Lowrider culture is far from specific to Los Angeles, with vibrant pockets represented around the country. The nonprofit lowrider organization Slow & Low recently published a retrospective book of the same title, the first formal documentation of the lowrider community in Chicago. In partnership with Nick Adam’s team at the design studio Span, Slow & Low was created with the utmost thought and care to showcase the photographic archive of twelve years of the nonprofit’s events and festivals. In addition to its gorgeous and vibrant imagery, the book features essays from Slow & Low co-founder and curator Lauren M. Pacheco and ethnographer, cultural critic, and professor Dr. Ben Chappell.

Span took on the design of Slow & Low with the imperative that every detail and aspect of the book must somehow reflect lowrider culture. They worked closely with Pacheco and her co-founder, Peter Kepha, to ensure they achieved this, from the editorial considerations to the page layouts and materials.

The book’s grid, for example, creates an elaborate page sequencing system that balances variation and repetition, creating perspective shifts and contextual relationships. From page to page, the photo compositions create a filmic cadence where motion, zooming, and surrounding angles evoke the sensation of cruising.

Lowrider culture is about far more than cars, and Slow & Low aptly reflects that. Beloved community photographers shot the 112-page photo archive presented throughout the book with a firsthand understanding of the culture, offering an intimate and authentic insider’s perspective. The range of photos depicts lowriding as a way for individuals and the community to have a voice of creativity and pride, featuring waving Mexican flags, airbrushed Aztec symbols, and folklórico performances in the background, to name a few.

The photos have been curated and sequenced by Span and then printed in full color with a spot gloss varnish on high-gloss coated paper. This meticulous process better reflects the look of the candy-colored cars on display, a nod to the vibrant aesthetics of lowrider culture. The effect also feels like a family photo album. The book’s front and back are printed with silver ink on natural paper to contrast the glossiness of the photos. The silver ink has a reflective quality inspired by the engraved chrome of lowrider cars and viclas.

The book’s body copy is set in Canela, designed by Miguel Reyes at Commercial Type. Each column of the Canela text baselines to the bottom of the page and rises to hit different heights meant to represent the hydraulic bounce of a lowrider. The display type is Respira, designed by Lucas Sharp with Wei Huang at Sharp Type. Respira was inspired by blackletter, which is a signature lettering style in lowrider and Chicano cultures.

Meanwhile, the Slow & Low front and back covers also feature the blackletter style, stamped in white foil on a black textile texture. The form is reminiscent of the letter-based tattoos that read top-to-bottom on many forearms within the lowrider community. This style also pays homage to the way churches often depict text, given the importance of faith within those in the lowrider community.

The book is stitched with myth-sewn binding to open flat, allowing you to immerse yourself in each photo fully. It concludes with a series of 360 silver ink photo booth photos featuring over 1,000 members of Chicago’s lowrider community, all taken at the 2022 Slow & Low festival at Navy Pier.

Concept, Design Direction, Design, Content Collection & Curation: Nick Adam

Design: Grace Song and Cheryl Kao

Printing: OGM

Writers: Lauren M. Pacheco and Dr. Ben Chappell

Curators: Lauren M. Pacheco, Peter Kepha, and Edward Magico Calderon

Photographers: Carmen Ordonez, Carolina Sánchez, Don’t Get Shot, Edward Magico Calderon, Fernando Ruiz, Katrina Nelken, Manuel Lagunas, Manuel Velasco, Max Herman, Mike Pocious, Nick Lipton, Peter Kepha, Sebastián Hildalgo, and Nick Adam

Given the weight of the assignment, it’s perhaps no surprise that it took a lot of work. Or, as designer Arsh Raziuddin put it, “5 [million] options for weeks on end.” You can see a fraction of those comps on Raziuddin’s Instagram—and below, you can find the final cover that hit bookstores last week. It’s restrained, if not elegant—yet hauntingly captures the story of Rushdie’s attack and his recovery in the wake of it.

Elsewhere this month: Na Kim delivers a perfect watercolor cover with some Ralph Steadman vibes for Rough Trade—a novel set around opium smugglers in the Pacific Northwest in the late 1800s. Emily Mahon seems to utterly nail the tone of The Most Famous Girl in the World—which isn’t out until September, but features the tagline, “Stars―they’re just like us! Except much, much worse.” And Tom Etherington hypnotically delves into book design’s past.

Here are 15 of our favorite book covers that were revealed or published this month.

Palookaville 24 (Drawn & Quarterly), a long-awaited installment of Seth’s longtime series, is the perfect evocation of his contextually complex and graphically precise manner of rendering high-contrast geometrical compositions. The choice of Art Deco–inspired lettering for the title is a satisfying typographic complement to the spare cover image.

Elise Gravel’s microbes (Club Microbe, Drawn & Quarterly) are not exactly the same germs found under a microscope, but maybe with extremely powerful magnification the free-loading organisms that populate our bodies actually do have quirky human characteristics. And why wouldn’t they? Gravel’s lively and engaging cover design certainly makes one consider the possibilities.

Pierre La Police’s cover for Masters of the Nefarious: Mollusk Rampage (New York Review of Comics), translated by Luke Burns, quietly introduces a raging off-center adventure starring two mutant twins who share the job of paranormal investigators. Their mission is to solve crimes and combat evil along with their splotch-faced, bulbous-headed best friend, Fongor Fonzym. The cover art seductively hints at the surreal war with mollusks left in the wake of a freak tsunami.

Unknown Pleasures by Tomer Hanuka (Ginko Press) is not actually a graphic novel, per se, but it is a collection of the artist’s exceptional narrative graphics, with the most inventive lettering (on front and back covers) shown here. (I hope he’ll consider turning it into a font.) The book contains a variety of reimagined film posters as well as illustrations for magazines and self-initiated projects. As a special production feature, the cover and back cover are die-cuts—and I love die-cuts.

A few highlights and (non Community) notes:

• Cover design has been thriving in vintage type treatments, layouts, and all visual terrain in between. What I’ve loved lately: Those fascinating covers where past bleeds into present (if not future)—such as in Kishan Rajani’s work on Little Rot.
• I’ve spoken to different designers over the years about the challenges presented by short story collections (in particular: How does one craft a single image to represent a dozen or more disparate parts?). Especially when, say, the collection goes like this: “An influencer attempts to derail a viral TV marketing campaign with her violent cult following. A marriage between two ghost hunters is threatened when one of them loses her ability to see spirits. The lives of a famous painter in the twilight of her career and a teenage UFO enthusiast converge when a mysterious glowing orb appears in their small desert town. And a slasher-flick screenwriter looking for inspiration escapes a pack of wild dogs only to find herself locked in an SUV with a strange man beside her. Set primarily in deserts throughout the American Southwest, Lena Valencia’s Mystery Lights is a debut collection of stories about women and girls at the crossroads of mundane daily life and existential dread.” Beth Steidle somehow flawlessly pulled everything together in a surreal and enigmatic jacket accented by an utterly perfect typeface.
• And finally, March brought some striking backlist work from Malika Favre and Coralie Bickford-Smith (that tooth!).

Here are the rest of our favorite book covers revealed or released this month(-ish). 

I overheard two people talking at the Rizzoli bookstore in Manhattan the other day. “I don’t know the author,” said one, holding a paperback. “Nor do I,” said the other, “but I love the cover. Give me a good cover, and I’ll try reading the book.”

What else can a publisher ask for? Unless supported by a strong PR campaign, most titles sold in the few brick-and-mortar shops left are designed for browsers who don’t know a book by its cover, but are compelled by that very thing to buy it.

A true test of that principle is if a book that’s now long out of print is as eye-catching as when it was first published. And I’m often finding vintage books that do just that. Two of my favorites of late are these by George Giusti (1908–1990), whose minimalist representational illustrative designs for books, records, periodicals and ads dominated the late ’50s and ’60s popular media.

The two volumes shown here were on my high school reading list. At the time I had no idea who the authors were or what the books were about—and to this day I’d have trouble providing a viable summary without having to totally reread them—but I can say they are memorable to me because of their visually reductive yet thought-inspiring covers that struck a chord that’s lasted over 50-some years.

“Giusti is taken up with the discovery of pictures for things that are not accessible to the normal visual powers of the human eye,” wrote Georgine Oeri in Graphis 26 (1949), “jobs in which a pictorial interpretation has to be found for the revelations of modern science.”

As someone blissfully lost in the magic of minutiae at the cost of the big picture, here are a few highlights from the cache of covers that have been published or announced this month:

• Eliot Weinberger thrives in the experimental, defying expectation in various literary contortions and distortions. And thus his new book—“not a translation of individual poems, but a fictional autobiography of Tu Fu derived and adapted from the thoughts, images and allusions in the poetry”—was a delightfully straightforward fit with the stylings of Oliver Munday.
• For a novel that explores identity, Janet Hansen’s cover for Ask Me Again no doubt distills the essence of Clare Sestanovich’s prose. But tear it off the binding and it could work as an LP cover. Blow it up and it’s a poster. Throw it in a frame and hang it in an exhibition of your choice. With a few stark ingredients and an entrancing palette, Hansen’s alchemy is magnetic.
• And finally: When you look at Jamie Keenan’s cover for You Glow in the Dark, you will wonder: Did he really do it?! Well, in what had to be a mountain of utterly maddening work, yep, he really did.

Kate Humphreys, a vintage children’s bookseller, has tapped into the inimitable magic of illustrated stories from a bygone era with her online shop, Oly Oly Oxen Free Books. The Nebraska-based Humphreys admits she has a bit of an obsession with vintage children’s books. “I love finding beautiful stories and sharing them with as many people as I can,” she writes on her Etsy shop. Humphreys also uses her delightful Instagram account as a sales channel for her books and to spread her love and appreciation for these classic, illustrated artifacts. She shares a careful curation of book covers, page spreads, and preciously drawn moments from her collection on the daily, amassing a lively community of followers who gush with glee on every post.

I contacted Humphreys to hear more about her vintage children’s book obsession and to get her expert opinion on why these books have such staying power in our souls. Her thoughtful responses are below!

(Interview edited for clarity and length.)

How did you first get into selling old children’s books?

The simple answer is that I had been collecting them for a number of years and started accumulating too many! I also had a hard time not purchasing good kids’ books at the thrift store, even if I already owned them. A friend suggested I open an Etsy store, and things went from there.

The more in-depth answer is that owning a children’s book store has been a fantasy dream job since I was a kid, like owning a candy shop or riding elephants in the circus. Something that your kid mind thinks is possible but your adult mind can’t come to terms with. I decided to ditch the rational adult thoughts and sell beautiful books with pictures.

I decided to ditch the rational adult thoughts and sell beautiful books with pictures in them.

What is it about children’s books that you find so obsession-worthy?

The picture book is the most underrated art form there is! Utilizing words and images to tell an engaging story to young people is no easy feat, and to own these small works of art by people who have indeed mastered that ability is magical. It’s the most affordable art one can own! Imagine if Picasso decided to make a children’s book; it would likely be no more expensive than one about burping dinosaurs!

Because of their brevity and the tendency for kids’ books to teach morality, the well-done ones are often wise and poetic. A story told simply is not always a simple story. A good children’s book embraces playfulness, and I believe play is an essential part of living a life of joy.

A good children’s book embraces playfulness, and I believe play is an essential part of living a life of joy.

What’s your process for choosing the books you sell and the illustrations you post on your Instagram?

I wish I could give you a secret formula, but I’m just buying what I like! That’s my only rule. I have to buy things I like. Sometimes I’ll find kids’ books that are probably worth something, but I don’t really feel drawn to them, so I don’t buy them.

As far as the illustrations I post on Instagram, I have to find images that work well in a small square. Lots of times, a book is remarkable but doesn’t have the perfect square image for the feed. Also, I’m usually looking for a picture that tells a story in and of itself.

What is it about vintage illustration aesthetics that makes them so captivating?

There is something about the analog nature of older printing techniques that imbues warmth! The fact that you can see where the color goes outside the line or imperfect inking draws you closer to the moment of creation. Also, making a children’s book took longer, and I think that extra time and consideration made for a better product. We all know that aesthetically speaking, something astounding happened in the 60s and 70s, that I won’t even attempt to explain.

Children’s media is so intimately tied to our upbringing, it’s impossible to separate the two. The book comes to represent a time and place and a moment, which is truly powerful! 

Nostalgia is a powerful thing. How do you see nostalgia at play in how people respond to your shop?

I didn’t consider the nostalgia element when I started my book account, but it’s certainly what brings many people to the page. I get so many questions about long-forgotten children’s books that I wish I could unearth them for people. Children’s media is so intimately tied to our upbringing that it’s impossible to separate the two. The book comes to represent a time, a place, and a moment, which is truly powerful!

Do you have a favorite children’s book from your childhood that was particularly formative for you?

Doctor DeSoto by William Steig was a particularly big book in my household.

There is a moment in the book when the fox, who is having his teeth worked on, has his mouth glued shut and tries to speak to his mouse dentist. My mom really delivered the fox’s line, “Fank oo berry mush” with such panache. It’s a tremendous memory.

Images courtesy Kate Humphreys.

Epigraph of My Life in Paper by Beth Kephart

What does your paper say about you? Receipts in totes, scribbled notes shoved in pants pockets, birthday cards tucked in desk drawers, ticket stubs saved from clammy first dates to the cinema. This paper ephemera carries our stories and marks moments in a singular, physical way nothing else can. Such is the power of paper, to which author and paper maker Beth Kephart has become wholly devoted.

