Art Director: Nicole Caputo // Nation Books / Perseus Books
On March 19, 1969, First Lieutenant Homer R. Steedly, Jr., shot and killed a North Vietnamese soldier, Dam, when they met on a jungle trail. Steedly took a diary—filled with beautiful line drawings—from the body of the dead soldier, which he subsequently sent to his mother for safekeeping. Thirty-five years later, Steedly rediscovers the forgotten dairy and begins to confront his suppressed memories of the war that defined his life, deciding to return to Viet Nam and meet the family of the man he killed to seek their forgiveness. Fellow veteran and award-winning author Wayne Karlin accompanied Steedly on his remarkable journey. In Wandering Souls he recounts Homer’s movement towards a recovery that could only come about through a confrontation with the ghosts of his past—and the need of Dam’s family to bring their child’s “wandering soul” to his own peace. Wandering Souls limns the terrible price of war on soldiers and their loved ones, and reveals that we heal not by forgetting war’s hard lessons, but by remembering its costs.
For freelance clients, I'm just required to design the front and spine and the rest is handled in-house. If I have time, I try to design the entire package. But this time I was swamped. Alyssa Stepien, Nicole's Design Assistant, did a great job taking my design and reinterpreting it for the entire package. Thanks Alyssa.
Eighteen-year-old Stony De Coco has to make a choice: either join his father in the tightly knit world of New York's construction unions or take off and find his own path. But Stony’s family is not about to make that choice easy. As he tries to protect his little brother, Albert, from their dangerously unbalanced mother, and to postpone the difficult adult responsibilities that await him, he finds hope in a job working with children at a hospital--a job that promises not to make anyone happy but Stony.
Richard Price's Bloodbrothers is a soulful and often profane story of working-class life in the Bronx, and one young man's bruising initiation into adulthood.
Rocco Klein is a Dempsy, NJ homicide detective six months from retirement in the opening pages of Clockers. Dempsy, NJ is a lost, desolate place, full of slums hemorrhaging drugs, specifically crack. Strike, the second main character, is the crack dealer. He overseas his host of minions—his clockers—but not without undue stress. His profession makes him nervous and he doubts whether it is truly for him. His boss, the drug kingpin Rodney Little, sees it another way. This sets the stage for the event that catapults Rocco Klein and Strike toward each other. A murder occurs outside a fast food restaurant. Instead of Strike stepping forward, his brother, Victor, admits guilt claiming he did it in self defense. Klein of course does not buy the confession and the pursuit of Strike and Rodney Little begins.
The story is told from the perspectives of both Rocco Klein and Strike, alternating chapters as the novel moves through the grime and grit of slummy NJ. Each character has a distinct view of the world they live in. On the whole, this lets Price create two different worlds within one, a layered city, with each layer utterly connected.
I’d have to say this book is geared toward a predominantly male audience.
The tone is desperate and violent. Every line spoken, every description suggests violence in one way or another. “The New York skyline had begun to bruise purple.” The language is aggressive and direct. Everything is meant to cut someone else in some way, emotionally, physically. It’s a hard environment and Price paints the picture of Armageddon, the last days over Dempsy, NJ.
Compare this book to all the gritty cop dramas that were once good. NYPD Blue in its beginning days. The Wire (which Price writes for). It’s smart and fast paced. Homicide: A Year in the Killing Streets by David Simon
The language is what makes this book different. Price’s prose clips along. Every character is cunning or done for, and there is a clear line between both. The crack dealers he is portraying are smart, know the game, know the cops, know their clientele. The cops know the clockers, and watch the city and its dismal surroundings, like crooks themselves.
Notable imagery: Strike drinks vanilla Yoo-hoo to nurse and calm his ailing stomach. Handcuffs. The slums, the endless maze of brick housing projects. The corners, parking lots and concrete yards where clockers know to set up shop. Police interrogation rooms. Crack viles. Beepers or pagers.
A brilliant, alternative take on 1960's swinging London, Jenny Diski offers radical reconsiderations of the social, political, and personal meaning of that turbulent era.
What was Jenny Diski doing in the 1960's? A lot: Dropping out, taking drugs, buying clothes, having sex, demonstrating, and spending time in mental hospitals. Now, as Diski herself turns sixty years old, she examines what has been lost in the purple haze of nostalgia and selective memory of that era, what endures, and what has always been the same. From the vantage point of London, she takes stock of the Sexual Revolution, the fashion, the drug culture, and the psychiatric movements and education systems of the day. What she discovers is that the ideas of the sixties often paved the way for their antithesis, and that by confusing liberation and libertarianism, a new kind of radicalism would take over both in the UK and America. Witty, provocative, and gorgeously written, Jenny Diski promises to feed your head with new insights about everything that was, and is, the sixties.
Once you create a series look, you can get handcuffed by it. For the BIG IDEAS // small books series, photographer Jon Shireman and I had set up a single image conceptual approach, stripped down to its visual essence with a limited color palette around the conceit that the book itself was physically experiencing the BIG IDEA of that book. This book was not about the 60s as it was experienced in America but in England. So I had to find some way to distinguish this aspect. Without the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War to draw upon, I saw that 60s London was more about external cultural changes. Mod fashion styles, ala Austin Powers. I did some research on Mod culture, Carnaby Street fashions, groovy industrial designs, tie-dye, abstract trippy art and saw that all of those approaches demanded an explosion of colors. Which was a possible problem. This direction might be too colorful to fit in with the established look of the series.
I needed to say UK and the Mod culture of the 60s. I thought of taking the British Flag aka The Union Jack, and tie dyeing it would be a smart combination of the two. Jon had an all-white flag created from cloth and we experimented with just using the flag's blue and red colors. But it wasn't working as well as I thought and there was too much color scattered all around.
