Austin Grossman - Soon I Will be Invincible

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Austin Grossman. Soon I Will Be Invincible. Penguin, 2008, UK edition. Cover design by Estuary English. Illustration by Bryan Hitch. (NB: internal design may be Chip Kidd. The internal design is the same in US and UK editions and Kidd designed the 2007 US edition.) Collected 29 March 2010 I chose to look at a number of design elements from this book because of its elaborate design. Apart from its striking cover, the book also uses coloured inside covers, decorated part pages, and includes a glossy colour signature. What I found particularly noteworthy about the design as a whole was its coherent message that functioned parallel to the novel’s content. The comic-book iconography and the cover and internal art of characters from the book as characters on the cover of comic books draw attention to Grossman’s ironic treatment of comic book themes. ( read more )

Cold Comfort Farm

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Stella Gibbons. Cold Comfort Farm (1932). Penguin, 2006 (Classic Deluxe Editions), with introduction by Lynne Truss. Cover by Roz Chast.

Unlaminated card, desaturated colours, flaps. Hand-lettered fonts throughout. The front cover is vignettes of main characters in the book with humorous captions designed to amuse the reader and draw their attention. Both front cover and back cover are replete with in-jokes for those who have already read the book, which is a good decision for a classic being reissued. The flaps and pictorial jokes (such as the sukebind, which runs beside the spine) are good for people who have already read Cold Comfort Farm and must be persuaded that the re-issue is worth buying, perhaps for the second time; however, many of the jokes (such as naming a bull Big Business, or the captions to some of the vignettes: ‘Reuben: A Sad Sack. Judith Starkadder: Just Leave Her In Her Misery’) are funny in themselves, and not merely self-referential. Others are intriguing to the new reader. Lynne Truss’ name, associated with her best-selling humorous book about grammar, is adequately sized to draw the attention of the reader. Cover artist Roz Chast is a cartoonist for the New Yorker. All of these details harmonise with Lynne Truss’ introduction, in which she suggests that Cold Comfort Farm has been neglected because modern readers fail to realise that it is a satire. It seems clear from the cover that Penguin is attempting to rectify this, with its funny sketches and Truss’ name, and in my opinion they succeed. On a more pragmatic level, the inclusion of a space to put a price sticker on the back cover is very useful, and the flaps are a welcome and handy addition (as well as being humorous!) Although the lack of a blurb is typically a decision with which I quibble, in this case the cover had done such a good job indicating the content of the book that I found it was not missed.

Love in a Cold Climate

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Nancy Mitford. Love in a Cold Climate and Other Novels (1945, 1949, 1951). Penguin, 2000 (Modern Classics), with an introduction by Philip Hensher. Cover photography (c) Host. No design info given. Collected 4 May Unlaminated, very floppy card, desaturated colours, font-heavy front cover, no back cover art. This omnibus is chiefly of interest by comparison with Cold Comfort Farm, discussed below. Both books are Penguin Classics, satires by English women, historically but diminishingly widely read, being reissued with a critic’s introduction, with unlaminated covers and generally desaturated colours. Regrettably, the similarities end there. While the Penguin Deluxe edition of Cold Comfort Farm has pulled out all the stops and worked hard to emphasise the humour of Gibbons’ novel, the Mitford cover is dull as ditchwater and fails to capture any sense of Mitford’s notable wit. The back cover has been quite neglected - hence no scan - and looks more like a placeholder design with its dull silver-grey. The rose on the front cover is mysterious indeed. In essence, while the blurb describes the novels as ‘witty, irreverent stories of ... glamour, gossip and decadence’, the book’s cover gives it the lie, suggesting perhaps a torrid romance – doubtless disappointing many readers. This book has not worn well. This book was acquired first-hand in late March 2010, and by the beginning of May it is already damaged and dirty. For a paperback containing three novels, clearly designed to be portable – for the pages are very thin and the type is rather small – this is simply thoughtless design. The covers should, at minimum, have been laminated, and the card should have been stiffer. Although a reader would not mind sacrificing quality for price in the case of the Pocket Penguin series – books designed to be read once – it is not appropriate for this volume. Paperbacks should be laminated. 15 July: Revisiting this cover, it's unfortunate that a backlit LCD screen makes it look quite vibrant! The physical book is quite dull.

Q and A

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Vikas Swarup. Q and A. Doubleday, 2005. Cover design by Claire Ward. Illustration by Nicky Dupays. Collected 14 May 2010

Jacket Matte laminated card with spot gloss on typography and on illustration. This cover design is clearly going for minimalism, which in book design aims to get people to pick up a book just because it’s beautiful – not because they know what’s going on between the covers.Unfortunately in my opinion it is not a successful cover, perhaps because it fails to completely commit to the minimalism. The illustration on the cover, of a television, obstructs the book’s minimalism, but nor does it give much of an idea of what happens in the book, so the cover fails on both counts. Instead it becomes a cover that is neither beautifully simple nor informatively detailed. ( read more )