As part of Kephart’s ongoing exploration and adoration of paper, she recently penned a love letter to the medium as a memoir-style book entitled My Life in Paper (Temple University Press, 2023). After Kephart’s brother gifted her their mother’s old copy of the paper maker Dard Hunter’s (1883-1966) autobiography My Life with Paper (1958), Kephart’s obsession with paper extended to a deep and profound connection to Hunter. Through My Life in Paper, Kephart mines her bond with this kindred spirit through letters to Hunter interspersed with poetic reflections about categories of paper ephemera.

I had the pleasure of speaking with Kephart directly about her memoir, her love of hand-making paper and books, and the experience of moving through the world as an artist who defies category. Our conversation is below.

(Interview edited for clarity and length.)

When did you first develop the book arts side of your writing practice?

The death of my father in early August of 2020 was the beginning. I had been taking care of him on an almost daily basis for years, and then COVID hit, and I could only be with him when he was suddenly dying. It was a very rainy night. It was very late. I almost didn’t hear the phone. They allowed me to be with him for the first time in such a long time, and I was there at his death. It was so frustrating and heartbreaking.

What my dad always wanted was a funeral. When he was sick before that, and he couldn’t get to funerals, I would go to his friends’ funerals, and the first thing he would always ask was, “How many people were at the funeral?” It mattered to him for some reason; he thought that would be the measure of his life. And, of course, we buried him on the hill, my brother, my sister, our children, and that was it because of COVID. So what I began to do out of that sadness was, with very little knowledge, make these booklets; they were Gelli printed, they were hand stitched. They were designed for people who had loved my father to record their own stories. That became a two or three-month project, but I couldn’t stop.

How did you go from stitching those booklets to making your own paper by hand?

I was fascinated by hand-making paper, and then my husband gave me marbling paint. Then I started cyanotyping and solar fasting over cyanotypes and Gelli printing underneath them all. It just became something that felt suddenly inherent to me.

Because I am married to a real artist—he went to Yale, has his Masters in Architecture, and is an extraordinary oil painter and ceramicist—it didn’t feel like it was my domain. I was words, and he was art. And yet, it has become what binds us even more. Right now, actually, I’m making this handmade paper, and he’s going to be printing on it, and then I’m going to be adding words to it. There’s more integrative power. We’ve always done stuff together in a very long marriage, but now it’s really together.

It took me such a long time to become a writer who was not only not afraid of making mistakes but eager to make mistakes.

It’s interesting to me that you first put yourself into that words-only box. I’ve grappled with that myself, and I know a lot of other creatives do, too. We feel like we might need to choose a lane and stick to it, but if you are a genuinely creative being, usually that means you’re breaking down barriers and exploring different forms of art and media. What I love so much about My Life in Paper is that it feels like you’re doing a similar exploration by creating your own genre while writing and breaking existing genre molds. You’re expressing yourself in a form that doesn’t exist yet.

My work is so un-categorizable. Whether I’m writing young adult or history or whatever it is, what everybody says about me is, “You can’t be categorized in publishing’s tiered system. We don’t know where your work would go.” It is frustrating.

It took me such a long time to become a writer who was not only not afraid of making mistakes but eager to make mistakes.

I now don’t think I could write a book without having time in a day to go stitch one.

Can you elaborate on what it is about hand-making books and paper that you find so captivating?

Before working on the Dard Hunter, I was obsessed with Virginia Woolf. I’ve written many books that never get published, and one of those books was trying to put myself into her mind as she made books with her husband, Leonard.

I found that story to be remarkable. Virginia found, in paper and bookmaking, calm. Before she and her husband bought what turned out to be a broken press that they had to fix, she had one of her famous and long-lasting nervous breakdowns. Her half-brother was publishing her first novel, and it was making her anxious. Leonard, thinking, how can we salvage this great mind? went with her to buy the press on her birthday. She was the one who would place the typeface in; he was the one who would press it, and she would bind it.

I have that same relationship. I love making. I love making words. I love making a book. I’m terrified of the process afterward; I will not look at this book now that it’s there. I read from it once, and that’ll be it. But this idea of the letters, the typography stuff in her hands, the paper, and the ink on her fingertips calmed her— I find that to be very true in my own practice. I now don’t think I could write a book without having time in a day to go stitch one.

The crux of My Life in Paper is your infatuation and fascination with the great paper maker, Dard Hunter. Can you share more about your relationship with Dard?

Dard opened something in me. I was reading his My Life with Paper during a season when I doubted myself in many ways. But while reading Dard, I felt this sense of failure, a sense of disappointment in my work—not with fame but with the artistry of it. And I just fell into this conversation with him that felt entirely urgent.

Dard was imperfect. We’re all imperfect, but he used terminology when he was writing that is understood to be inappropriate now, like “primitive handmade paper.” When trying to understand how Dard’s encapsulation of some of the cultures he visited feels now versus my own sense of being swept into who he was in his time, I’ve been fortunate to be educated by a handful of artists and historians. They were able to nest my effusive love for Dard in, yes, but look at this. Yes, but consider this. And that is a way of honoring Dard, too.

The art that excites me the most is art in which I can feel the artist grappling with something in the process of making it, which is very much the case with so many of the ideas and themes you’re addressing within My Life in Paper.

My letters to Dard are intense; I cried writing to him. Especially when I thought about the end of his life. I felt like he was in the room with me. In my letters, I was saying, “Dard! I know it’s horrible! I feel that! I’ve been there! They can treat you like shit, Dard. But you’re somebody, and you’re somebody to me.”

It is so important as a writer to realize that you can fully empathize with and honor someone whose political philosophies differ greatly from yours. When you look at another’s life with complete sympathy and empathy and do the work of imagining it, everything else falls down. I think it’s important that we keep remembering the power of the empathetic imagination in this world, especially right now.

I was hoping you could walk me through the considerations that went into the design of My Life in Paper. Obviously, the book’s subject matter makes the physical book object incredibly important.

It was a rainy Saturday morning, and one of the cyclamens in my yard fell. I use cyclamens a lot; I always work with the plants I have here. So the cyclamen on the cover fell from the pot it was in. I said to myself, It’s so beautiful; I should see if I can make the cover design with that. I wanted to take a soft piece of sheer paper from the dictionary and find the word “paper,” but I used the veil on top of it because what does paper really mean? Those are my scissors; that is my thread.

This rough piece on the side is a failed attempt at a Gelli print cyanotype, but I thought My Life in Paper was imperfect, and the colors were right. So I got a stool out, and I found this one rectangle of grayish light on the floor, and I just stood with my big camera and arranged things. I did not do the typography; Kate Nichols of Temple University Press did the interior and typography. That was her first attempt, and it was perfect.

For the interior, I sent them three different sheets of marbleized paper to choose from. In real life, it’s much punchier; it’s more precise. For the chapter divisions, my idea for the book launch was to give everybody a handmade bookmark, which I made with a combination of cyanotype and Gelli. I told Kate Nichols, and she told me to scan them and send them over. We talked about how they might be used. So even though they’re faded, they’re almost positioned where you would slip a bookmark.

In my first conversation with Sean (of Temple University Press), he said, “I can see this book, and it has to be beautiful. It has to be a hardback; it has to have endpapers.” In today’s world, it would have been a $16.99 paperback, but it wouldn’t, as an object, have felt like what I was saying a book is. So they went all out in making it an object, too.

This book holds in it everything that I currently am.

For me, the experience of reading has to be physical; it has to be on paper. I understand the value of eReaders and PDFs, but to enjoy and luxuriate in the words and story that the writer is sharing with you, you owe it to the author to have the container of those words honor them.

I agree with you, even right down to the deckled edge. That’s how paper comes off the mold, and Dard cared a lot about the deckle. I care a lot about the deckle, but it makes a more expensive, therefore a less “successful” book. But, if people were to ask me, “Has this book succeeded?” In my definition, yes, because it’s the book that I wanted it to be. You have to keep your eyes on not what you want but who you are. Who are you as an author?

This book holds in it everything that I currently am. It holds my love for the people in my life; it holds my love for playing with and breaking language, finding raw urgency and truth inside storytelling, and just the art of the book itself.

To wit:

Thomas Colligan’s cosmically beautiful, playful take on Marie-Helene Bertino’s Beautyland, which I’d buy as a poster. 

The delightful type on Holly Gramazio’s Husbands and Shannon Sanders’ Company.

The vibrant jester insanity of Glen James Brown’s Mother Naked (don’t miss that poulaine merging into the ‘a’).

… And on and on.

Too much gets lost in January. So this year, let’s rectify that. 

Here are 15 of our favorite cover reveals/launches of the new year.

When so much work has been produced, even during a compressed period of time, it’s easy for some winners and losers to fall or be stuffed through the cracks. Below are covers and jackets that have resurfaced. Like the others in POP, this selection represents a range of styles and mannerisms, each an eclectic interpretation of the content.

The storyline follows a long-ago conversation between two gay Latino men, one near death, the other young and eager to learn about life. A 1941 compendium of case studies titled Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns acts as a literary and visual motif. The older man owns a rare edition he’s bequeathing to the younger, two heavily redacted volumes covered with black marks that obliterated the findings, so all that remained were words and phrases like ‘narcissistic,’ ‘tendency to femininity,’ ‘abnormalities,’ and ‘mincing.’ 

The winner of the 2023 National Book Award for Fiction, Blackouts is replete with memories, dreams, descriptions of the mental institution where the characters met, family histories, and other references, including French and English literature, the Bible, films, and song lyrics.

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux (FSG), the book has been called “a masterpiece,” “magical,” and “an artwork.” I was privileged to enjoy online conversations with Na Kim, who designed its jacket, cover, and endpapers, and the interior page designer Gretchen Achilles. Both designers worked with Torres, editor Jenna Johnson, and production manager Nina Frieman.

(Conversations edited for clarity and length.)

Ellen Shapiro: First of all, congratulations on the excellent reviews and the National Book Award. To begin, how do you generally approach the design of an illustrated novel?

Na Kim: We get a questionnaire filled out by the author with broad guidelines of what they’d like to see, if there are any visual inspirations for the book, any artwork they’d like us to consider, and what they absolutely don’t want on the cover.

ES: Do the cover designer and the interior book designer work together or independently?

Gretchen Achilles: We work separately (on different production schedules) but often consult each other and try to coordinate design elements when possible and appropriate.

ES: Do you usually present one design or more?

Achilles: For interior designs, we present a set of layouts to the editor and author, showing the front matter and an example of each design element as it will appear in the text. From there, we revise or tweak the design until we have approval from both.

Kim: Some books run through rounds and rounds of designs, and there are others when a single cover is presented with a strong sales pitch. We often present three to five options to the editor, but I find that presenting one with real conviction can be the most successful.

ES: Gretchen, did you research and find the illustrations and photographs? Was there any back-and-forth about which ones to use and where?

Achilles: They were all supplied by Justin Torres, and he determined where they needed to fall in the book. For the redacted pages, he made color photocopies of torn pages from his copy of Sex Variants and made the redactions in Sharpie. We scanned them in-house and manipulated the images to sharpen the text and heighten the contrast so they could be seen as part of the reading text rather than stand-alone art like the photos.

ES: So it’s not true that authors have little or nothing to say about a book’s design. At FSG, how much is the author involved? 

Achilles: The author is involved as much as they want to be. We are an author-centric house. We incorporate suggestions and advise on the best ways to visually achieve what they are looking for. Justin was very involved.

ES: Justin, did you need to get permission for every piece? Looking at the three pages of illustration credits, that must have been quite an endeavor. 

Justin Torres: Getting permissions for the images was insane. I didn’t know anything about how complicated the process would be. I had to hire a freelance editor to help hunt down the permiss images; some are from children’s books illustrated by one of the characters, Zhenya Gay, others are from Sex Variants, some are photos by Thomas Painter, another character in the book, whose archive is at the Kinsey Institute. Other images are personal.

ES: Was there any pushback about male frontal nudes?

Torres: Not at all. My editor is the best, and her constant refrain was, ‘Make the kind of book you need to make; let me worry about the rest.’ If there was any internal pushback, she didn’t mention it. We had some conversations about why certain images were important, and we definitely made a lot of jokes about just how many penises are in the book.

ES: Let’s talk about the redacted pages from Sex Variants. Was there a method for choosing which lines of text to black out and which to leave in? 

Torres: Each blackout poem had its own method. For one, I focused on the word ‘to,’ transforming the text into a kind of ode. For another, I focused on reducing the language to simple first-person declarations: ‘I came, I saw, I conquered.’ Another focused on internal rhyme. I varied my approach with each blackout.

ES:  The New York Times Book Review chose Blackouts as one of the year’s most notable book covers. Tell us about the black gloss rectangle on the dust jacket.

Torres: When asked to describe my ideal cover, I said something like, ‘All black, only my name and the name of the book in embossed gold lettering.’ I wanted the cover to recall the original Sex Variants book, which my novel circles around: all black with gold titling.

The brilliance of Na’s design is that it’s the exact shape of one of the erasure poem images. I recognized the shape instantly and just loved it. The rectangle-with-one-torn-edge is the shape of the torn page that recurs throughout Blackouts. I made those erasures myself by photocopying the Sex Variants pages and tearing the photocopy to make it appear as if it had been torn from the book itself. I’m not sure how many readers realize the source of the shape on the cover; it’s a subtle connection. 

Kim: The black-on-black also nods to the stories within the stories, shadows existing in the dark. The peeking hyena is pulled from the illustrated children’s book within the novel.