Maybe if I tried breaking it into segments to contain the colors. But it still wasn't clicking. BOLLOCKS!
Forget the tie-dye and work in a peace sign instead. PISS POOR Attempt!
Maybe a more graphic approach. I tried to find relationship patterns between the angles of the peace sign and Union Jack. For a good moment I thought this would be it! But no. BLOODY AWFUL!
Maybe I should go full out and just commit to using a multi-colored tie-dye pattern to make it recognizable: BLIMEY! It was too much color and breaking away from the series look. And they all abandoned the simple and original conceit that the books were experiencing the author's idea.
Jon and I brainstormed some more and ended our conversation with absolutely no ideas or direction. We decided to talk again at a later date when minds were fresh. So I hung up and stepped out of my office door and then it hit me. BUTTONS! Growing up in the 80s and hanging out in the East Village of NYC, it was the style to personalize our jackets with objects of our affection/affectation. Our jackets were covered with favorite band logos, bandanas, patches, safety pins, store buttons like CANAL JEANS, FLIP and Trash and Vaudeville and hand-painted back panels and sleeves. I thought that this would allow me to include many of the eclectic ideas of the 60s by representing them in a button and pining it on a clean white Union Jack. e.g. model Jean Shrimpton, peace sign, rock music, drug use, paisley. I saw plenty of 60s political button art but they probably didn't use buttons like this in their 60s fashion. But still, I like that this approach kept the monochromatic color scheme of the series. Maybe the flag could be a white denim jacket. And used colors only as added dashes of accents. I also liked that it was applied onto the flag and removable. Implying that these were fashionable trends of the moment that you can pick and choose and add to yourself and remove when you were over it. I'm not sure if this is the best solution but I was glad I was able to bend the visual closer to the series original intent and tone.
"A deeply thought-provoking book about the dramatic changes we must make to save the planet from financial madness." —Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine
Opening with Oscar Wilde's observation that "nowadays, people know the price of everything and the value of nothing," Patel shows how our faith in prices as a way of valuing the world is misplaced. He reveals the hidden ecological and social costs of a hamburger (as much as $200), and asks how we came to have markets in the first place. Both the corporate capture of government and our current financial crisis, Patel argues, are a result of our democratically bankrupt political system.
If part one asks how we can rebalance society and limit markets, part two answers by showing how social organizations, in America and around the globe, are finding new ways to describe the world's worth. If we don't want the market to price every aspect of our lives, we need to learn how such organizations have discovered democratic ways in which people, and not simply governments, can play a crucial role in deciding how we might share our world and its resources in common.
This short, timely and inspiring book reveals that our current crisis is not simply the result of too much of the wrong kind of economics. While we need to rethink our economic model, Patel argues that the larger failure beneath the food, climate and economic crises is a political one. If economics is about choices, Patel writes, it isn't often said who gets to make them. The Value of Nothing offers a fresh and accessible way to think about economics and the choices we will all need to make in order to create a sustainable economy and society.
Arun Gupta: You contend that the actual price of a $4 Big Mac should be $200. What are the real costs of that hamburger? Raj Patel: The Center for Science and Environment in India tried a few years ago to figure out the true cost of a hamburger. Assuming that it was raised on pasture that was once rainforest, the ecological services provided by that rainforest, the loss of diversity, carbon sequestration, water cycling, fuel and tropical product sources, among many other things, the cost would come to $200. The U.S. food industry has huge hidden costs, from the agricultural run-off that causes a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico to the cultural destruction wrought by the “Western” diet. There are also huge health costs associated with poor diet — in 2007, $174 billion was spent in the U.S. caring for people with diabetes — as well as the public funds that support the industrial food system.
Cheap food is “cheat food.” There are all kinds of costs that are externalized from the price we pay at the checkout. We pay those costs one way or another — but the food companies don’t. Merely having a system of free markets with accurate prices still doesn’t address the underlying issues of poverty and disenfranchisement.
The hamburger analogy was my original approach. The concept was to show the hidden cost of a hamburger. When you bite into it, you're contributing to the cost of land, transportation, fuel, global warming, heart disease, health care cost, etc. I thought a burger made out of representative icons of all of these cost areas sandwiched between hamburger buns would put the idea across. I also used bright colors to suggest fast food.
Initial concept sketch:
To make a quick mock up of my concept for presentation, I used the icons from the poster of Gary Hustwit's documentary OBJECTIFIED.
{ My signed postcard by Gary when I saw him and his documentary at the IFC Center.}
I hired illustrator Daniel Pelavin to flesh out my idea. These were still in initial sketch stage:
My Publisher liked it but thought it was emphasizing too much on one specific part of the book. I was asked to broaden the idea to bring to the forefront the economic aspects of the book and somehow show the vague idea of "value". And it had a "call to action". More big poster and immediate in feel. Hmmm. I decided to illustrate the title. Making "Nothing" out of "Something." A BIG FAT ZERO made up of phrases and World currency symbols. To further the idea of "nothing", I planned on blind embossing the letters so that it was black on black. I imagined the texture looking like a garlic/ginger grater. I set the type at a very small 4 points to form a smoother zero. But it was difficult to read and the blind emboss would never read on Amazon. So I simplified it to just using the US "$", increased the point size and dropped the idea of blind embossed and printed the letters in silver ink. The final cover prints in super glossy lamination with 2 hits of dense, rich black; metal tone silver ink for the small type and uses one of my favorite bright printing colors:
Lime Green PMS 375.
Earlier comps when the tentative title was ANTON'S BLINDNESS This idea was to put price tags/values on things that were considered priceless and not for sale. The sun, sky, trees. But I couldn't make the tags work in an elegant way. I also tried a barcode but got bored of that approach.
