Earlier this month, we looked at some upcoming books where the authors and publishers are clearly hoping to get caught in Dan Brown's wake, as they explore themes of Freemasonry and American history that are generally assumed to be important thematic elements in The Lost Symbol. So when a new Tarcher/Penguin edition of Manly P. Hall's The Secret Destiny of America (combining two texts from 1944 and 1951), we couldn't shake a weird feeling of déjâ vu, but we figured it was purely thematic—until we got home and took another look at the cover to Mitch Horowitz's all-new Occult America: The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation, one of the books in our initial item. Both covers prominently feature, against a vellum-like background, the image from the Great Seal of the United States popularly known as "the eye in the pyramid," which has the more esoteric name of "the all-seeing eye" or "the Eye of Providence."

As it happens, Horowitz is also the editor in chief at Tarcher, so we asked him about the situation, and he emailed back to remind us that, while the house may be selling Manly P. Hall a bit more overtly than usual as Dan Brown's publication date nears, this particular cover design for The Secret Destiny of America has actually been in use for some time, and he assured us that no similarity was intended between the cover of that book and his own. "I encouraged using the eye-and-pyramid on the jacket to Occult America since that image is so perfectly suited to the subject and is discussed in the book," he explained. "It's one of the most alluring images in American history."

(And it's true: If you're going to write about occult-tinged versions of American history, you're going to wind up talking about the Great Seal of the United States at some point.)

Horowitz added that the two covers used different versions of the Great Seal's eye-in-pyramid imagery (we've blown the two elements up so you can see for yourself, and "beyond that," he said, "I felt that other elements were significantly divergent." Given all the additional imagery on the Occult America jacket, that sounds reasonable to us... but we can't help wondering if we're going to be seeing the Eye of Providence again before this bookselling season is over?

When the fall W.W. Norton catalog arrived a few months ago, we were intrigued enough by the cover art for Hammer: A Novel of the Victorian Underground to peruse the description and decide we wanted to see what sort of story Sara Stockbridge had come up with for her debut. Who was this woman with all the jewelry and trinkets? What was that man whispering in her ear? Why were those children standing in the background? So we put in a request, and when the ARC came, there was a note attached saying the cover would change, which we didn't think about any further until a finished copy showed up last week—and not only had Norton replaced the illustration with a photo montage, they'd gone and changed the name of the book to Grace Hammer.

What we had seen in the catalog was the cover used for the original British edition, published last year by Chatto & Windus, Jill Bialosky explained to us yesterday afternoon. Bialosky had seen that cover shortly after she acquired the book for Norton; "I was intrigued by it," she said. "It was a very different approach than what we had been considering." The character of Grace Hammer and the group of young pickpockets she'd gathered around her in 1880s London was one of the primary attractions of the novel for Bialosky and her colleagues, and they were drawn (no pun intended) to the way the British cover art brought those elements forward.

The initial reactions from American booksellers, however, were not enthusiastic, and Norton began to reconsider whether the original art was best suited to reach the readership they were after. Bialosky thought back to another of her authors, the late Michael Cox, and the way the covers for The Meaning of Night and The Glass of Time had used visual elements to convey an aura of Victorian-era mystery and suspense; after designer Greg Mollica combined images of a street and a woman in 19th-century clothing, Norton took another look at the title—"it seemed to us that we should soften the title," Bialosky concluded, "that Hammer seemed a little too severe."

And thus Grace Hammer was sent out into the world.

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When the finished copy of Beg, Borrow, Steal, Michael Greenberg's collection of autobiographical essays, turned up in our mailbox last week, it felt uncannily familiar to us, so we went digging into the stacks of review copies surrounding our desk until we came up with The Late Age of Print, Ted Striphas's consideration of the continued relevance of the printed book which came out earlier this year.

Both covers use images from the work of Cara Barer, who has been "attempting to blur the line between objects, sculpture, and photography" for at least the last half-decade, based on the sampling from her online portfolio—which offers a lot more opportunities for art directors to sample her wares. Or have you seen Barer's handiwork on other tomes already?

One of the topics of discussion we've been circling around repeatedly in recent weeks is the idea that there is so an audience for short story collections, if only publishers could reach that audience consistently, so when Jeffrey Trachtenberg wrote an item in last week's Wall Street Journal about the surprise success of David Eagleman's Sum, we snapped to attention.

The main focus of the article, as it happens, is how Sum appears to be doing much better at Amazon.com than at walk-in bookstores, and Pantheon's subsequent decision to reissue the book with a new dust jacket, after determining that the original cover art made potential readers think it was "a ghost story or a work of science fiction" (as opposed to a work of literary fiction comparable to, in one reviewer's estimation, Italo Calvino or Alan Lightman). We're not 100% convinced by the new cover—our first impression is that it goes too far in the opposite direction—but as we poked around the Internet, we found ourselves charmed by the cover Canongate created for the British edition of the book. (And, we realized, Pantheon's problem could've been much worse; not only is the German cover unexciting, the book has been retitled Nearly in the Other World: or, Why God Reads Frankenstein.)

Then again, we're not the only, or even the ideal, book buyers in America: What do you think of these three covers? Which one would get you to pick up the book and take a look inside?

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