ES: Justin, do you have a special relationship with or feelings about the hyena? What does the animal mean to you?

Torres: Impersonating the hyena’s laugh functions as a queer cry of recognition, a code, so certain characters can recognize one another.

ES: Is there a reason the typeface used for the chapter titles and initial caps isn’t on the cover or jacket?

Achilles: I chose Poster Bodoni, with its ‘censored’ rubber-stamp look yet classic literary feel that would marry well with the Adobe Caslon text. It’s heavier than the font Na used on the cover so that it would drop out of the solid torn rectangles.

ES: How did the choice of brown ink on cream stock come about?

Achilles: That’s a long story! Justin and Jenna wanted the book to have black text and sepia-toned images. I suggested doing it as a two-color job, black and dark gold Pantone 124U ink. We made duotones with the two inks to create a sepia tone, kept the text black, and used the gold in accents like the drop caps. Nina ran estimates every which way, but the book was not making margin (that is, keeping production costs in line). We could make margin with a lower-grade paper, so we settled on that, but when we were routing the page proofs, Jenna looked at me and asked, “Is this book really going to look good on this paper?” And I had to admit that I’d never run a two-color job on that kind of paper. So Nina and I reviewed the pages with redacted text and concluded that the [lower-grade] paper wouldn’t hold the detail. We returned to the higher quality, smoother, cream-colored sheet we’d originally wanted—the paper we stock for poetry titles and books with art that can carry the extra cost. On that paper, dropping the second ink, the book made margin. Jenna didn’t want to lose the sepia-colored images, so I suggested printing in one color, a deep brown (Pantone 2322U), so the text would be dark enough to be legible and so we could manipulate the images to create the ghostly sepia feel the author wanted. All the printer had to do was clean the press and replace the black ink with the Pantone color, and we wouldn’t have to pay for a two-color job. FSG is a smaller house, and we have smaller budgets.

ES: Thank you for sharing insights into what most graphic designers used to do, specifying ink on paper. In-house designers often get short shrift. I sometimes hear comments like, “When there’s a really great project, we send it out.” What are the plusses of being an in-house designer?

Kim: We’re pretty democratic regarding who gets to work on ‘big’ or ‘fun’ titles. Each of us has individual strengths and talents, and we work hard to make sure that everyone in our department of four gets an opportunity to work on a title they’re excited about. The plus-plus of being in-house is the relationships we build with our authors and editors. There’s a lot of trust. If there’s negative feedback, it’s easier to take when you know and like the person behind the remarks. It allows for more clarity and understanding about why something does or doesn’t work. 

Achilles: The biggest plus is that you are part of a team working in different ways for a book to succeed. Here at FSG, a smaller company, the publisher and editors make you a part of something we’re all doing together. The important thing we do is create a mood and support the text in a visual way that helps the reader make sense of it. The text is the star. The most successful designs are ones you don’t notice because they’re in service of the text rather than distracting from it.

ES: When you go on speaking tours and give interviews, do journalists and reviewers usually ask questions about the design?

Torres: I get a ton of compliments on the cover, but not really in the form of interview questions. The interior design comes up quite a bit, though. The brown ink really makes an impression on people. It’s so unusual for a novel not to be printed in black and white. No one asks such design-specific questions, but they do wonder why it was important to me to create such a stylish, visual book.

Wholly subjective? Yes! Utterly brilliant and inspiring literary eye candy? With hope, also yes.

Dig in and enjoy—and afterward, for the best book covers that you didn’t see in 2023, click here.

For Edel Rodriguez politics is personal. As a child, he and his family fled Castro’s Cuba as part of the Mariel boatlift. Once settled in Miami, a young Rodriguez became fascinated with the Bill of Rights in school. His first adult job was working the New York Times op-ed page. As an illustrator, Rodriguez has always been in the business of political commentary, speaking truth to power through his art.

His truth unfolds in Worm: A Cuban American Odyssey.

The Cuban dictatorship was great about sending the ‘right’ kind of propaganda out into the world. I hope my book dispels some of this. A ‘hero’ like Che can be someone else’s oppressor.

Edel Rodriguez

Debbie Millman’s and Steven Heller’s recent conversation with Rodriguez covered a lot of ground, from how he devised Worm’s visual language to the reclaiming of a derogatory term as the title to the deeper philosophical reasons for why this book (and why now). Rodriguez also delves into the parallels between the Cuban Revolution and the January 6th insurrection. As for a future film adaptation (we’re calling it here!), he’d cast Pedro Pascale as his father.

If you missed the livestream, register here to watch the episode.

Don’t own a copy of Worm? You can order one here.

Today, designers and art directors are turning out rich cover work at an alacritous clip, and while it collectively shapes publishing’s future, so much of it vividly draws from or reinterprets the past—especially that halcyon “golden age” of the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s. Which we’re absolutely loving.

Some highlights this month:

• Wendy Copy’s work has always been a seemingly effortless blend of simplicity and profundity—and the cover for The Orange (a collection of her most popular poems) serves as a genius mirror to that fact.
• Matt Broughton created a sublime blend of past and present in Vintage Classics’ reissue of Martin Amis’ The Rachel Papers, paying homage to the original lettering of the 1974 first U.S. edition.
• When it comes to creating a jacket for a lost novel by one of the greatest writers of the 20th century, you’d better bring it. And Jon Gray did for Gabriel García Márquez’s Until August. (So much that even though we missed it last month, we’re including it here.)

And the full list of our favorite covers published or revealed in November …

The London-based Boris is as taken by physical mediums as I, primarily working in silkscreen, sculpture, book, and letterpress. She continues her exploration of these proclivities with Rainbow, which features seven layered pieces of paper that gradually form the arches of a rainbow as the pages turn.

The only difference between Rainbow 1 and Rainbow 2 is the colorways featured, with Rainbow 1 composed of bright hues as they appear in nature and Rainbow 2 exhibiting pastels. The two versions came about when Boris made the book prototype from leftover paper samples she had on hand in her studio while under pandemic lockdown in 2020. During the process, she felt compelled to propose two different color palettes. The two versions can be experienced independently of one another or as a set, with Rainbow 1 seen as the classic and Rainbow 2 as its more interpretive counterpart. Both are made from a range of Japanese papers by Takeo.

To fully understand and experience the wordless books, you must hold them and turn the pages. Both Rainbow 1 and Rainbow 2 have been released in an edition of 222 and are available for purchase in Korea, Germany, the US, and online. Boris is also converting the book into an exhibition, which will be on view in France first in March and April and then again in May and June. This exhibition interpretation will feature the book, 48 modular color pencil drawings, a series of sculptures, and a new, unbound edition. Boris is hopeful the exhibition will soon find a home in the US as well.

In the age of all things digital, virtual, and AI, Rainbow is a refreshing reminder that the physicality of the book form still reigns supreme.  

I did, too!

So when PEN America announced the most banned books of the 2022–2023 school year, I began tracking down their jackets and covers.

Why? I have a hunch that no one who bans books has actually read them. So what could be on the covers of these toxic verboten titles?

Soon enough, I found out: The word “queer”! A hijab! Type made out of powder to look like drugs! A wallflower!

Whereas the rest of us might see the makings of innocuous YA books, certain politicians and school officials see something more sinister. And it all tracks: According to PEN America, there were 3,362 book bans across U.S. public schools and libraries over the past year (a 33% increase YOY), removing some 1,500 books by hundreds and hundreds of authors and illustrators. To emphasize the quiet part: “Authors whose books are targeted are most frequently female, people of color and/or LGBTQ+ individuals.”

As PEN recaps, “Over the past two years, coordinated and ideologically driven threats, challenges and legislation directed at public school classrooms and libraries have spurred a wave of book bans unlike any in recent memory, diminishing students’ access to books and directly impacting their constitutional rights. … Identified by John Adams as ‘necessary for the preservation of rights and liberties,’ public schools facilitate information sharing, knowledge-building and the ongoing unification that undergirds a pluralistic society.”

Eleven books in particular were yanked from shelves across nearly two dozen districts. And again, “These most frequently banned titles are largely young adult novels featuring female, queer and/or nonbinary protagonists.”

A key question to mull as we wait for the veritable morality bonfire to reach 451 degrees: Why would politicians and others want those narratives in particular suppressed?

Stories have power—and so do images, especially the ones that serve as the fixed memory of a given story in our minds and culture at large. 

So on the heels of Banned Books Week earlier this month, let’s use this installment of PRINT’s monthly cover column as an excuse to celebrate these titles once more. (And hey, you can even pick some up for yourself or a literary-at-risk youth at a discount right here.)

Either way, steel yourself: For here are the 11 most dangerous books in America.

This catalog caught my eye because it introduced me to a female pioneer of modern cover design who was unknown to me. Indeed, much of her life (and she’s still living at 97) is something of a mystery. Seymour Chwast, who illustrated one of her covers (below) when she was on staff at Harcourt Brace, recalls only, “I loved Janet. She was great to work with.”

Halverson designed, art directed or illustrated over 1000 book wrappers. Russem told me he began collecting her work around 10 years ago, but even after he learned where she currently resides he has never spoken to her — “not wanting to disturb her”.

He writes, “Janet Halverson designed covers and jackets for books written by some of the most important authors of the 20th century. That and the fact that those covers and jackets are highly regarded by contemporary designers of covers and jackets is, more or less, all that is known about her. There are no books about her. There are no articles. Most recent references to her on the internet are by people wanting to see and know more. When we tracked down people who might’ve known her, we were most often told, ‘I knew Janet—but not well.’”

Unfortunately, he adds, “this exhibition won’t provide much interesting information about Halverson’s life”. Here are the bare bones: She was born in Orono, Maine, in 1926, grew up in New Haven, worked in New York, and presently lives in suburban New Jersey. “But at least there is her work. And from that work we can discern that she was a good and inventive and smart designer. This show won’t provide the definitive story of her life and work. It is, alas, only an introduction.”

I spoke with Davis about how his philosophy drove the brand and what it means when Davis describes the brand as a “system of intention.”

You could say that unconventional is foundational for Davis, having worked on his doctoral research with William H. Gass, the founding theorist of metafiction. This self-referential literary form plays with the rules. Davis spent the following two decades as a brand consultant, working for media companies and publishers, including the Big Five. Frustrated by big publishing’s highly commercial focus, Davis saw little room for what he calls “fine literature.”

Davis believes that books saved his life as a young adult, so books became his lifeline after he burned out of his 20-plus-year career. “I wanted to luxuriate in the written word,” Davis said.

Literary dissent from fearless writers.

Bringing everything he learned from his literary, brand, and publishing backgrounds, he founded Unbound Edition Press to publish “literary dissent from fearless writers,” focused primarily on collections (because of how people read today) of essays, poetry, and memoirs in essay form. “I believe personally and politically that there needs to be a place for voices of dissent to be treated with full literary merit, not just as passing rants on the internet,” says Davis.

Every Book, a Beautiful Manifesto

Having worked with some of his designers for 20-plus years, Davis turned to them with a simple brief: “I want every book to look like a beautiful manifesto.” The team took inspiration from old French texts, and Salinger covers from the mid-20th century. Davis wanted to honor notable independent presses of the past, like Grove, Ecco, and David R. Godine. Davis says, “In an age of consumable and disposable content, we wanted to create books that are worth reading and worth keeping.”

The resulting brand is striking. Every book has the same design language centered around color and type. I can’t help but think of walking into my local bookstore and seeing the variety of books on display. On the face of it, every book looks different, but there’s a formula at play that involves a commercial calculus. Davis wanted to turn that formula on its head.

Looking at an Unbound Edition Press book, all I see are possibilities. Because the covers are about color, you absorb the mood and tone that sparks your imagination without, for example, an image of a screaming eagle hitting you over the head. That doesn’t mean the team at Unbound Edition Press doesn’t respect the work of book designers. “There are brilliant book covers designed by talented designers. But I don’t subscribe to the idea that the cover should illustrate the book,” Davis says. “We prefer a simple approach that conveys the book’s tonality, mood, and spirit through text and color.”

A distinctive half-jacket is another singular Unbound Edition Press book feature. The jackets complement and complete the colorway, utilizing copy that extends from front to back, including the spine. Potential readers notice the spine copy on the shelf, encouraging them to turn the book over and read the jacket copy. You’ll see the jacket color on the endpapers, too.

The color, the type, and the jacket excerpt combine to create a beautiful design object. Design consideration for how the books will retail together has helped the press partner with some of the best independent bookstores, such as Buxton Books in Charleston, South Carolina. Booksellers and customers associate the brand with quality, stimulating literary works. Davis wants people to see an Unbound Edition book and know that “it’s going to be a thoughtfully challenging read.”

Design-Focused but Author-Centric

The earliest authors had doubts–You want to do what with the cover? But the press takes a highly collaborative approach with their authors, producing a dozen colorways to select from, yet another break from publishing convention.

The author’s first name follows the title on the same line to integrate the author and title. Nodding to how we reference the great authors of the past, like Emerson, Dickinson, and Austen, the author’s last name always stands on its own line.

The trim size is also intentional–to fit in the hand and to be easily portable. While some authors had questions at the beginning, most have come to embrace the brand’s design and approach. 

Despite the specificity of the brand, the team still finds room to play. Their authors are creative on many levels. “We want to include many aspects of the writers’ lives because their creativity is multidisciplinary,” Davis says. See some of those examples below.

It doesn’t cost us anything more to be creative with a blank page.