ANTON'S BLINDNESS is a neurological condition in which loss of sight is accompanies by an insistence and a belief that the patient can see. One of the key symptoms is the complicated confabulations needed to explain accidents that result of in fact being blind. We are like those patients in our blind belief in the free market and its accomplice prices. Why even now are we making complicated excuses for the failure of free market capitalism? As we witness the continuing financial and economic crisis, economist and activist Raj Patel asks us to consider why things cost what they do, and how we reclaim both the market and democracy.
The central premise of this book is that many of modern society’s strategies for nurturing children are in fact backfiring – because key twists in the science have been overlooked.
For some jobs, it can take a while to come up with an idea that you think is worth pursuing. Exploring endless ideas and directions with many, many variations both broad and minute. But sometimes you get a job where you know exactly what you want to do before the client is done with their intro brief. That was the case when Art Director Anne Twomey called me to discuss a new book on the subject of how we were raising kids all wrong by over praising them. I recalled reading a New York Magazine about this very subject. It turned out that the same authors wrote it. Over praising your child either develops high self-esteem and encourages them to strive higher. Or sets them up for failure. The authors use science to back up their claim that everything we thought about raising a child is working towards opposite results. Shocking! But whatever the opposing theories are, children were seen as delicate, fragile things caught in the middle. Treating them with kid's gloves. So by the time I hung up the telephone, I knew that an egg was the perfect metaphor. A white egg set against a white background. Simple and uncluttered. And the egg should be cracked. Suggesting both its fragile nature and the beginnings of coming out of its shell and ready to come into the world. I was going to shoot this myself but decided to see what was available through stock photos. I saw golden eggs, smashed eggs and cracked eggs. But visually, the idea was starting to look a little thin to me. Especially if I wanted to have the object against white. Then I saw an egg with a band-aid on it. That was a nice element of color to focus on. The band-aid could represent the child rearing that kept things together until it was ready to hatch. Or maybe it was stunting its growth and trapping them in a shell? It also made the perfect spot to the place the title. For a book that had a lot of attention and needed a “Big Book” commercial look, I’m happy that I was able to keep the execution clean and simple.
THE HAPPY BOOK shows how to practice and celebrate happiness so you can find it when you really need it. Packed with creative prompts, wacky ideas, and hip activities, this is the ultimate pick-me-up. Packaged to encourage doodling and drawing, THE HAPPY BOOK has space to scribble thoughts, make lists, fill in the blanks, and paste pictures. This book is about creating a record of what makes you glad, whether that means '80s hair bands or hot chocolate with churros.
Fully interactive and customizable for each reader, THE HAPPY BOOK allows today's social networking fans an offline outlet for play. From photo scavenger hunts to cake baking to finger painting, everyone's happy formula is unique. THE HAPPY BOOK enables readers to celebrate and share whatever gives them wall-to-wall joy.
This is a happy book I designed for my friend Rachel. I'm going to put in drawings of the World Series Champion NEW YORK YANKEES. Because THAT, makes me very happy.
Patrick Rush is a single father, unhappy with his career, devoted to his young son but haunted by the loss of his wife, when he joins a local writing group. In the candlelit studio where the circle meets, he finds one writer's work far more powerful than the others—a young woman named Angela, who writes about a girl stalked by a killer named the Sandman. But Angela's stories may be more autobiography than tall tale: soon the members of the group are being hunted by a shadowy figure resembling the Sandman, and the line between fiction and real life beings to dissolve. When his own son is taken, Patrick is forced to chase down the Sandman for himself and to discover the ending to his own terrifying story.
A sheet of writing paper with a delicate semi-circle paper-cut wound came to mind as I was talking with the editor. With a bit of blood pooling up behind it and beginning to run.
I emailed a quick, concept sketch to Jon Shireman to photograph:
Last night, I attended THE NIGHT OF THE ITALIANS. A celebration of Italian design presented by the Type Directors Club in the beautiful new SVA Theatre.
This was one of the best talk I’ve been to. Paola was an entertaining moderator who was funny, personal, and kept things moving along.
SOME HIGHLIGHTS:
The word Fili is Italian for “Threads”, Cavalli means “Horses”, and Mucca means “Cow”.
Francesco and Matteo are both from Milan, and Massimo is from Venice. Only Louise was born in America. New Jersey to be exact. Unlike the rest who wanted to come to America to pursue their design dreams, Louise was desperate to live in Italy. Ever since the time she first visited with her family at the age of 16. Because of her yearning for the culture roots of her parents, she embraced all things Italian and was influenced by its aesthetics. Her design reflects the most typically “Italian” of the four there.
But they all admitted that although Italy is a great place to be, they could not work there.
Most left Italy for greater opportunity. Masimo left because the ceiling was too low there. He found that NYC has no ceiling when it came to realizing your creativity. Matteo presented some typical advertisement work being done in Italy and said that THIS is the reason why you don’t want to work in Italy as a Designer. Making the transition from Italy to NYC wasn't hard to make because Milan is a very urban city and is as chaotic as NYC. But living in a city where stores and life doesn't close down for the weekend was very stimulating.
The post-Q&A section generated some very good responses from the panel.
One questioner, noticing that most of the works shown were print based, asked their thoughts on designing for the Internet. Massimo responded that BOOKS ARE DEAD! Yikes! But sadly not shocking. The printed books could only reach the amount of people that it can publish. But the Internet can reach millions around the world. Matteo added that books have had a good run at reaching people for over 500 years but in essence, has hit the ceiling. And the Internet does not have a ceiling in getting your message out. I think I need to look for another line of work.
Another question, “What is more important, the image or the copy?” was met with amused silence until Matteo answered, “The kerning.” This was a reference to Matteo's earlier remarks about his subtle redesign of the Victoria's Secret Logo, jokingly commenting, "We got paid a lot of money to do kerning."
