The Wax Lyrical: 'By the Book' by Ramona Koval

Leading up to last Christmas I was gratified to see people go up to bookshop counters clutching copies of Koval's By the Book. Books about reading books, a book subtitled: A Reader's Guide to Life. That's as bookish as booklovers get.

From the blurb: "Ramona Koval’s By the Book is about reading and living, and about the authors that have written themselves into her life: from Oliver Sacks to Oscar Wilde, Christina Stead to Grace Paley. It is about learning to read (and asking her mother to buy her a copy of the Kama Sutra), about love and science (and her childhood ambition to be Marie Curie), about arctic exploration (and her ruminations on what part of a husky she would eat if she had to), about poetry and travel and falling in love."

One thought was to do a metabook cover, like Penguin by Design. But I had been working on Geordie Williamson's The Burning Library and one turn of the spinal tap was enough. It seemed better to go with a classic look, which would fit nicely on a shelf with the books which had inspired the author.

There is this passage in the book:

Two books sit, one upon the other, on a plant stand in the corner of my room... They were given to me when a [late] friend and her husband came for lunch one day. She was an artist and the books were from her recent exhibition to do with bees and temples.They now completely encased by wax that had been deposited on them by bees after she had placed the books in the beehive and left them to be worked upon ...The waxed books are here as I write. I wonder which books they are but I don’t want to disturb the seals on them that would break of I opened them. They might be a message from the grave. They might not be.

A beautiful mystery. Wax and bees – a book as beehive, words as pollen transformed by reading into honey. And so an image emerges for a cover. Three design niceties: the bees and wattle (local resource) are life size, allowing a certain trompe l'oeil effect;  the drop of honey makes a lens which distorts the L in Koval, and the Text logo fits neatly into the bottom left loop of the ribbon border.

Tree, bark, paper, novel: 'The Pages' by Murray Bail

An author 's last two novels, with two-word titles, have only five letters difference: The Voyage – The Pages.

Tree and ship.

Paper and piano.

Log is boat.

Sheet is music. 

The cover of Murray Bail's 2012 novel, The Voyage, has a piano lid which evokes sailing. His novel before, The Pages (2008), has the bark of a gum tree, with lettering on it, as if on paper. Word pictures – one is one plus one is two...

Here is the demi hardback of The Pages.

From the blurb:

On a family sheep station in western New South Wales, a brother and sister work the property while their reclusive brother, Wesley Antill, spends years toiling away in one of the sheds, writing his philosophy. Now he has died. Erica, a philosopher, is sent from Sydney to appraise his life’s work. Accompanying her is Sophie, who needs distracting from a string of failed relationships. Her field is psychoanalysis.

Murray Bail’s The Pages is a beguiling meditation on friendship and love, on men and women, on landscape and the difficulties of thought itself...

The Voyage (previous post) cover was easily arrived at compared to The Pages. The latter accrued six versions, each with several variations. Here are v3 and v4 (a more fastidious system would make it v3.1 – v3.6 and then v4.1 – v4.5):

 

Cover design v1.4 featured a photograph of clasped hands – a weathered beefy farmer's and a female's, pale and freckled. This was regarded with enormous disdain by everyone else in the office. I thought it was a nice gesture towards a surprisingly warm story.

The thinking got more abstract – and more literal: it entered the arena of paper and pages before it went tangent into trees and bark and gum and the land.

And the lineage keeps going back: the finished cover may as well have been done for the novel before The Pages: Eucalyptus.


Here is the UK edition cover, keeping up their usual symbols of the big outdoors populated with rustics that the British imagine are the Antipodes (when we are not in Ramsay St).

High Seas, High Culture: 'The Voyage' by Murray Bail

What does high culture look like? We've heard the sound of music, but how does it look? (A: Not like life at the supermarket.)

From the blurb:

Frank Delage, piano manufacturer from Sydney, travels to Vienna, a city immersed in music, to present the Delage concert grand. He hopes to impress with its technical precision, its improvement on the old pianos of Europe. How could he not know his piano is all wrong for Vienna? 