In a nod to Davis’ literary roots and inspired by William H. Gass’ masterpiece, The Tunnel (the trope is a shuffle of pages), the press has released The Experiment Will Not Be Bound. Packaged in an embossed black box, The Experiment includes 460+ unbound pages–photographs, poetry, slides, and Soundcloud audio (via QR code). “The question posed to the reader,” Davis says, “is what makes an anthology? The binding? The editor? With The Experiment, the reader becomes the editor.” Davis wanted to create a different reading experience through design. The reader enjoys a limitless, interactive experience. No two copies will ever be the same.

“It’s been a lot of fun building it and seeing the vision come to life,” Davis says. When asked how he sees the brand evolving, he says, “Evolution will happen to be true to the work and the brand. It’s about authentic collaboration between the author and the brand. It’s not about acquiring rights and doing what we want.”

Unbound Edition Press will continue to push with dissenting voices and opinions and put out challenging work. One particular title Davis is excited about is The Bomb Cloud, a memoir by Tyler Mills about discovering her family’s involvement in the bombing of Nagasaki.  

Patrick Davis’ favorite thing to hear from customers is, “Nobody makes books like this anymore.”

Indeed.

Images by Jason Holland.

At Penguin Random House, the biggest book publisher in the United States, veteran editors who have worked with many of the biggest authors in fiction and nonfiction are leaving the company. It is a changing of the guard. The New York Times reported that Penguin Random House lost both its global and U.S. chief executives in the past seven months alone.

Until this latest upheaval, 58 year old Paul Buckley was the longest serving (34 years) design director of Penguin Books. His layoff was a shock to those, like me, who greatly admired his work. If he of all people is this vulnerable, what about others who are not yet ready to take retirement?

Buckley leaves behind an incredible legacy of iconic, smart, clever and damn beautiful work. So upon hearing the sad news, I asked him to select 10 projects out of the thousands he’s created for Penguin that give him the most pride. It’s better to see and read about them now than in a later postmortem/historical reprise.

“I simply do not want to cap off my Penguin career, an imprint I still love and full of lovely people who were powerless in this situation, to tinge what I think was a really good run,” he told me.

The following projects are among the best of his directorship—and in retrospect I could have offered him greater space to spotlight even more. Here, he explains them in his own words.

DESPERATION & THE REGULATORS

This project was very early in my career, but remains a favorite. I was a complete unknown, and this project landed on my plate. King was our biggest author at the time … and Bachman was a pseudonym he sometimes published under. So this was two books by King coming out on the same publication date; no pressure. This being the case, the publisher decided to pit both of her two imprint’s art directors against each other. George Cornell (who first hired me 34 years ago) worked with an artist (I do not remember who) that he had done many truly great Stephen King covers with through the years, but you know … going down the same road. I knew I wanted one painting, and to have the stories visually merge into each other, and I wanted a 1950s pulpy look. At the time, Mark Ryden was just coming into being the force we know him to be today, and he was happy to work on this with me. The time came and George and I both put our wares on the conference room table. Our CEO, Peter Mayer, was there and simply stood up from the table and said “I know which one I like”; while saying no more he simply ran his hand across my mock-up and then walked out of the room, ending any further discussion on the matter. 

This next bit embarrasses me a bit, as I was too unpolished to fight an insistent publisher: She voiced some weird concern that “Cowboys are scary.” It’s freakin’ Stephen King and has lifeless dolls and wolves and spiders and vultures and snakes … but the publisher just kept going on and on and on about the damn cowboy. She wanted him gone entirely. I did manage to fight to keep him, but she was insistent he be lightened; hard to tell here, but he was more voluminous before. Ryden was utterly pissed. I felt terrible about it and still do. This is a solid example of how the subjective whims of others can be so infuriatingly random and forced upon artists who know perfectly well how to do their craft.

For the final, I hired the always brilliant Shasti O’leary to make the type sing. 

We bought the painting from Ryden and presented it to King. I hope he knows what he has.

PENGUIN VITAE Collection (ongoing series)

The Penguin Vitae series is a recent series of hardcover titles, conceived of by Elda Rotor to, in a grand and gorgeous way, bring into the Classics canon a diverse array of authors, many of whom history has unfairly ignored. 

I chose to work with uncoated papers over board, and two stamped foils each—some glossy, some matte, some metallic, some not. Pictures often fail, as they are very lush and vibrant. I so often collaborate and was wanting for a project that was purely my efforts. I went at these in a very paired down, non-literal manner, utilizing simple ornamentation and color to project a feeling of the book, a tone, a mood. As much as I hate to say it, a vibe.

These were born out of the similar work I did on designing the spines for the Penguin Drop Caps series, just much simpler and, I think, more visually successful.

To have them be fun and bold, and decidedly unlike anything out there, I decided to turn them sideways. No one was getting away with that a few years back, and it wasn’t for a lack of many of us trying. I held my breath as I put them on the table, awaiting an obvious “nice try, Paul … they really are lovely but …” It never came, and all that came at me was a roomful of “lets do this”; the scariest and most rewarding aspect of the cover designer’s place in the grand scheme of things.

CLASSIC PENGUIN

This is my second book for Penguin, a compendium of the covers that me and my group, and our collaborators, have done for Penguin Classics, commissioned by Elda Rotor, the genius publisher behind Penguin Classics. Similar to PENGUIN 75, another book I did for the Penguin imprint, I conceived of it to appeal to an art and design crowd, but also to the vast many who simply appreciate literature and books. We have authors, designers and artists of every stripe discuss the process of creating covers, which is not always diplomatic. Outtakes and failures are joyously included, as are many an exploratory sketch process.

Matt Vee was hugely key in helping this vast project come together. 

PENGUIN CLASSICS DELUXE EDITION (ongoing series)

Rife among designers who find themselves working on the classics is an attitude that these books have been packaged a 100 times—let’s just get it done and move on to that front list title we’re really excited about. A designer slaps an old dusty painting of a woman in a long gown, one gloved hand holding a hanky (your husband was just trampled by elephants during the war effort in whatever far-off place he shouldn’t have been sent), the other hand, palm out against her forehead, fainting. Panel some horrible type and let’s just get on with it. 

For the longest time, designers (and editors) did not see how fun it is to repackage something that’s been repacked 100 times—just do it in a way that’s never been done, have fun with it. The author is dead and is probably not gonna find a way to complain. These are hands-down my favorite books to work on.

These DELUXE EDITIONS are a series of books where we do french flaps and often uncoated paper, a few bells and whistles touches, and hire all the artists we always dreamed of working with. My art direction is always simply “go for it.” I wanna laugh, or be shocked or surprised, something. The editors on this series, Elda’s brilliant team, get this, and if you bring it, we promise very little back and forth—just a great time doing commercial art as we all wish it always was and, because we leave them alone, one great package after another. 

PENGUIN HORROR (six titles picked by Guillermo del Toro)

That all said, from time to time I get the itch to illustrate a project, and decided to go about trying to design and illustrate this series of books. To be very clear I do realize that I’m no Jaya Miceli or Jim Tierney, and am deeply out of practice when it comes to illustrating covers, but I can muddle through it and hopefully not completely embarrass myself. This was another instance where I laid my wares down in front of a table of publishers and editors and waited for someone to say “umm, I don’t know …” but all were happy and Guillermo del Toro, who edited the series with Elda, was apparently also happy with them.

Fast forward a few years and MOMA contacts me, letting me know these six covers are part of their collection, and they would like my consent to display them as part of their Guillermo del Toro: Crafting Pinocchio exhibit. Hey, even a blind squirrel finds nuts once in awhile.

PENGUIN ORANGE COLLECTION (12 titles)

Elda wanted to publish some titles to celebrate the oft-heralded TriBands from Penguin’s rich heritage, which led me to thinking how we could do this but make them our own, and also fun and modern as well as historical. I envisioned the panels not as flat, but rather as areas of dimension that art could weave itself in and out of, and commissioned the master of line art, Eric Nyquist, to collaborate with. We took many liberties with putting the beloved penguin into many a harrowing predicament, and updated the typography. One fun bit that only Penguin nerds will see is that I took the penguin out of the lozenge that it usually resides inside of, and floated it up above, replacing the old wonky shape that used to hold the words “Penguin Books.”

PENGUIN DROP CAPS (26 titles | A through Z)

I was at Penguin a long time, so I became (somewhat) comfortable with pitching an idea for a series of books on occasion. This is far from the norm in publishing, but why not, who’s getting hurt? I’m a big Jessica Hische fan and brought some of her Daily Drop Cap work up to Elda and said, “maybe we could do a few books like this?” And she said, “very cool, 26 books?” And I said, “why 26?” I’m often not very bright. Jessica would provide me a black-and-white letterform, and I’d figure out the color scheme and the rest of the package design. I came up with the rainbow theme, and the powers that be approved me a three-sided top stain. Brianna Harden and Kristen Haff and Dolores Reilly were all huge in getting this color scheme to happen and the foils to stamp well and remain true to color, which was a nightmare—but we got there.

PENGUIN INK (12-title series)

These were born of a one-and-done personal tattoo I wanted. As I was researching who would leave a permanent mark on me, I was astounded by the diverse plethora of untapped talent not being utilized on any commercial platforms (at that time). I pitched the concept to my Penguin publisher, Kathryn Court, and she teamed me up with a fantastic, heavily tattooed editor, Tom Roberge, who gave me titles to work on, with authors that were game. Half the artists were lovely to work with, the other half were impossible, thus we had to cut our losses and end the series.

PENGUIN THREADS (six-title series)

Cruising Etsy, I came across a wonderful little piece of embroidery. I brought this little thing upstairs to Elda and said, “embroidery? Book series?” She was in. We had just come off the PENGUIN INK series and I wanted something artistic but 180 degrees from that experience … how about old-fashioned sewing? I bet those folks are full of all kinds of kindness.

OK, sold to the publishing team, but now I had to fulfill the sell and find an artist who not only was talented enough to concept and sew an entire scene flap to flap (french flaps again) as well as all the typography, but could also produce three works of super-complicated craft/art in one season (three months). Careful what you ask for. I was always trying to solve multiple projects at any given time, and was looking at the work of the “who is more talented than” Jillian Tamaki (absolutely nobody) for a Jack Kerouac series I was working on. She had a personal work section of her website; these can often be more fruitful than the commissioned portion. Waaaaaay at the bottom was a ridiculously complicated and gorgeous blanket she did for herself; the caption was something along the lines of Don’t Ask Me to do This for Any Commissioned Work. I’d been website surfing all night and it was so late and I badly needed to get my tired ass home, so I shot Jillian an email saying “just think about it, I’ll give you whichever one of these three titles you want.” The next morning there was a reply from Jillian, “Can I do all 3?” We sculpt embossed the hell out of these, and at one point I noticed the gorgeous craziness on the back of her embroideries because the backing was peeling off on one corner. Back upstairs I went and said “c’mon, this has to be on the reverse covers.” Sold. 

Jillian took an SOI gold medal that year for Black Beauty.

They were so loved that we did three more with the stellar Rachel Sumpter.

BEN LOORY

Ben Loory writes the most fantastic fantastical short stories, and by short, I mean reaaaally short … like it all fits on one page short. And by fantastical, like who thinks up scenarios like this, fantastical … as if your dream self decided to take a wee bit of drugs and maybe let’s just ride the razor’s edge a bit before he wakes up. I have met Ben, he’s a lovely human, and I’m pretty sure he’s not on drugs, but his thoughts definitely are. I cannot recommend his work more, and anything he writes is a book designer’s dream to interpret. I did the art and design on these; the background photos being snaps I took out of random plane flights, with a smattering of stock imagery here and there. Somewhat off-topic, but I do not understand hose who watch movies on flights—the best movie is sticking your nose to that window and looking at the wonder and beauty of this rock we call Earth.

A few weeks back, I happened to touch base with Zoe Norvell, whose work I’ve included in different roundups over the years, and ran the idea by her—and she generously agreed to take part.

In addition to the many fantastic covers Norvell has produced throughout her career—first working in-house at Simon & Schuster and Penguin before going solo in 2015—she also runs two websites catered around the craft. The first is I Need a Book Interior, where Norvell provides just that for interested parties. The second is I Need a Book Cover. Prior to editing the print version of PRINT, I worked at Writer’s Digest magazine, and witnessed firsthand how utterly lost writers often feel in the design process, regardless of whether they’re self-publishing or going the traditional route. And that’s why Norvell’s site is such a critical resource. Her audience is multi-tiered: Art directors can find fresh talent. Editors can point writers to the site to help them wrap their heads around the difference between, say, type-driven covers and conceptually illustrated covers. And readers at large can find covers they’re trying to remember based on key elements, thanks to custom filters.

Ultimately, the site is a delightful gift to the publishing and design communities … as are Norvell’s 10 favorite covers from the past month, which follow below, with a little context behind each selection.

“Kate took a perfectly normal, Hopper-esque painting and turned it into a ‘weird’ book cover, my favorite kind. This wouldn’t deliver quite the same punch if it wasn’t for the addition of the ‘loading’ symbol placed by the book. Nice.”

“Oh, this color palette. I want to turn this cover into fabric and wear the whole thing as a jumpsuit.”

“This just works for me. Somehow it’s loud and quiet at the same time.”

“Another great cover for my favorite author, and a huge departure from his backlist.”

“The double-negatives here are making my head spin—in a good way. Plus, that yellow hue is perfect against the cloudy sky.”

“Pink strikes again this season!”

“Black and white and gold. A classic trio.”