A 4th year design student was concerned that his senior portfolio did not reflect an obvious “style” and would that be a problem for Art Directors hiring. Massimo responded that, “It’s not important to develop your own style but your approach.” To which Francesco added with no disrespect, “You are too young to develop a style.” He described our job as problem solvers and that your voice will come out on its own. Or else, you are just imitating someone else's look.
After the talk, there was Sicilian gelato served from L’Arte del Gelato for which Louise designed the logo. The line was very long and there was only one person scooping s-l-o-w-l-y. But the Stracciatella and pumpkin flavors were really delicious and worth the wait. It was great catching up with friends and the panel members were all accessible and having a great time. I love Louise. My Art Director and Mentor who taught me to be the Art Director and Designer I am today. When I’m around her, there’s a part of me that still trembles in awe. Just like how I felt when I was starting out as her design assistant at Pantheon Books. I was able to snag the event poster designed by Charles Nix. It was a fun night. The event ended with Matteo calling out to me as I was leaving. I turned and saw him flipping me the bird. Now That's Amore. Arriverderci.
Here are videos I was able to take of Louise and Matteo's presentations discussing their work and what it means to be an Italian designer:
Novelist, cultural commentator, memoirist, and historian Eva Hoffman examines our ever-changing perception of time in this inspired addition to the BIG IDEAS/small books series Time has always been the great given, the element that establishes the governing facts of human fate that cannot be circumvented, deconstructed, or wished away. But these days we are tampering with time in ways that affect how we live, the textures of our experience, and our very sense of what it is to be human. What is the nature of time in our time? Why is it that even as we live longer than ever before, we feel that we have ever less of this basic good? What effects do the hyper fast technologies—computers, video games, and instant communications—have on our inner lives and even our bodies? And as we examine biology and mind on evermore microscopic levels, what are we learning about the process and parameters of human time? Hoffman regards our relationship to time—from jet lag to aging, sleep to cryogenic freezing—in this broad, eye-opening meditation on life’s essential medium and its contemporary challenges.
It’s about Time, but what aspect of time? When you have plenty of it, it never comes to mind. You only think about it when you're running out of it. That’s what I needed to think about. With deadlines approaching and running out of time, I think and let go. Sometimes after the end of a long workday, with time standing still, I stare at my wall and my mind drifts. The afternoon’s setting sun begins to cast shadows of my windowpane across my office wall. It made me think of the long shadows of late August. That melancholy moment when you realize that summer is almost over. Where the sunlight becomes golden, hazy and lazy. That's when time makes itself known. When it tells me that moments are drifting away. Goodbye summer. That’s what time is to me. Fleeting moments. I’ve already established this BIG IDEAS series with a minimal color palette and minimal imagery. Using a golden color would be out of place. But I was also designing another subject in the BIG IDEAS/small books series about the British SIXTIES where I needed to incorporate the red, white and blue of the Union Jack. I had to break my rules. I placed my type along the shadow's edge. The transition point that separates day from night. Interesting thing about this image is that it’s not a photograph. I didn't want to use a stock image. It seemed simple enough to photograph live. But I was designing this in the wrong time of the year, winter. So I mocked up my concept by creating it in Photoshop with Gaussian blurs and gradient masks. I did have photographer Jon Shireman shoot this as he has for all of the other in this series. But I decided to stay with my mock up because it just seemed to capture the mood I wanted. Sorry Jon. But wait till you see what we came up for the next in the series, CHOICE. I can't wait to show you.
It's a beautiful autumn here in NYC and summer's a distant memory. Replaced with apple picking, butternut squash, crisp blue skies, rustling leaves, cocktail parties, great weather for leather and dressing in layers. Hello autumn! Did you have a nice summer?
Jackie Under My Skin is a passionate investigation of the ways Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis transformed America's definition of celebrity, identity, and style. In a gallery of fantasies and tableaux, Wayne Koestenbaum explains the late first lady’s hold on Americans by examining the myths and metaphors that we've attached to her. An exuberant paean to a great star, Jackie Under My Skin is also a meditation on fame, mortality, and the difficulty of defining desire.
It's hard to find an image of Jackie that hasn't been overused. Before I could dig too deep into my research for the perfect shot, the editor saw this Andy Warhol portrait and really wanted to use it. I was hesitant. But when I imported the image into my InDesign frame, it came in cropped and I thought, well that's an unusual look for her and a different way of interpreting this iconic image. I had to ask the Andy Warhol Foundation for permission to use the image in this way and surprisingly they said yes. Joseph Sullivan at The Book Design Review Blog felt that my cropping of the Warhol image was "Sinister". I'll accept that interpretation.
An apocalyptic comic novel about a deadly outbreak of plague, reincarnation, narcotics recovery, a family in trouble, and some Norse mythology.
I was really into Marvel Comics' THE MIGHTY THOR, the god of thunder when I was growing up. And through that I was introduced to Norse mythology. I found out that Wednesday was named after Odin/Wotan, Thursday after Thor's Day and Frigg/Freya for Friday. I also learned that Earth (Midgard) is connected to the Home of the Norse Gods (Asgard) by the Rainbow Bridge (Bifröst). And at the End of the World (Ragnarök "Doom of the Gods"), the Bow Bridge would be shattered.
I thought a broken rainbow would make a great visual for this book. The end of the road, the end of a dream. Hope interrupted. I wanted to find a sweet, sentimental vintage greeting card, full of rainbows and unicorns and then rip it up. But Thee Nay! None that was satisfying came up in my research and I moved on to a simpler approach.
Here are two versions where the rainbow broke to a black background, but the subtler approach without the black was chosen for the final: I instead used the black for the title type to add a subtle darker, sinister tone instead of making it ethereal soft white.