But a chance meeting with Amalia von Schalla brings new possibilities for Delage—a soiree, a meeting with her daughter Elisabeth, a dinner with an avant garde composer. Now travelling home, on a container ship, with Elisabeth, Frank Delage can begin to tell the real story.

Murray Bail is one of the high priests of Australian fiction, conjurer of that unique bush romance, Eucalyptus, whose real subject may be the power of the imagination. The Voyage is also a romance – to rub it in, a shipboard romance on a vessel named Romance – but the deep subject is, I think, high culture, and the vexed, unstable relationship Australians have with it.

I was asked not to put a ship on the cover; nothing so banal, please! Working up an iPhone sketch I produced an odd image (rough, below left): a hybrid of liner, grand piano and stiletto shoe (see Wifework!). The publisher liked it, amazingly, but the author did not. In retrospect it was too complex in every way. By request I mocked up a keyboard with three hands, illustrating a scene of a duet and hinting at the emotional dynamics (rough, below right). The author didn't mind that one, but I did.

It was the piano key that turned the lock (so to speak). Looking back I saw it all had to be stripped back, conceptually and compositionally. I threw the lot overboard and started looking at pianos.

A grand piano is like an ocean liner. The lid is very like a sail. And despite the perversity of the book's characters going home in a working boat – "not one of the P&O queens, a container ship" – they are still sailing the high seas of culture. The final cover reaches for the pre-war Europe of a more formal era, of the black and white of books and movies and the nostalgic imagination, of piano keys, black tie and evening dress.


Here is the whole jacket (it's a demi hardback). As usual, click to enlarge:

The piano was made from cutting and pasting various bits and then cooked smooth. The bespoke type was Deco inspired; I started with a sans and then adjusted the proportions and thickness, the strokes and arms and counters – I particularly like the "E". It was stamped in foil onto a nice paper-finish stock. With this design the paper stock risks marking in the shops, but as Tom Wolfe says about his white suits, it's “a marvelous, harmless form of aggression,” so you just have to go all the way.

A Cruel Bouquet: 'The Commandant' by Jessica Anderson

The surreal (previous post) reminds me of the image which ended up on Jessica Anderson's The Commandant. Part of Text Classics, a series I have been working on over the last 18 months, it was by an author I was barely aware of, though I knew the famous title of another novel of hers, Tirra Lirra by the River.

I found it a tremendously impressive work (introduced by Carmen Callil) – Anderson's prose has great verve and style, a flexible and, in this book at least, a kind of contained power, as if she was keeping a tight rein in case any sloppy move might cause the explosive subject matter to blow up.

From the blurb: "The penal colony of Moreton Bay is under the command of Patrick Logan, a man not afraid of brutal discipline. But his rule is being questioned and the arrival of his sister-in-law Frances will change everything. The Commandant is an unforgettable tale of power, duty and humanity."

My first attempt: I combined a banana symbolising Queensland (the red marks represented the cruelty, the floggings) and a Trigridia pavonia, the Tiger flower that makes an appearance at a crucial moment. There is something satisfying about the intersection of the vertical and the crescent – it echos the hammer and sickle, but more tenuously it also suggests to me some of Raphael's Virgins, like the Colonna Madonna. The pillar of Mary cradling the Child in the scoop of her arm. Of course, this has nothing to do with The Commandant, but it does explain why the composition exerts a charm on me.

 

But, oh, but. The author's estate put its foot down and firmly pointed out that Yes, we had no bananas in Queensland in 1835, when the story was set. It was no use arguing that one of the central design ideas for the series was to contemporarise the appeal of the books. Visual anachronism was sought after, even. As these things happen, the problem moment was compounded by the non-approval arriving late, so late that I was left with a day and a half to fix it, get final approval and send it off to the printers.

So long Andy. The symbolic banana was replaced by a literal cat o' nine talis, a period graphic which I repurposed. Used in green and grafted with Tigridia pavonia blossoms it became a kinetic bouquet, the beauty threaded into the violence. The red and palest pink of the blooms helplessly calls up white flesh and blood.

I did an interview with Shearer's Bookshop in Sydney about designing the Classics, and the lovely interviewer misheard me and gave me this immortal quote:

"Jessica Anderson’s The Commandant is like reading Jane Austen with wit."