“We see cross-out covers often but I’m not tired of them yet! This one is perfectly executed and conceptually spot-on.”

“At first glance, I was drawn to the shadowy box. I’m a sucker for trompe-l’œil covers when they’re done well. It was only after a little while that I realized what the woodpeckers are doing to each other. Cheeky.”

“June Park never fails.”

Now, the traditional sequence of events usually goes like this: An author writes a book, a producer buys the film rights to it, and a director transforms the narrative into moving images; if the film was born of a screenplay, it is then sometimes adapted by an author into a novel. Matt Stevens turns the whole process upside down. These are not all books made into films, but films made original as imagined books. It’s an interesting twist—and here we talk about Stevens’ work and inspirations.

What prompted this project?
I work with a client who is a longtime collaborator on a lot of different types of work. He owns a production company called Mortal Media and I am asked to do a lot of pitches that rise above the noise of a pretty competitive landscape. Lots of people trying to get ideas made. We often approach our pitches by trying to come up with ways to do something unexpected or out of context. One of the pitches we did was to pitch a modern story, but in the style of an old storybook. I just really enjoyed the process of doing that—the research, trying to take old designs apart and see why they worked or what I responded to. That gave me the idea to do a personal series, and it just took off from there.

In order to accomplish this transformation, you had to interpret the books through the lens of multiple graphic periods, aesthetics and personal styles. How did you determine what was the best approach to each film/book?
It’s really a mixture of things. I’d say it’s often three components that drive it at varying degrees, depending on the cover. The film itself (and it’s perception or my feeling for it), my concept of what I want to communicate about it, and the chosen style. I keep a running list of movies that I want to work on. My only rule is that I have to have a personal connection to it or some degree of affection for it. I won’t do a movie I don’t like, just because it’s popular. I’m constantly doing research and immersing myself in old work and various styles. I keep a Pinterest board of things I like and respond to. Most often it’s the concept that comes first, and I think about that concept in the context of style and the film. What best communicates that idea? Sometimes the style comes first. I will get an itch to try something or am particularly inspired by a piece, and I see what movie it would be fun to execute in that style. The forensics of breaking apart what I love and figuring out why I respond to it is one of my favorite things about the project. It’s also a great exercise in various ways to generate ideas.

This work reveals a decidedly unique sense of design function and stylistic fluency. What is your relationship to design history?
Most of my career has been working for small design/brand shops, so I’ve always needed to be able to do lots of different things. When I went out on my own about 10 years ago, the intention was to pursue more illustration, and I really enjoy working in lots of styles and trying new things. It keeps the work interesting and presents a constant challenge. Sometimes I worry that I don’t have a signature style, but being versatile has kept me very connected and interested in the work I do.

I always sketch digitally on the iPad and sometimes that will evolve into a finished piece in Procreate on the iPad or I will take the sketch or drawing into Illustrator if it’s more appropriate for vector art. I always build the type portion of the covers in Illustrator. I do the final compositing in Photoshop using found textures and scanned paper.

Are there one or two of which you’re most proud?
I think in general the ones that are my favorites are the ones that came easy. I had an idea, felt good about it and it just always felt right. A few of those are Collateral, Nope, Rango.

In this month’s collection …

• Oliver Munday crafts an ominous, retro-tinted rose treatment entirely suited for a novel described as Snow White meets Eyes Wide Shut.
• From the jagged lettering to the composition and flow, Anna Morrison brings brilliant chaos to Yelena Moskovich’s latest.
• Math Monahan distills Hunter S. Thompson down to his most elemental. (I long for a copy of this with no type at all.)

… And more. 

Happy almost-fall. May the stifling humidity dissipate and the best books hit our shelves soon.

Have you spotted a great new cover in the wild (or created one)? Send it my way for consideration in a future installment!

I jumped at the chance to learn more about Hand-Painted in L.A. from Yonki directly, as he generously offered to answer a few questions from a fellow sign lover. Below, Yonki unpacks his journey as a sign painter, and dissects his general infatuation with an old world craft that I can’t get enough of either.

What’s the origin story of this book?

The book originated from an Instagram account I started in 2017 with photos of hand-painted signs taken with my phone around Los Angeles.

At the time, I had been living in L.A. for three years and had been consistently taking photos of signs, pretty much since the day I arrived. Around that time, I started to notice the disappearance of some of the ones I had photographed. The idea behind the account was to give these signs a place to live and be appreciated after the commercial life they served in our urban landscape, and create community with fellow sign enthusiasts.

I later decided to transform the Instagram feed into a printed book when I moved to Portland, Oregon in 2022. It became clear to me that not living in L.A. anymore was the end of the documenting process. That was the catalyst to turn this project into a physical version. 

I love books and have a fascination with physical ones, so it felt like a natural thing to do after going through my archive and realizing I had collected over 1,500 signs between 2014 and 2022. I had been posting fairly consistently on the account, and now I wanted those signs to have a life of their own outside the Instagram grid— something I could hold in my hands.

What was the process like adapting @handpaintedinLA into a book? What was your favorite part of the process? What was most challenging? 

This is my first book, so I was totally unfamiliar with the process of making one, and I had to learn all the aspects involved in self-publishing.

After collecting all the images, I got in touch with Ethan Hassi, who had attended one of my sign painting workshops in Portland. I explained the project to him, and together we looked at several books that served as inspiration for what we wanted this book to feel like. I handed him all the photos, and he took on the arduous task of editing it and creating the collage-like layout that you can see on the book. He worked on that for about a year while I was working on the visual aspects of the book: coming up with the book title, the book cover, and creating the graphics I painted for it. 

My favorite part was to share the project with others and feel their excitement. Once I had the printed book for the first time in my hands, I was so eager to start sharing what I’d been working on for the past year. I really enjoyed the process of planning how to tell people about the project. It involved doing some research and taking the time to write my ideas clearly in order to share the decision-making process involved in the book. English isn’t my first language, so that came with its own challenges, but to my surprise, I found myself enjoying that part of the process a lot.

I think the most challenging part was staying motivated and keeping the momentum going throughout the whole process. As an artist, I’m used to working on projects for weeks at a time, so I had to adapt to the pace of a longer deadline. This demanded me to be really patient in order to see the idea through.

Why are you so captivated by hand-painted signs?

It’s challenging to put into words, but my fascination with hand-painted signs stems from personal experiences and my own curiosity. The first time I saw someone painting a sign was in Chile when I was around 12 or 13 years old. One of my aunts was opening up a beauty salon near my middle school, and one day, I was walking back home and saw a guy painting letters on her storefront with a brush. I didn’t make much of it, but something clicked when I understood that there was a person holding a brush behind the sign, and I’d look at the sign whenever I’d get haircuts from her.

When I went to high school, I started taking public transportation buses every morning. All the signs in these buses were hand-painted, so I grew up surrounded by them on a daily basis. In 2007, the public transportation system in Santiago changed, and all the new buses came with standardized vinyl signs. It was then that I noticed the disappearance of this art form and became aware of how captivating these signs were to me.

There’s a charm to these signs. I believe it relates to the fact that usually it’s the small imperfections that serve as evidence of how it was made, and the way it was made is evidence of how much the owner cares about their business. Today it’s cheaper and easier to get something printed on vinyl, and businesses are becoming more and more aesthetically corporate, so perfection has become the standard. 

There’s something of value in the small imperfections that a human hand can add when conveying a message for a business. It’s emotional, it’s visceral, and that’s how this art form can help businesses thrive in a way other mediums can’t. The medium is part of the message.

When did you first dive into the world of sign painting yourself? 

I initially delved into sign painting during my college years in Santiago, Chile. I got into graffiti during high school, which led me to start observing and drawing letterforms consistently, but I didn’t really grab a paintbrush until I was in college. I was still attending school for psychology when I got paid to paint my first set of windows. It was for a burrito spot I’d have lunch at every week and ended up befriending the owner. He trusted my amateur skills enough to pay me for putting some paint on it.

This experience opened my eyes to understanding the commercial value of hand-painted signs, while also witnessing how more and more businesses preferred to have stickers on their windows, so I didn’t really see a path forward in pursuing it. It wasn’t until I moved to Los Angeles that I realized this trade was very much alive there, and decided to pursue it more seriously and leave behind my plans of becoming a psychologist. 

I learned mainly through practice and workshops. Although I was aware of the L.A. Trade Tech Sign Graphics program, after attending college for six years in Chile, I wasn’t ready to go back to school for another two. So I chose the path of teaching myself this craft.

What makes L.A. such a particularly ripe city for hand-painted signs?

While it’s hard to pinpoint the exact reasons for the city’s suitability for hand-painted signs, I believe its rich cultural diversity plays a significant role. I’m originally from Santiago, Chile, then moved to Los Angeles in 2014 and lived there for eight years. It’s the first city I lived in that wasn’t my hometown, and it’s the city where I became a sign painter, so it holds a very special place in my heart.

While living there, I met so many different people from so many different backgrounds that I believe we all bring those different influences to the trade. In my case, for example, the signs I grew up seeing in Chile are definitely part of the aesthetic DNA of my imagery, which shows through in my work. Sign painters are partly in charge of what cities look like, and I believe L.A. represents its diversity through the vernacular graphics you can find there.

Do you have a favorite hand-painted sign in L.A. you find yourself thinking about more than others, or that you try to emulate in your own work?

Absolutely— my favorite hand-painted signs are the ones on the front and back cover of the book. Both located in Highland Park, they exemplify the unique aesthetic I’m drawn to.

Due to my early influence back home, I gravitate towards a certain type of aesthetic that exists outside of the tradition and doesn’t necessarily follow any design or sign layout rules. These are signs where the brushwork is evident at first glance. Purists of the tradition might call it “bad,” “sloppy,” “untrained,” or “poor work,” because it doesn’t fit into the academic knowledge of letterforms or layout, but that is the type of work I find myself referencing or emulating the most. That is probably the common thread between the hundreds of signs that you’ll find in the book.

In your expert opinion, what makes a hand-painted sign worthy of snapping a photo of and sharing with the masses? 

Appreciation for hand-painted signs varies from person to person, as beauty is subjective. Personally, I believe any sign that resonates with someone’s aesthetic sensibility is worth capturing and sharing. I refrain from labeling signs as “good” or “bad,” since we’re all on a learning journey. 

The signs included in the book are the ones that simply caught my attention. They weren’t chosen based on perfection, but rather their unique visual appeal and the stories they tell about the city’s vernacular. Fellow sign painter Bob Dewhurst said to me that it’s one of his favorite books because it’s full of “real signs, the kind of signs real sign painters paint to make a living and serve the public.”

He gets it.

Title-wise, though, “Some Human’s Favorite Book Covers He Spotted This Month” just doesn’t have the same ring to it. So! I’ve said throughout many years of covering design, writers, and that sweet spot where the two meet that I was going to do a monthly roundup of book cover brilliance at some point—and I’m doing it for once. So stay tuned each month for The Best Book Covers of the Month, a title that might feel reductive to some… but hey, it will have the side effect of hopefully spreading some nice design far and wide.

Selfishly, a series like this is a great excuse to get lost in that design on the regular— and I hope you lose your way in this labyrinth of fantastic work too.

Eggers’s most recent title, The Eyes and The Impossible, is far from your typical paperback. Eggers has written and designed a book for all ages that comes in a deluxe wood-bound hardcover edition, courtesy of his nonprofit publishing house McSweeney’s. Knopf Books for Young Readers is simultaneously publishing a traditional version for middle-grade readers, making The Eyes & the Impossible the first-ever book to be published in two editions, for two readerships, and from two publishers.

This first-of-its-kind publishing model isn’t the only standout aspect of the book— a real bamboo die-cut cover and gold gilt pages makes the physical wooden edition a thing of beauty unlike any book I’ve ever encountered. As someone enamored by innovative book design and the world of book arts, I jumped at the opportunity to speak with Eggers directly about the book’s design and his creative process to get there. His thoughtful reflections are below.

(This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.)

Where did your idea for publishing a wooden, die-cut book come from? 

I began thinking about what this book might look like almost three years ago. I began doing some sketches which I usually start with, and then I was at the US Post Office one day out here in San Francisco, and I came across a greeting card that had been made of bamboo. It was a mass-produced greeting card that was probably $5 or $6. I’d never seen it done on that scale before, but it made sense that laser-cutting technology has gotten to the point of affordability and efficiency. So we sent that card to our printer and said, Hey, can you do something like this? And they said, Well, sure. That became a two-and-a-half year process.

While I was finishing the book and going through editing, we were going back and forth with the printer. I think we had seven different prototypes. First, it was an example of what the bamboo would look like; they made it much thicker than the greeting card I sent, for durability’s sake. Then we did an early die cut and realized they could do that very efficiently and make a really clean cut in the bamboo. 

We had a little bit of freedom in terms of timeline, and for any designer, when you have that much time, you can fine tune and troubleshoot every last thing and make sure that there’s no surprises. Usually when you get something back from the printer, there’s at least a few gambles you’ve made. But this is one of these rare occasions that maybe 14 months ago, we had this exact book in our hands. It’s really nice to see it finally making its way into the world. We think it’s the first wooden book!

You just never know how everything will come together. We’ve been in business 25 years, and you always look at a book object with certain reservations or certain things you would change, but this one, I can’t get enough of it.

This book features so many lovely design elements in addition to the bamboo covers, from the gold gilt pages to the red cloth spine to the rounded corners. What informed these choices?