I'm a pop culture icon! Not really. But Entertainment Weekly Magazine mentioned how my cover design for Tom Perrotta's novel Little Children with it's green lawn background inspired copycat covers. If it's true, I'm flattered. But the kid is not my son. Although their mock cover for Leaves of Grass IS pretty brilliant.
Cover photograph by Wendy Idele
You can read a bit about the controversy surrounding the HC edition of Little Children with its Goldfish cracker cover that I was forced to change. Which I thought was perfect for the story.
JUDGING ASIAN AMERICANS BY OUR BOOK COVERS Hyphen Magazine, Winter 2008 by Banerjee, Neelanjana
Do stereotypical images reflect bad marketing or stilted writing-or both?
YOU WOULD THINK that in the publishing world where Asian Americans have had significant mainstream success we wouldn't still be subjected to exotified marketing. Yet when I sort through the Hyphen book box at our office, I see an array of stereotypical Asian images: lotus blossoms, flowing saris, flawless Asian faces. I know I'm not supposed to judge, but I sometimes have a hard time getting past the cover to read what's inside.
This may sound like a terrible admission for a book editor that I judge Asian American books by their covers. But let me ask you: Is Asian American culture only about chopsticks, geishas, fans and dragons? Or are we simply being reduced to stereotypes that sell?
Perhaps the trend of "chinking up" book covers comes directly from the success of Asian American authors. Last year, the National Endowment for the Arts study To Read or Not to Read showed that Americans are spending less on books than at almost any other time in the past two decades. So, since books about Asian Americans tend to do well - Amy Tan's stereotype-laden The Joy Luck Club (1989) still has millions of copies in print - publishers want to mark other books in the same way: with "authentic" cultural artifacts.
This makes me wonder if the pressure on Asian American writers to be "more Asian" hasn't grown worse lately. Judging by the endless memoirs about growing up in [insert Asian country here] that come through the Hyphen office, it seems that writers are succumbing to such pressure. Could it be that the bad book cover problem stems from (gasp!) the writing itself?
Henry Sene Yee, creative director of Picador Books, says that when it comes to book cover design, everything the designer does is coming from the book. "If you are an Asian American and you are writing about 18th century China, the writer is pigeonholing themselves in a way," Yee says. "Asian writers who are only writing about the Asian experience that limits [the designer] to work[ing] with certain images."
Yee is working on the paperback cover of Don Lee's farcical novel, Wrack and Ruin, about Lydon Song a sculptor who flees New York City to be a Brussels sprouts farmer in a coastal California town, only to have his brother try to sell the land to developers who want to build a golfcourse resort. So far, Yee has a close-up image of a Brussels sprout on a golf tee.
"His book isn't just about the Asian experience or the culture," Yee insisted, "so it was easier to come up with an idea."
Yee says the publishing industry is all about recognizable codes: "Russian constructivist font for Russian books; torn paper and beige for Westerns; italics, diamond rings and legs for women's fiction," he says. "The writer is tapping into this culture; so is the designer, and so is the reader."
But Sunyoung Lee, editor of indie Asian American publishing house Kaya Press, argues that publishing houses deserve some of the blame: "Mainstream publishers typically do a terrible job of designing book covers for Asian American authors though things seem to have improved recently from where they were in the 90s."
Lee's primary example of a poorly handled book cover is the 1995 anthology On a Bed of Rice: An Asian American Erotic Feast published by Anchor, an imprint of Doubleday. The cover features a blurry naked Asian woman on a bed, covering her private parts with a fan, with lilies in her hair and Chinese lettering printed over her body under book's English title.
But as Lee points out, it isn't just major presses making such covers. Take, for example, the Copper Canyon Press poetry book Spring Essence, published in 2000, a translation of the work of 17th century Vietnamese poet Ho Xuan Huong. On the cover is a photograph of a naked woman holding an enormous plate over her face.
"This was particularly upsetting to me precisely because Copper Canyon is such a wonderful press, with so many amazing authors and projects on their list, including this one," Lee says. "One of the points that [translator] John Balaban makes in his intro is that there are tons of double entendres in [Ho Xuan Huong's] poetry . . . that it was far racier than you might suspect. But to try to sell a Vietnamese classical female poet a literary hero, in fact with a naked, faceless woman! It still makes my blood boil."
Lee thinks that Copper Canyon had good intentions and probably didn't think the cover would be considered offensive. "But in a way, that's precisely the problem. They don't even see what the problem might be."
Writers and readers need to take the publishing industry to task for the way it pressurizes both the content and the marketing of Asian American books. Maybe that's what it would take to shift the focus to what's most important: the writing.
Neelanjana Banerjee, Hyphen's Books Editor, is only judgmental when it comes to books, really.
Copyright Hyphen Magazine Winter 2008 Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved
about this book A mesmerizing narrative about the rise and fall of an unlikely international crime boss
In the 1980s, a wave of Chinese from Fujian province began arriving in America. Like other immigrant groups before them, they showed up with little money but with an intense work ethic and an unshakeable belief in the promise of the United States. Many of them lived in a world outside the law, working in a shadow economy overseen by the ruthless gangs that ruled the narrow streets of New York’s Chinatown.
The figure who came to dominate this Chinese underworld was a middle-aged grandmother known as Sister Ping. Her path to the American dream began with an unusual business run out of a tiny noodle store on Hester Street. From her perch above the shop, Sister Ping ran a full-service underground bank for illegal Chinese immigrants. But her real business-a business that earned an estimated $40 million-was smuggling people.
As a “snakehead,” she built a complex—and often vicious—global conglomerate, relying heavily on familial ties, and employing one of Chinatown's most violent gangs to protect her power and profits. Like an underworld CEO, Sister Ping created an intricate smuggling network that stretched from Fujian Province to Hong Kong to Burma to Thailand to Kenya to Guatemala to Mexico. Her ingenuity and drive were awe-inspiring both to the Chinatown community—where she was revered as a homegrown Don Corleone—and to the law enforcement officials who could never quite catch her.