What I said was: "Jessica Anderson’s The Commandant is like reading Jane Austen with WHIPS."

The Domestic Surreal: 'Wifework' by Susan Maushart

We went to an exhibition of Louise Bourgeois' remarkable late works, made in her 90s – fabric sculptures, paperworks and a room-spanning metal spider crouching over a cage.

I stopped at a piece titled Femme Maison (2001), on a theme of a series begun in the 1940s. Covered with a fuzzy flesh coloured material the sculpture suggests both a woman's body trapped and disfigured (or incapacitated) by the little house sitting (or growing) in the middle of her. Or more positively you could read the figure as the ground of the growth: mother earth.

The Domestic Surreal

It made me think for the first time in ages of a book I designed in 2002: Wifework. A polemical thesis by Susan Maushart, then a popular columnist on the Australian, it had a title that was the business – a smart punning on housework; (house)wifework. From the blurb: "Almost half of all marriages end in divorce. Three-quarters of these divorces are initiated by women. Why? – Wifework."

The first edition cover was an exercise in avoiding controversy, a swathe of hot pink cloth with type; I had to toss out what I thought were pointed and witty visuals; but of course that was the very problem with them.

In the next iteration the publishing group allowed me my way. I had had this sudden vision of an iron which was also a stiletto shoe, charring floorboards – hot press, hot shoe, hot foot, iron shoe, a burning weight  – it riffed on a spray of puns. The stiletto and the pointy iron sole made for a cruel image. I wasn't much familiar with Bourgeois' work then; my debt, stylistic rather then conceptual, was owed to John Brack (even though, on reflection, it's not much like his look at all apart from the intent of precision).

I'll drop in a proper jpeg when I can locate the original book to scan (so long ago all this!); and I'll look for the original art, a small painting in gouache; I can still remember how painstaking it was – wifework, artwork.

The road less taken, and overtaken

There seem to be inevitable affinities with certain book jackets.

Here is a cover I did for Garry Disher's Wyatt, a return of his eponymous anti-hero after ten years absence (the Wyatt series is excellent crime). I shot the photo in a dark and narrow place of my acquaintance. Earlier this month, Wyatt won the Ned Kelly Award for Best Crime Fiction.



Led Zeppelin inverted: a stairway to hell. That was made in October last year. Earlier, around March, we were discussing the cover for Peter Temple's new novel, Truth. We eventually settled on an image by Bill Henson (his very slow site) whose photographs have covered several of Temple's books: a picture of a road turning into blackness. The gift for the title, of course, is that the road is bent - very suitable for a story about a troubled cop in a troubled town.



Truth went on to win Australia's most prestigious book prize, the Miles Franklin Literary Award. That it was won by a crime novel excited a good deal of comment, including from myself. Author James Bradley proably had the most incisive post about it.

A friend of mine tells me he has borrowed Truth from his local library in a country town. It's a hardback, and it's an American edition! What are libraries doing, buying overseas editions of books by local authors? Not helping the local book industry, is the correct answer. I didn't know of and hadn't seen the US cover. Here you go:



In my highly biased opinion, it's not even half the truth.

An author you can love

Click on the image to enlarge.

The kind of author a designer wishes for. I have just done a jacket for a debut author, SJ Watson, who lives in Britain. Text, where I work, seem to have produced the first cover for the book, which will be published in 20 languages(!).

Having worked in the NHS for fifteen years, he can't quite get used to being real author yet. In his blog, he writes: "Yesterday, though, it felt very real. I woke to an email from the team at Text, who are publishing my book in Australia and New Zealand. 'We are delighted to show you our cover...' it said. I was still half asleep, but felt almost too anxious to open the email. What if I hated it? What if it looked like the kind of book I wouldn't look twice at? The cover design is so important - probably the main reason someone picks up a book in a store (or, presumably, clicks on it in an online store?) - and the wrong jacket might put off a whole host of potential readers.

So, anyway. I did open the email. And I love the cover. I think it's perfect. It's designed by the art director at Text, Chong Weng Ho."

+++

This is the cover:



He adds: "The text at the bottom says 'The best debut novel I have ever read.' - Tess Gerritsen. That bit I am particularly happy about!"