The gilt edges, I’ve always wanted to do, and I don’t know if we’ve done it before. I did some sketches at home of the colors together: the red, gold, and brown. I have a lot of old books that have leather covers and gold foil stamp lettering and red end paper, so I always knew that that combination worked well. The old Heritage Dictionary is always that red leather with gold stamping, so it’s kind of a tried and true palette.

But it was also just what was going to work. We tried a black type on the spine, we tried a green spine, but I liked the boldness of the red against the 17th-century landscape imagery. Back then, all of the frames for those landscapes used to be so elaborate; eight-inch gold frames that nobody uses anymore. In that era, the frame was just as ornate as the landscape within. So there’s a little bit of the book that harkens back to that era of the ornate gilt frame.

What was the collaboration like between you and the book’s illustrator, Shawn Harris?

Shawn did all the artwork on the cover and inside. We’d worked together many times, so I went to him three years ago and said Let’s try to make the most beautiful thing either one of us has ever held, and I think Shawn really did that. We have a totally intuitive way to work together. He’s the most versatile, talented artist I think I know. He can just adapt his style to the needs of that particular project.  

I don’t know whose idea it was to use these old Dutch and Flemish paintings to paint the dog into. Originally, I tried to approximate the paintings and do them myself, but I couldn’t get it right. So we ended up using these open-copyright paintings, then he made the dog in each one of them look totally of that period and of that style; it’s remarkable. There’s no way you would be able to tell at first glance that that dog was not original to each one of those pieces of artwork. He managed to make it totally seamless.

Why are you drawn to these unique and non-traditional materials for the books you’re designing and publishing at McSweeney’s?

The materials will do so much work for you if you choose them right. The weight of this wood, and how the grain is totally different on each one of them since it’s real bamboo— you can do so much when you have that kind of tactile quality and you’re moving beyond just paper.

We work as much as possible with real materials. I’ve never been a faux-finish person. Whenever we’ve done anything, it’s always got to be the real material because I think that we really connect with objects. We have a tactile, chemical connection when we feel something that’s real, whether it’s real wood, or well-made paper, or nice leather, or you can feel that foil stamp, or the linen of a nice case wrap. All of that really matters, especially in obvious contrast to all of the digital stuff that we’re surrounded with. We realized how much we miss it. A heavy, well-made object gives us that bone-deep connection. Somehow that feels right.

I didn’t realize how heavy this book would be until we got it back and I was like, this feels like five pounds or something. It feels so good! 

The physical book really does affect your reading experience so significantly, and how you engage with the story itself. Even just carrying the book around in your tote bag or having it on your coffee table, it becomes a much more powerful or exciting experience when the book is this beautiful object.

We put so much time into these books when we write them— this, for me, is the culmination of decades of thought about this voice and this character, so you might as well spend a little bit of time on the vessel that it’s contained in. That’s always been our philosophy here at McSweeney’s. These authors are putting everything they have into these books. Books are souls. Each one of them is a soul vessel. It contains everything that the author feels. So that vessel, that container, should elevate, dignify, and exalt the work inside.

Our art director here at McSweeney’s, Sunra Thompson, and I sit here looking through materials and prototypes and try to do something that we haven’t done before, and try to elevate a book through the form that we put it in. It’s also a way to keep it new. We’ve been at it for 25 years; what would be worse than to be lucky enough to work in this business and then just do the same thing over and over again? What a waste of a gift. 

Do you think it’s possible for more publishers to innovate when it comes to book forms and materials? 

There’s something here called the San Francisco Center for the Book and they celebrate the book arts, and I would say many of the most beautiful books their artists have made as one-offs could be mass-produced in some form if you were to show it to the right printer. Then it’s just a matter of being accepting of a slightly different unit cost. I think so much could be done.

There are beautiful books made every day, but if you have a little bit of flexibility, you could make totally unprecedented book object every time around. A lot of times, it’s just taking inspiration from those one-off artists’ books and saying, Oh, wow, I think we could find a way to adapt this.

Is it hard to find printers and manufacturers who appreciate and understand bringing your visions to fruition? 

Our first printer was right outside of Reykjavik. I used to go to Iceland with an idea, and they wanted to experiment just as much as we did. Then we ended up printing at a place called Thomson-Shore outside of Detroit, and I got to know all the people on their press, and just seeing how happy it made everybody in the company to do something different was really invigorating. We realized that the printers take pride in having created something unusual and beautiful. When the designer has fun, the art director has fun, and the printer has fun, ideally that is felt by the reader too.

Your wooden die-cut version of The Eyes & the Impossible is intended for all ages. What is it like writing and designing a book meant for such a vast audience range? 

I love the all ages category. I’ve always had mixed feelings about the other categories— I think it can create unnecessary stigma. The books that I remember reading when I was younger didn’t have a designation on the back. They didn’t say this is for this age group or that age group. I don’t remember Charlotte’s Web or The Hobbit or so many other books having that kind of delineation.

I like the idea of books where it doesn’t really matter. I certainly didn’t write this for any one age group, and I would hope that adults could get just as much entertainment out of it as a 12-year-old or a 10-year-old. 

The Eyes & The Impossible book form does seem to combine design elements of very different kinds of book categories. The color palette and gold gilt pages feel very classic and academic, but the thick wooden cover, the almost-square shape of the book, and the rounded corners remind me of those puffy cardboard books geared toward toddlers. To me, this all drives home the un-categorizable nature of your book.

We also wanted to make it look a little outside of time. In the way that Shawn has taken these old, 17th-century paintings and put the dog into it, I wanted it to look timeless so that if you were to pick this up and somebody said it was made in 1732, it wouldn’t be totally unrealistic. Maybe some old German company used to make books out of wood or something— it has that old-world look, but then we forgot about wooden books for 300 years, and here they are again.

Are there any other book forms or materials that you’re interested in using next?

More and more, I’m trying to think of ways to make something that’s so apart from design trends, so apart from materials trends, and even lean into the weird. Sunra and I were looking at some prototypes and some materials today that were truly weird— weird slipcases that interact with each other in a way that comes from a strange place. Then you’re not really beholden to any era. You never really know— was this made in 2023 or 1892? I love those sorts of artworks and designs.

Sometimes, we’ll have a prototype for years without knowing what to apply it to. So it’s a little bit of a laboratory, where Sunra will fiddle with something and then three, four years down the road, we realize that it might work with a certain book or a certain issue. The prototypes are a source of unending joy.

It’s our 25th anniversary later this year, so we’re putting out a special issue that’s going to be really weird— we’re using metal. It’ll be our first metal object. I’ve also always wanted to make a glass book. We haven’t been able to get a prototype that’s durable, but we’re still working on it. It’s been 15 years or so, and every so often we’ll go back and try to get somebody to see if it’ll work.

I love going to the bookstore and finding somebody that created something I’ve never seen before, in some format that I didn’t know was quite possible. 

Bored with the selection but not ready to give up, I pulled this book down to read the rest of the title on the cover: Anita Klinz la prima art director Italiana (Anita Klinz Italy’s First Art Director).

Those words I understood. I looked inside and was floored by what I saw: It was a biography/monograph of a book designer whose name I had never heard, and book (and magazine) designs I had never seen (apparently neither had many of my Italian design friends). Her work on covers for art, history and fiction titles for the great publisher Il Saggiatore di Alberto Mondadori Editore was beyond the American sense of mid-modern. Damn! Those done in the late 1950s through the 1960s were, I have to say, beyond contemporary too. They were not period or trendy, they were just perfect. I assume that Klinz’s work had long ago influenced many of the wonderful current covers sold in Feltrinelli.

Milan has long been the center of book design in Italy, with almost entirely its own nuanced styling. And Klinz (1923–2013) was among the wellspring of talent from which it sprang. Now, remember, I do not have fluency in Italian, so cannot tell you more than I know. But I logically surmise that despite her talent and influence, as a woman she did not garner the historical recognition that she was due until Pitoni, with contributions by Mario Piazza and Leonardo Sonnoli, wrote her story, collected her work and produced this marvelous volume.

I was tempted not to buy it to avoid adding more weight to my luggage, but the temptation to have the reference inspired me to dig deeper into Klinz’s life and work (and finally start learning Italian before it’s too late).

Has this always been true? Of mass market publishing it has. But at the same time, even the most mainstream books have been sold because of spot-on cover aesthetics. What you see below are sample from sample book of cover proofs from Star Publishers, a 1930s-era reprint house. traveling book salesmen would usually show around 100 seasonal jackets would be bound together so that the bookseller could easily see the back, front covers and flaps in real time and size.

The titles are intriguing, and in some cases the graphic design is on the same par.

Although we were all raised with the cliched adage, “don’t judge a book by its cover,” it’s also human nature to make quick inferences based on visual information, especially during an era in which our attention spans have withered away to next to nothingness.

Alas, we all judge books by their covers, and luckily for us at PRINT, we have the excuse that it’s our job to do so. Like all design industries, book covers experience the ebb and flow of trends, with a certain look and style suddenly sieging every bookstore shelf. While the book blob dominated the discourse for the last few years, we’ve recently identified another trend splashing its way across new releases: the recurring symbol of doorways, open windows, and mysterious portals. 

While many of us reach for our phones to mindlessly scroll our way out of reality, others still turn to books as a means of retreating from the real world and diving into another. Media of all kinds has always been humans’ favorite refuge and go-to distraction. And who can blame us? Real life is hard. Times are tough. Eggs are now over $7.00 for a dozen! This compulsion for escape has now manifested visually onto book covers themselves, in the form of forbidding door frames, whimsical archways, and romantic passageways, all beckoning exploration and evoking the idea of a place we’d rather be.

The portal motif is being depicted in a variety of aesthetics, ranging from abstract and gestural to more literal and realist. Many of these covers also incorporate imagery of the sky and clouds, underscoring the themes of breaking free to an imagined world outside of one’s day-to-day mundanity.

The image of a doorway to an unknown destination is inherently rich with symbolism. It’s at once enchanting and compelling, yet simultaneously threatening and ominous. These covers no doubt vaguely represent ideas addressed within the pages of the books themselves, but they are also meant to lure in readers, offering an entryway into the world of the book. “Come take this journey with me,” invites the outstretched hand appearing in the circular portal on the Scattered All Over the Earth cover. “Read me and you too will be transported to a world beyond your wildest imagination,” calls out the silhouetted airplane flying through the cover of Eleutheria.

Birds and flight are often incorporated into these depictions of portal motifs, conjuring notions of freedom, possibility, and the sense of fleeing up, up, and away— for both characters and readers.

The portal motif also transcends genre, tone, and audience, due to its vast metaphoric value and its range of interpretations. Intrigue. New beginnings. Running away— the list goes on and on. But where do we land on the trend as a whole? Anytime we start seeing the same thing repeatedly within an area of design, it can feel a bit uninspired or formulaic. The book cover portal is no different. Don’t know what to design for a cover of a book? Let’s just throw an open door on a colorful backdrop leading to some clouds and call it a day.

Is a trend just another term for cliche? The ubiquity of the portal motif has reached a level that feels like a visual platitude; what does it actually mean? The point at which we look to something to represent everything, is when it actually means nothing.

From a traumatic haircut to a slew of great (and not so great) roles as an art director— well, everywhere— Steve Heller shared personal stories from his long, illustrious creative career at yesterday’s inaugural meeting of the PRINT Book Club. Debbie Millman helmed the discussion for readers around the world.

Heller’s new book, Growing Up Underground, is no ordinary memoir. It’s a coming-of-age tale about his colorful youth, surrounded and inspired by the ’60s and ’70s creatives who were riding the waves of beatnik, hippie, and punk counterculture.

Heller vulnerably, humorously reflected on memorable moments from his career, beginning with stints at The New York Free Press, The New York Review of Sex, and The New York Times Op-Ed page, where he was the youngest art director in the publication’s history.

If you happened to miss yesterday’s conversation, you can sit in on the recorded Book Club here, and order your own copy of Growing Up Underground here.

In the meantime, watch this space for more information about next month’s meeting. We’ll dive into The Human Side of Innovation: The Power of People in Love with People, by PepsiCo SVP & Chief Design Officer Mauro Porcini.

It’s all come to this! After months of collaboration and creative process, the Proportion Design team has completed the cover of Sam Aquillano’s forthcoming book, Adventures in Disruption: How to Start, Survive, and Succeed as a Creative Entrepreneur. In this episode, Blake Goodwin, Paul Reiss, and Andrea Cincotta from Proportion unveil their final design to a very excited author. The final design is a refinement of a concept from round 2, which shows the title breaking through, and seemingly ripping through, the front cover to unveil the Design Museum’s signature orange brand color— representing Sam and team’s approach to finding their way through barriers in their effort to launch and grow the Design Museum. See the full cover design below.

How did the team get here? Proportion started with an in-depth discovery phase, where they sent Sam a questionnaire and interviewed him about his life, story, and book. They also gathered other books in the same genre to study those covers and uncover useful elements. Then they more fully detailed the audience for Adventures in Disruption, defining personas and labeling the market segment for this book as the Creative Biz-Curious. From there they generated three brand attributes: Passion, Creativity, and Expertise, and used those words to develop two distinct creative directions. Then they designed two rounds of concepts, each building off the last. Finally they absorbed Sam’s feedback and direction to refine the final design.

After seeing the design for the first time, Sam then shows the book cover to his Design Museum co-founder, Derek Cascio, and they discuss next steps for the book. Derek has a new creative venture launching soon, a beverage band called Thirst Burster, which they chat about as well. To wrap up the series, Sam, Blake, Paul, and Andrea discuss the project and what it meant to them — and where they go from here. Sam will launch a Kickstarter campaign in early 2023 to help fund the publication of Adventures in Disruption.