Indeed, Sister Ping’s empire only came to light in 1993 when the Golden Venture, a ship loaded with 300 undocumented immigrants, ran aground off a Queens beach. It took New York’s fabled “Jade Squad” and the FBI nearly ten years to untangle the criminal network and home in on its unusual mastermind.
THE SNAKEHEAD is a panoramic tale of international intrigue and a dramatic portrait of the underground economy in which America’s twelve million illegal immigrants live. Based on hundreds of interviews, Patrick Radden Keefe’s sweeping narrative tells the story not only of Sister Ping, but of the gangland gunslingers who worked for her, the immigration and law enforcement officials who pursued her, and the generation of penniless immigrants who risked death and braved a 17,000 mile odyssey so that they could realize their own version of the American dream. The Snakehead offers an intimate tour of life on the mean streets of Chinatown, a vivid blueprint of organized crime in an age of globalization and a masterful exploration of the ways in which illegal immigration affects us all.
WHERE THE SNAKEHEAD SLITHERED Key locations from Patrick Radden Keefe's The Snakehead, which documents the rise and fall of Chinatown's immigrant-smuggling kingpin, mild-mannered Sister Ping, and its most vicious gangster, Ah Kay. —New York magazine, July 26, 2009
Beginning on August 9, 1945, in Nagasaki, and ending in a prison cell in the US in 2002, as a man is waiting to be sent to Guantanamo Bay, Burnt Shadows is an epic narrative of love and betrayal.
Hiroko Tanaka is twenty-one and in love with the man she is to marry, Konrad Weiss. As she steps onto her veranda, wrapped in a kimono with three black cranes swooping across the back, her world is suddenly and irrevocably altered. In the numbing aftermath of the atomic bomb that obliterates everything she has known, all that remains are the bird-shaped burns on her back, an indelible reminder of the world she has lost. In search of new beginnings, two years later, Hiroko travels to Delhi. It is there that her life will become intertwined with that of Konrad's half sister, Elizabeth, her husband, James Burton, and their employee Sajjad Ashraf, from whom she starts to learn Urdu.
With the partition of India, and the creation of Pakistan, Hiroko will find herself displaced once again, in a world where old wars are replaced by new conflicts. But the shadows of history--personal and political--are cast over the interrelated worlds of the Burtons, the Ashrafs, and the Tanakas as they are transported from Pakistan to New York and, in the novel's astonishing climax, to Afghanistan in the immediate wake of 9/11. The ties that have bound these families together over decades and generations are tested to the extreme, with unforeseeable consequences.
The title Burnt Shadows refers to the crane shaped patterns from the protagonist's kimono that was burnt onto her back when she was exposed to the atomic blast while in Nagasaki waiting for her German officer lover. Whew. It represented a constant reminder of the world she lost and marked her as an outsider trying to find happiness but is swept up in historical events. Instead of trying to illustrate the epic scope of the story, I wanted to focus on that. But it could easily turn out looking grotesque. I needed to find a more painterly and beautiful approach to creating the image. Marc Yankus is always dropping by my office to show me his beautiful photographs. They're more like paintings. Really stunning. I'm always looking for a project that we could work on together and this seemed perfect.
Marc had his close friend Minnie pose for him. Focusing on the back of the woman, she couldn't appear too provocative but had to appear as if she was baring her soul and her shame. A moment of intimate trust. Of the contact sheet, this shot of Minnie looked particularly vulnerable. We then looked for crane references. Most of the stock art and Dover books sources were too stiff and graphic. I wanted something more painterly and soft. I thought that kimonos would be a good bet. But oddly enough, we had a difficult time finding kimonos with the right crane patterns. We looked all over NYC. We checked kimono stores, the famous Japanese bookstore Kinokuniya, a private dealer of Japanese rare prints, the New York Public Library Picture Collection but none were right. It seemed easier to recreate it ourselves. So I hired my go to image maker Philip Pascuzzo to create a flying crane and ocean waves in the style of Japanese woodblock prints. Marc then took Phil's drawings and arranged them into his composition. The wooden bracket from a piece of Marc's furniture was added to the back cover to suggest the India portion of the story. I kept the type solution quiet. The gradient sky was inspired by the Japanese screen painter Ando Hiroshige (1797-1858) and Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849).
Cover photograph by Justine Kurland // Mitchell-Innes & Nash
Juxtaposing the most common and the most gothic, the humorous and the tragic, Jeffrey Eugenides creates a vivid and compelling portrait of youth and lost innocence. He takes us back to the elm-lined streets of suburbia in the seventies, and introduces us to the men whose lives have been forever changed by their fierce, awkward obsession with five doomed sisters: brainy Therese, fastidious Mary, ascetic Bonnie, libertine Lux, and pale, saintly Cecilia, whose spectacular demise inaugurates "the year of the suicides." This is the debut novel that caused a sensation and won immediate acclaim from the critics--a tender, wickedly funny tale of love and terror, sex and suicide, memory and imagination.
The cover of Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex, which I designed with Olga Grlic, is still one of my favorite designs and favorite books. So when Picador got the rights to republish The Virgin Suicides in paperback, I was excited to get the chance to repackage it.
Great typography huh?
I absolutely loved Sofia Coppola's debut film version of the book. So it was hard not to be influenced by the look and tone of the movie. I wanted to stay away from depicting any direct scenes from the book and go with images that suggested the spirit of the writing. Jeffrey and my Publisher also wanted to go for a modern American classic look.
Working with a limited budget, commissioning a new piece would be difficult so I looked for artist that dealt with similar themes in their work. Hoping to find something in their collection that would resonate sympathetically.