Listen in the player above or check it out on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

Catch up with Episode 1, Episode 2, Episode 3, Episode 4, Episode 5, Episode 6, and Episode 7.

There are only a handful of authors in the marketing maze of publishing who are allowed to choose the designer of their book jackets. Among those, there are even fewer who would select their relatives for the job. Imagine the worst client-writer-designer relationship possible; with the added bonus of familial issues, it has the makings of a disaster. This did not happen, however, for sisters Woolf and Vanessa Bell.

One of the great writers of the 20th century (who was also a proprietor of the Hogarth Press, alongside her husband), Woolf’s books are unabashedly recognizable by virtue of the fact that they were all designed by Bell, an accomplished Impressionist painter and print maker.

Far from being either conventional or experimental, Bell’s handcrafted, roughly rendered designs were always abstract. In fact, Bell rarely ever read the manuscripts before doing the jackets. But she did do every single one of Woolf’s books, with the exception of her first.

Though they were universally disliked by the London booksellers, Woolf appeared to be very pleased with the aesthetic quality they brought to her body of work and the overall identity that was achieved when seen en masse. As Mary Jane Karnes has recounted: “Virginia Woolf once told Bell, ‘Your style is unique, because so truthful, and therefore it upsets one completely.’” Whether by happenstance or design, Bell’s expressive visual shorthand was the quintessence of modernistic simplicity and an unmistakable style for the Bloomsbury sensibility.

About the book
“Volver a pensarnos” is an urgent book on politics and mental health written on the imprecise border between the pandemic and the post-pandemic; an unprecedented event that forced us to reflect on what makes us human, what is our relationship with suffering and how to develop in an unfair system that, moreover, overwhelms us with experts and magic formulas to achieve the long-awaited happiness.

One idea weaves together this set of short essays: there is an unavoidable human suffering that comes with our cultural life; but there is another, against which we must rebel, which derives from an unacceptable design that must be dismantled and rethought.
Far from self-help and prescriptive advice, the psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Santiago Levin proposes unavoidable starting points to think about mental health situated in a historical moment, in a conception of the subject and in a social and political system that determines it. Because mental health is also taking care of thinking about the world and our ways of living in it.

About the designer
Andi Landoni is an Argentine illustrator and graphic designer. She works designing for different publishers and illustrating for audiovisual projects, clothing and her personal brand. Passionate about editorial design. For the Futurock essay collection I was inspired by abstract paper cutting forms, generating a system that with the vibrant colors and typography, gave the collection a strong identity.
links:
https://www.behance.net/andilandoni
https://www.instagram.com/andi.landoni/
https://andilandoni.tumblr.com/

About the collection
The collection of Essays aims to address the post-pandemic thought of as a watershed from different disciplines.

About the publisher
Ediciones Futurock is the daughter of Futurock FM, the radio station that since 2016 has revolutionized the map of independent media in Argentina. Futurock showed that it is possible to make a professional, critical digital communication medium and not die trying.
Ediciones Futurock is driven by an idea: it’s time for a new generation to write a new world. With this goal as a beacon, we set out to sign fair agreements with authors, who receive 50% of the profits generated by their books, an unprecedented event in the publishing market. In a difficult context for the sector, Ediciones Futurock has sold more than 16,000 copies, which is a true feat.
Editorial : https://tienda.futurock.fm/tag/libros/
Radio: https://futurock.fm/

Ecologia is just one recent instance of exciting cover art from Zardo, so if you’re a fan of smart book design, we highly recommend keeping an eye on her work.

With this in mind, Austin Lee‘s art feels like a breath of fresh air. For over a decade, he’s brought the charming, chaotic feel of childhood back into high art institutions with his bright, expansive paintings. You can find some of his best work in the glossy, gorgeous new book Like It Is, which focuses on a recent solo exhibition at Jeffrey Deitch. Though Lee’s art often deals with the stark, adult subject matter of modern life, his scrawled handwriting and expressive, clay-like aesthetic add a sense of humor, comfort, and empathy to whatever he covers.

Pre-order Like It Is on Pacific’s website.

Once reserved to the writings of science fiction, for over a decade now Austin Lee has explored the shrinking dichotomy between the real world and virtual reality. His hypersaturated airbrush paintings are created through a combination of traditional painterly techniques, along with the latest digital tools.

This extends into Like It Is, where Lee further investigates recognizable cultural motifs and art historical imagery, spanning from archival photos and tarot cards to Vermeer paintings. Screaming with color, each psychedelic composition is partly inspired by the famous Rorschach test, a diagnostic psychological study that uses a subject’s perception of inkblots to analyze their personality characteristics and emotional functioning.

Like It Is is a softcover publication documenting Austin Lee’s recent solo exhibition at Jeffrey Deitch, as well as a series of drawings and interactive AR elements.

Thanks to Adidas’ partnership with the US Soccer Foundation, now Rodman can add “superhero” to her impressive resume. She stars in the bright, action-packed new children’s book Wake Up and Kick It, featuring design and illustration by Wolfgang and Black Madre. Eye-catching graphics, glow-in-the-dark ink, and Rodman’s own artwork make this a desirable addition to any child’s bedside table. It might even inspire them to pick up a soccer ball!

Wake Up and Kick It with Trinity Rodman x adidas

The words “hero” and “athlete” have always been used to describe men. Combine that with the fact that 95% of sports media coverage is focused on men’s sports, and we are teaching another generation of boys and girls to idolize male athletes. Few had heard of 19-yr old, Trinity Rodman, US women’s soccer phenom, and Rookie of the Year, fewer had seen her play. So, instead of creating a traditional campaign to share her amazing accomplishments, we made a children’s book that told Trinity’s story as inspiration for other young athletes.

Unlike other children’s books, which are designed to put kids to bed, this is a “wake up” book. After all, Trinity didn’t become the youngest player ever drafted into the NWSL by sleeping in; she got there by getting up and getting after it.

The Wolfgang team worked closely with Trinity to write the book based on her life experiences and partnered with visual arts studio, BLACK MADRE, to create the illustrations. Some of Trinity’s own artwork appears in the book. Photoluminescent ink was used to make the cover glow in the dark.

Now that Trinity has been called up to the USWNT, the only remaining question is, when will the sequel be announced?

But once upon a time, it wasn’t quite so hard to find exciting creators working together under the same roof. For decades, magazines have provided readers with a one-stop-shop for a wide range of work from fresh, new voices, including essays, criticism, and fiction. You could find an eclectic range of publications in the racks of most bookstores, and choose any number that reflected your views or lifestyle. Readers could keep up with faraway creative communities, and even become a part of one themselves through subscribing to a given magazine.

Sadly, after a solid decade of folding publications, failed new media companies, and massive editorial layoffs, it’s been hard to avoid the lingering sense that magazines are dead. But don’t be fooled by disappearing newsstands and shuttered domain names— rabid print fans still lurk on eBay, social media, and even in quiet storefronts.

Writer Nadja Spiegelman has seen the rising tide for herself. “I go into the few specialized magazine shops that still exist in New York City, and see them consistently filled with young people who really, really want magazines,” she told me. “There’s sort of a resurgence of them, in part because they’re disappearing.”

As the chief collaborators behind Astra Magazine, Editor-in-Chief Spiegelman and Creative Director Shannon Jager are poised to ride the crest of this wave. In this bi-annual publication, readers can find exciting new work from creators around the world, all in one place. Within almost 200 gorgeous pages, you’ll find an eclectic range of prose, poetry, essays, comics, and art. In their first issue, “Ecstasy,” work from previously unpublished writers lives alongside exclusives from bestselling authors like Ottesa Moshfegh and Leslie Jamison. These stories are accented with rich visuals by prolific cartoonists like Evan M. Cohen, Diana Ejaita, and Nicole Rifkin. Design enthusiasts will delight in Jager’s bold color palettes and ambitious, yet accessible visual flourishes, all on elegantly embossed, high-quality paper.

The expansive feel of Astra goes beyond its diverse line-up and dynamic look. The publication provides a thoughtful approach to international literature by honoring the art of translation, engaging directly with global communities, and representing creators on their own terms. In order to accomplish this lofty goal, Spiegelman, Jager, and their expert team have combed through a century of visual references and a whole world of creative localities. You can find their editors in Europe, Asia, and Africa, and their most recent journeys have taken them from Manhattan high-rises to Canadian ice fishing shacks.

I recently sat down with Spiegelman and Jager to get their firsthand account on adventures in modern publishing. They discuss challenging the dry, western feel of literature, the importance of strong crediting, and the weird, secret trick to publishing magazines without newsstands.

(This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.)

How did you both end up at Astra?

Spiegelman: I’ve always dreamed of starting my own magazine, but I was waiting for an idea for something that doesn’t exist yet, that really would fill a space. So I started working with Astra Publishing House on creating a magazine that would align with their vision of international literature. They wanted to make a literary magazine that was genuinely cosmopolitan, and that didn’t ask any one writer to represent an entire country. It seemed really exciting, and like something that I wasn’t seeing done elsewhere.

Jager: I’ve always had a love of magazines. I’ve worked for places like Pentagram, T Magazine, and a few other Canadian editorial magazines. I also had my own magazine called Double Dot that’s now defunct, but at the time, it was celebrating the cultural differences between cities around the world. So when I got wind of Astra, this ideal of global collaboration really spoke to me.

It sounds like you both bring a solid amount of perspective and experience to the magazine. Is there anything specific that draws you to the medium of print?

Spiegelman: I grew up with parents who were incredibly interested in art for reproduction, something that can be endlessly reproduced and accessible. There’s this magic in being able to not just create an object, but create an object for reproduction on a large scale. I just grew up like feeling like that’s the coolest thing one could possibly do!

In our moment, all of the systems for magazines are falling apart, like the print advertising dollars that once made them possible. There are no longer newsstands; there are no longer easy distribution systems. That means it’s a really difficult time for magazines. But I think there will always be a desire for print magazines, because the internet is like this endless, flooding river. A magazine is a snapshot that’s less ephemeral, and that offers a really strict curation at a time when everybody has, like, 1000 tabs open on their screen. A magazine is something that is curated, that is inherently finite, that is also something that you can return to. You have a relationship that’s different from what you’d have with a book, in the sense that it’s a community, and it evolves issue after issue. That’s a really unique thing that a magazine can do, and I think it’s always going to be valuable.

Jager: I’ve always loved the medium just because of the slight resistance to single authorship, and just how no magazine can be put together by one person. And the quick turnaround is what makes it so temporal and of the moment.

This first issue features literature and art inspired by the theme of “Ecstasy.” What inspired that, and what goal do you hope the magazine accomplishes?

Spiegelman: This one is “Ecstasy,” the next one will be “Filth,” the one after that will be “Lust.” It’s intentional that we’re countering a preconception that literature in translation is going to be inherently medicinal or boring, or like an anthropological approach for a very foreign other. So instead, we wanted to focus on these universal, and somewhat transgressive and subversive emotions, and just think about what it is that we all have in common.

For the root word of “ecstasy,” you stand outside yourself and a god enters you. It’s like the moment of transcendence when you are outside your own being, and you are sort of becoming a god, and that, for me, is what reading is about. Engaging with art is like standing outside yourself, and letting someone else in, and being able to see the world through their eyes. The best moments of reading for me are the moments when I’m literally transported to the point where I don’t see the room around me anymore, or the train car around me, and I’m just living inside the story, and my physical body disappears. That’s the feeling that we wanted this issue to evoke.

How do you know when you’ve found something that works for the magazine?

Spiegelman: When I worked as an online editor at The Paris Review, I had a lot of space to actually publish what felt really moving, or that really spoke to me. Or I found myself wanting to send something to a friend, because she’s going through something similar, and I’m going through something similar, and this writer really captured it so beautifully. There’s a piece called “The Crane Wife” that went really viral that was about a bad relationship, but it was beautifully written. I never would have read that piece and been like, This piece is gonna go viral. It just spoke to people, and that is so much more satisfying.

We didn’t put any very timely nonfiction in here. Instead, it’s like much more like lyrical writing that you could return to at any moment. Some of the stories are more explicitly ecstatic than others. The theme is more of like a guide, and then we also just want to highlight the very best writing we can find.

Jager: The concept that Nadja and her team have built Astra around is not limiting, and there’s just so many exciting opportunities and possibilities for future operations. And even with having thematic issues, there’s this excitement for the next issue, and what that means. How do we share different sides of the same story, and give dimension to these dramatic words in the form of literature, illustrations, photography, so all these different components come together?

What kind of images did you use to communicate this?

Jager: For each cover, based on the theme, we wanted to have an image that ties closely to it. This photographer, Isabelle Wenzel, opened up her portfolio to us, and we were able to put together a story that I think it worked for the theme in a very expressive and abstract way.

Spiegelman: This photographer takes herself as her own subject. She’s trained as an acrobat, and so all of these are self-portraits where she holds these impossible poses for really long time until she gets exactly the shot she wanted. But there’s also an intentionality in her work as well, and an anonymity for the body. It’s her, but it could be anybody. It’s the body as a form, and that is part of the ethos of what we’re interested in. It’s also what we’re interested in editorially, is the feeling of like, “What is it that we all share? What is the body?”

Jager: There’s something really nice in the black and white photography, and I think it also helped visually open up the conversation about what ecstasy could mean. We could have done an ecstasy pill, or we could have done something like a little bit more like over the head, but this one really felt like it was like a feeling that was really emotive.