Jeffrey had suggested the Dutch photographer and video artist, Rineke Dijkstra. She photographed an early series of adolescent bathers in the United States and Eastern Europe in 1992 that dealt with their discomfort over their bodies. Children who seem at odds with their own bodies as they confront puberty. I contacted her representative at the Marian Goodman Gallery and we looked over her work and selected this image entitled, "Hel, Poland, August 12, 1998". Even though it didn't have a direct link to the story, it captured the mood.
Reineke's image was gorgeous but it was decided that a young girl in a bathing suit was too far away from the book. I remembered when we were brainstorming for MIDDLESEX, Jeffrey had suggested using one of sculpture/performance/video artist Matthew Barney pieces from his Cremaster Cycle on the cover. Interesting idea because they both dealt with early moments of sexual development that represented a condition of pure potentiality. But it would just be too disconnecting to most readers.
Another photographer that I had worked with on a previous book, Serious Girls came to mind. Justine Kurland, the fine-art photographer. She first became known for a series that depicted fierce feral teenage girls running wild in nature that addressed female identity without appearing passive or seductive. I thought she would be perfect for this.
I got in touch with Justine's gallery Mitchell-Innes & Nash and asked if they had anything that would be related to the book. They were very helpful. Justine sent me two images that she thought would work.
This image entitled MIDSUMMER NIGHT:
Beautiful and appropriate. But I loved her second image entitled ORCHARD:
It wasn't depicting anything that actually happened but was a visualization of a group of young men's nostalgia for the unattainable girls of their youth. The Lisbon sisters of their memory. Below, Justine describes in an email her inspiration for the photo after I sent the comps to Jeffrey.
hi henry,
great. I hope something works out. I loved that book, and actually read it the same time I was making the girl pictures. my favorite part, which was completely missing from the movie, was the hyperbolic fantasy life of girls imagined from the point of view of the boys, forever unknowable. for that, my strongest recommendation would be "the orchard"
How about that? It was as if I commissioned her for this book. It all came together nicely in the end. My Publisher and I loved it, and so did Jeffrey and his wife. DeLUX.
A Video Conversation with Jeffrey Eugenides in The New York Times Book Review The author discussed his celebrated novels, "The Virgin Suicides" and "Middlesex," and the decline of his hometown, Detroit, with Sam Tanenhaus, the editor of the Book Review. Jeffrey's opening words warmed my heart. :) <3
Critics have compared Eric Kraft to Proust, Pynchon, and Fred Astaire—an artful, slyly intelligent, wildly inventive observer of Americana. Now Eric Kraft has landed an ambitious comedy set both in our present and in an alternative 1950s universe—Flying.
It is the tail end of the 1950s, and in the town of Babbington, New York, a young dreamer named Peter Leroy has set out to build a flying motorcycle, using a design ripped from the pages of Impractical Craftsman magazine. This two-wheeled wonder will carry him not only to such faraway places as New Mexico and the Summer Institute in Mathematics, Physics, and Weaponry, but deep into the heart of commercialized American culture, and return him to Babbington a hero. More than forty years later, as Babbington is about to rebuild itself as a theme park commemorating his historic flight, Peter must return home to set the record straight, and confess that his flight did not match the legend that it inspired.
Author Eric Kraft has always been our undiscovered gem. We had previously published over five titles in another series based around his character Peter Leroy. Like his stories, the books were packaged around retro and nostalgia. They were all Illustrated beautifully and whimsically by collage artist Marty Blake and were designed in a visually connective series format. But for some reason they didn't sell as well as we hoped. And when books don't sell, it's usually blamed on the jacket. But when they do well, the jacket had nothing to do with it. But that's another story. All illustrations by Marty Blake // All designs by Henry Sene Yee
For his latest series Flying, it was published as a planned trilogy with the first two books already released in hardcover by St. Martin's Press. To give the books more attention, it was decided to skip the release of the third book as a hardcover and publish all three as a one volume original paperback book instead. And repackage it with a new look that didn't rely on retro and nostalgia. I wanted to strip all that away. Make it clean and take the focus off of the objects in the character's past and instead place the emphasis on the emotions of the character. The main character is a Big Dreamer. He builds a plane in his garage out of junkyard scraps and repurposed motorcycle parts until he finally takes flight and reaches for his dreams amongst the clouds...or does he?
The book made me think of the Terry Gilliam movie, BRAZIL. The visuals and the nihilistic Orwellian tones left an impression on me when I first saw it. I remembered the dream sequence where Jonathan Pryce's character escapes his oppressive life and sees himself as an armored angel flying through clouds. Up there he sees his love interest floating ethereally amongst the clouds. I thought this scene resonated with the book and man's state of mind. The images of clean, billowy clouds and blue skies. A future seen through Steampunk sensibilities.
I pictured a plane taking flight through these idealized dreamy clouds, going off page until you just see its tail section. When you followed it onto the spine and back cover, you saw that it wasn't flying, but resting on cinder blocks on a hilltop. Showing that this plane never really got off the ground. I've been wanting to work with photographer Scott Nobles for some time. While talking over the concept, the original idea of the front end of the plane resting on a hill would be difficult to visualized. The angle was wrong. It would end up looking as if it crashed into the hill instead of resting on it. Looking through Scott's website, I saw that he worked with ephemera and paper as textures in his photos. We came up with the idea that the back cover, that represented the reality, would work as a blueprint. This would also put across that it was a dream that was never realized past the planning stage. Plus, it would carry the conceptual themes from front to back. Plane to plan, blue skies with white clouds to blueprints with white lines. I decided that we could use some retro as long as we kept it to the back. Scott found some model planes online and I hired Phil Pascuzzo to create the plane schematics and it all came together nicely.
Wraparound French Flap with Rough Front Paperback:
Scott's Test Shots:
Model Plane:
Phil's Blueprint Drawing:
Scott's Alternate Clouds. These clouds had a great mood. But I wanted them to be clumpy and tangible. I thought that would better suggest graspable dreams than an overall, even spread of puffery. And I also wanted to have some groups of clouds so that I could interact with the title type.
This New York Times Op-Ed piece, America's Guardian Myth written by the author Susan Faludi explains the book better than I can.
NY Public Library Picture Collection
This was a difficult subject to package. I wanted to focus on one aspect of the book and I chose the "Heroic Cowboy" myth. Where women needed men's protection and men were able to provide it. This was the turning point where America's persona was formed. I thought using a classic John Wayne pose as a silhouette would be an arresting image. But it was determined that it wasn't saying enough of what the book was about. It had to look epic and expansive. The only way to portray the story that my Publisher wanted was to depict the entire history with multiple images. From Pre-Revolutionary America where homesteads were attacked, the women kidnapped with nothing that the men could do to protect them. To the growing myth of the cowboy savior, hopeful stories of the cowboy defeating the Indians and protecting the women, to the resurgence of that ideal in Post-9/11 America and heroic rescue of Private Lynch. But this was beginning to sound like a recipe for image/story overload.
My first device to contain all of these ideas was to create a shadow box or diorama of these scenes. Looking through them as if we were peering through history. I had recently seen the Kara Walker exhibition at the Whitney Museum and I was blown away by her animated shadow puppet films. So graphic and full of energy. I had started seeing Illustrator Andrea Dezsö work around in magazines and went to her web site. The range of her visual expression was amazing. She had the technique, style and flow that I thought would be perfect in telling this complex story in a simpler form. I called her up and it turned out that she was already familiar with the book because she had illustrated the author's New York Times Op-Ed piece. So from the start, I felt confident about the two of us tackling this project together. After several brainstorming discussions, we soon scrapped the idea of a dimensional picture box because it was unnecessarily complicated and decided to try this on one level.
Below are Andrea's sketches and her email comments.
Andrea: I did a layered composition where the layers represent time periods from the past (top) to the present (bottom). The top shows different versions of the "fight with the indians" story. In some scenes the cowboy is the rescuer in others the cowboy is huddling behind the tree and the woman fights. The bottom layer refers to the Jessica Lynch rescue fiction by US Special troops. Me: Beautiful! But too busy and too much story to figure out. Let's edit it down and concentrate on just 3 aspects.
Andrea: (Top): women fight indians (I took the guys out from here because I wanted to concentrate on the bravery of women and show them in an unusual way as fighters also to contrast that image more with the ones where men rescue women) (Middle): Cowboy myth--cowboy rescues woman (Bottom): GIs rescue Jessica Lynch reference or the contemporary myth. I think the images can go as one continuous block or be cut into 3 scenes however it would fit your typography better. I LOVE the stark stripped-down to the essence black and white idea:
Me: The Jessica Lynch/hospital bed story isn't coming across. I don't want to include the burning twin towers. But in the end, this was the terrible moment that President Bush used to justify his actions. So let's try fitting that in:
Me: It works, but please remove the 2nd plane.
The sketches were then photographed to suggest the original diorama box idea and to feel like a nightmare seen through a television:
Alternate comps: Too small on the page. Nice but too ghostly and wintery.
The final cover was printed as a 4/C over Metallic Silver Ink, PMS 877 with Glossy Film Lamination.
Authors@Google presents Susan Faludi // September 11, 2008
(Click on the link DESIGNING A BOOK COVER-101 to go to the Vimeo site to view a larger, higher-res version)
Back in early 2001, I was asked to give a presentation to our Sales Department at the St. Martin's Press / Picador Sales Conference to describe very simply, what went into designing a book cover. I chose the topic of working with different types of art. Showing one example each of working with an illustrator, a photographer and creating artwork myself. Since this was done in 2001, you'll notice I made note of the use of the emerging new technologies that were starting to change the way we did things. Sketches sent to me electronically via email, Using eBay and the Internet as a source for research, taking portraits using a digital camera instead of shooting on film for instant viewing and cost savings, and retouching digitally. This was also the first time I used PowerPoint and I enjoyed working with the different ways you could transition between one element to the next to convey the story. Although in exporting the PowerPoint as a movie, I lost many of the subtle scene shifts. So I'm presenting it as is. It may be a little hard to follow without me narrating. But you'll get the general idea. I added the music to fill in the dead space.
First you start with a blank page, stare and think really hard, drink lots of coffee, take lots of breaks, fix the copier jam, update your Facebook page, get over the fears that this project is the one that will finally expose you as the hack that you are, and then just trust to do what you feel is right from what you've read, present your ideas to find out how they live outside of your head, listen to feedback, try to leave work at a decent hour, have a life, floss, get enough sleep, have a good breakfast and come back the next day to redo it all over again. It's that simple and fun. And if it isn't, then get another blank page and start all over again.
Followers
Henry Sene Yee
is the Creative Director of PICADOR.
A BFA graduate of the School of Visual Arts in NYC, he started his career in editorial design freelancing at Condé Nast and Rolling Stone magazine and got his first job in book publishing working for Louise Fili, the Art Director at Pantheon Books / Random House. He left to work at St. Martin's Press as a Senior Designer eventually promoted to Senior Art Director Deluxe and to his current position at Picador, a leading literary trade paperback imprint launched in 1995. He has won numerous awards including AIGA's 50 Books / 50 Covers, The Art Directors Club GOLD Cube Winner, The Type Directors Club, The New York Book Show, The Society of Illustrators, Print Magazine's Regional Design Annual, Communication Arts, Graphic Design USA, and Graphis magazine. He can always be seen with a camera in one hand and a coffee in the other. Say hi the next time you see him riding by you on his Brompton folding bike. Or better yet, the first round of martinis.
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