Tell me more about the look of “Ecstasy.”

Spiegelman: “Timeless and of the moment” was the inherent contradiction that I first gave to Shannon. How do you do it? And even thinking through a design perspective: what does timeless mean? Because nothing is ever truly timeless. Like, when I think timeless, I’m thinking the ’20s, which is a very specific time.

We looked at a lot of references, like the old Gallimard covers, and even Fitzcarraldo books now, and ’20s modernism. And I think Shannon did a really good job of pulling inspiration from there, and from the ’70s at the same time, in a way that really does feel like every time and right now, especially because of the modular color scheme. So we’ll have different, contrasting colors, and every issue and our website will also update with those colors. But I think that having something that’s so classic, with colors that are so right now, really hits that nail on the head.

Jager: I think, to speak on the colors too, that decision was just to show the emotional spectrum that literature can have, and how that can play a part and elevate stories in new ways. So we were very thoughtful with the color selections, and continue to be excited about like the system that can be built in this harmonious color wave that a subscriber would have across the shelf.

Can you point to any favorite design choices within the issue?

Spiegelman: One of my favorites is this story “Wisteria,” which is one of our longer pieces. With every turn of the page, there’s ever so slightly more of a purple gradient. You only really notice that it’s turning purple by the end, and hopefully you’ve been so pulled into the story that you’re not even really noticing that it’s turning purple.

It was a really nice collaboration between Shannon and I. So I was like, “Can you just make wisteria petals fall on the page?” And she was like, “No, you’re making a literary magazine; you want people to read it. This is too literal, and also people won’t actually be able to read the story if there are petals all over the words.” So we found something that is just a more subtle expression of exactly that feeling through this accumulating purple.

It’s smart that you’ve figured out how to make it look both nuanced and accessible. I feel like it’s much more common that innovation in art or literature obscures meaning, instead of making it clearer.

Spiegelman: What made me want to work with Shannon from the start was her clarity. “Okay, I’m making a literary magazine, so people have to be able to read it, and it has to look really nice, and make you want to read it.” And I think that’s something that really comes through. You pick this up, and you can see that it’s like a very thought-through object, but you actually want to sit down and read the stories, and that never got lost.

Jager: We did numerous type tests, grid tests, baseline tests. We went through all the typefaces, and we just really wanted to build this really strong foundation for the magazine, so there could be a place where adding illustration or color would just be the icing on the cake. Just to that point that we would have something so robust that we could take it from issue to issue and then still have flexibility within it.

The visual language was something that you don’t usually see with literary magazines. That came about through conversations about translation, and different ways of storytelling, and how visuals could elevate each of the pieces, or be a language in itself.

How involved are both of you in the printing process, and what is that like?

Jager: The printer that we ended up choosing is called Prolific, and they’re in Winnipeg. I think that the opportunity for us to be involved in the process was after restrictions had been lifted. That enabled Nadja to fly to Canada and actually be on press with the issue, which is always like a really important part of the process, especially when it’s a first issue. It’s so key, especially just with the amount of illustration and artwork that we had, to do it properly like that

Spiegelman: It was really fun to actually go to the printer and get to see it come off the presses. That was especially after like a whirlwind year of making this thing, but also after a lot of the work that I’ve done in the past, being an online editor, where you just sort of like, click “Send” on WordPress, and like it’s in the world.

They’re really wonderful printers. They like have a real artistry in what they do. And they’ve worked with a lot of cartoonists who I really admire, and that was so nice to hear when I arrived. Cartoonists are artists whose medium is reproductions, so they care really deeply about how it’s being printed, and how it’s going to look, and so that like made me feel really safe. I was like, “Oh, great, you printed Chris Ware!” Very few people in this world can print Chris Ware.

I got to just watch it come off the presses, and do the press checks, and also see their ice fishing shack, which was really nice. Just the smell of ink and the feeling of like paper, the sound of it. It’s printed on this $8 million Japanese printer that like takes up an entire, huge warehouse. And because it’s a piece of Japanese technology, every time it finishes a printing job, it plays “The Itsy Bitsy Spider,” and the charm of knowing that is really nice! And it’s nice to have a good relationship with a printer, because through getting to know them, that also allows us to know what kinds of things we can do in the future. I got to have conversations about like, “What if for the ‘Filth’ issue, we want scratch and sniff inks?”

You’ve both mentioned wanting Astra to have a genuinely international feel. How do you bring the feeling of a global community into the magazine?

Spiegelman: I think that a lot of times, for a writer’s work to make its way into English and translation, they often have to be at quite an advanced point in their careers. And a publisher is going to take, like, their fourth or fifth book, once they’re very established in their home country. And often a publisher in America is asking this sort of ridiculous question of like, “Is this the best writer in Uruguay? Because we only want to publish one, so is this the best one?” And like if someone asked me who the best writer in America was, I would have no idea. I could tell you my favorite writer, but I don’t know who the best writer in America is.

So what we wanted to do is a magazine where people are really excited about the lineup— writers like Mieko Kawakami, or Fernanda Melchor. Mieko’s from Japan, and Fernanda Melchor’s from Mexico, but she lives in Berlin, and these writers have achieved a certain amount of notoriety. But they appear alongside writers where their work hasn’t even been published by their publishing house in their home country. We worked with publishers in Brazil and in Mexico to find this work, but it’s their debut, and it hasn’t even come out yet there, and it’s going to come out here in English at the same time. And that’s really exciting, to not have to already be at this level of your career before anyone will translate you into English, and your work will live alongside all these writers who are very established. Our hope is that then, what we would define as successful and exciting for the magazine, is if American publishers or UK publishers then read this and are like, “I want to get the author’s whole book, and make it available here,” and it can be a starting point for their careers.

I noticed you’re making translators’ names very visible throughout the magazine. It highlights that translation is a genuine, yet underappreciated artform that requires a lot of thought and intention. In any translation, somebody made a choice to use the word they printed.

Spiegelman: Yeah, a translation doesn’t have a single author, in a way. It’s being mediated through someone, changing your experience of how you read it. Then it also has a particular illustration, and the illustrators are also very clearly credited. A magazine isn’t done by a single person, and thinking through how all three of these people might have come together to create the reading experience is really exciting to us.

We have these insane last few pages of the magazine that are just bios for every single illustrator, translator, and writer, which means that it’s very long, but that’s part of what’s exciting. And these people are from everywhere, and they’re all collaborating together, and in conversation with each other, and that is really part of what’s so exciting about making a magazine at all.

It sounds like you’re approaching this from a very anti-colonial perspective that meets everyone at the exact same level. It allows writers and artists from around the world to create on their own terms, instead of filtering their perspectives through a westernized lens.

Spiegelman: Yeah, and I think a lot of the writers who we’re publishing wouldn’t necessarily think of themselves as like a writer of this country. They’re just writers who are writing about what they’re living.

It was a very intentional design decision to not have what country these people live in, or are from. We do say the language their work is translated from, but that’s different than saying, “This writer is from this place.” Most of the writers who we’re publishing are often born in one place, grew up in another place, moved to another place, and are actually writing through all of those places.

Jager: There are new voices from around the world that haven’t been heard, and haven’t been accessible to people, because not everyone is looking for specific pieces from different countries. I think that also the editorial team at Astra and their thoughts, like the pagination, and the rhythm of the magazine, is also quite unique.

Spiegelman: We have editors at large who are in Paris and Berlin, and Beijing and Cairo, who are in very frequent communication with about what’s happening there, and what the literary scene looks like there. We’re not trying to make something that’s only going to speak to these 20 people in New York City. We’re trying to make something that will have international distribution. The New Yorker does sort of evoke, “Here’s everything you’re missing in New York City,” and we’re instead like, “Here’s a lot of people living their lives, that can also speak to your life.” And I’ve just been corresponding with, like, 1000 different bookstores, so people will really be able to read it everywhere.

A lot of the infrastructure for magazines has deteriorated, but it sounds like you have ambitious plans for distribution. How are you getting Astra out there?

Spiegelman: We’re actually going to need to reprint our first issue already, which is really exciting. But one of the things that’s hard for magazines is that there are few newsstands, or distributors, or bookstores that carry magazines anymore, especially after the pandemic. Most of them stopped because people don’t preorder them in curbside pickup.

McNally Jackson in New York is one of the few bookstores that carries magazines, and when we asked them how they did it, they introduced us to a member of their staff whose sole job is to maintain individual subscriptions for every magazine. Whereas with books, you go through a distributor like Penguin Random House, or like Ingram, and you can just order books and get them, and that is a lot easier. That used to be true for magazines, but newsstand distribution has been monopolized and consolidated to a point where the few companies that do it, do it very unreliably.

And so from the get go, we’re like, “Okay, we’ll make a magazine, but it’s going to also be a book,” because one of the things that’s still working is book distribution. And because Astra Magazine is part of Astra Publishing House, which is distributed by PRH, bookstores love working with them, because they are very, very efficient. And every morning, a box from PRH comes and goes for every bookstore, and it’s very easy for them to just try a book or send it back if they don’t want it.

PRH doesn’t distribute magazines, so we had to have a whole call with them where we were like, “It’s a book that comes out twice a year; don’t worry about it.” And that work, and getting to be both, has really meant that we’re going to be able to like be an independent bookstore. If a bookstore in Athens or Copenhagen wants it, we don’t have to individually figure out how we ship books there. That goes through PRH’s global distribution system, and that gets to them very easily. They don’t have to pay shipping and like that’s an enormous, enormous gift. So that’s part of what we’re really excited about, is having the actual reach that is rare for a magazine to have.

Jager: There’s other elements or systems that we’re looking forward to exploring, like doing book tours or book fairs, or events. I think there’s like a lot of potential after this first issue for us to grow and also create a community, which is very exciting.

Spiegelman: I’m not sure if it’ll be possible, but I really hope that, for future issues, we’ll do launch events in different cities for each one. So, to launch the next issue in Mexico City, and launch the one after that in Singapore. It’s not impossible! And to do it in collaboration with the editors that we know at local publishing houses there, and the writers we know, and the bookstores. Because the magazine is fundamentally a place—it’s a very physical and localized thing, and I think part of that is really connecting to local communities in different places.

You can subscribe to Astra and read selections from the magazine at their official website. If you’re in New York City, you can RSVP for their launch party at McNally Jackson Seaport tonight (4/14) at 7 PM.

The graphic designer Domi is one such guardian, who runs the popular Twitter and Instagram accounts @PaperbackParadise. Domi sources real book covers that he then reworks on Photoshop to parody, typically with a hardy dash of absurdist dark humor. He’s not afraid to go crude, raunchy, or downright morbid either, finding jokes in death, sex, and other places others might shy away from. But therein lies the brilliance of Domi. “I love cover art— it can be so earnest, which makes it ripe for parody,” he tells me. 

Part of what makes the project so successful is Domi’s ability to reinterpret these covers so realistically. Their look is so spot on that you might not even think they’re actually photoshopped at first. He mimics a cover’s typefaces, colors, and textures so perfectly that his edits feel seamless.

So where did Domi’s idea for Paperback Paradise originate?  

“Back in 2005, I worked at a comic book store for a few years, where I was surrounded by comic covers all day,” he says. “To pass the time, I would reinterpret the characters’ expressions on the cover for a laugh—like making Wolverine secretly in love with Professor X, or Batman saying something passive aggressive to the Joker, because he’s never been asked to hang out with the rest of the bad guys. If it made me laugh, I’d share the idea with one of my coworkers, and it became a game we’d play.”

A decade later, when Domi found himself between jobs, he embarked on a fun project to flex his creativity and humor. “I had done some parody photoshops in the past, and decided to try my hand at repurposing books out of the dollar bin at a used book shop, because the source material was easily affordable. I posted the first attempts to Twitter, and the account took off pretty quickly.”

Domi’s process is pretty simple. “I go to a second hand store and browse the paperbacks until something catches my eye, either an expression illustrated on the cover or just the art itself,” he says. “Sometimes I have the idea for the joke immediately, but usually I have to stare at the cover and think for a while. Once I have the joke, I like to push the premise further with a plot synopsis on the back cover. I know a new one is ready when I read over it again and still laugh out loud.”

Paperback Paradise has amassed nearly 230K followers on Instagram and has hit the 210K mark on Twitter. Domi also sells products including bookmarks, stickers, prints, and apparel that feature his covers online. This success has come as a bit of a surprise to him.  

“Initially, I thought people may enjoy the covers, but I certainly did not expect to be doing this full time,” he shares. “I do this work because it’s fun, so I’m very happy that it translates to people who see my work. Whether you’ve purchased something from my store or simply shared my page with a friend: I appreciate you so much. I’m happy that we can connect on common themes like strange sex and the inner rage of horses.”

The dictionary is the result of discussions about the current situation and issues of art institutions in Poland among representatives of the artworld. Above 120 slogans and their definitions assign goals and future of the cultural world.​​​​​​​

Project Credits
r m

Project Credits
Anna Hidvegi

“65 is a commemorative book of art and design celebrating Ghana’s 65th independence anniversary, and is a brilliant and authentic graphic exploration of Ghanaian history, nationalism and identity. Curated by Ghanaian Art Director Jean Quarcoopome, 65 features submissions across graphic design, art, storytelling and photography.

At its core, this book is a moment in time for Ghana’s design industry and proves what Ghanaian creatives can make, and make possible, when we share ideas and collaborate.”

Project Credits
Jean Quarcoopome
Lena Morton