(Above) Post running the approval gauntlet.
THE ACADEMY OF BRITISH COVER DESIGN
In 2014, two notable book cover designers, Jon Gray (AKA Gray318) and Jamie Keenan, were becoming increasingly frustrated at the unsympathetic treatment received by book cover designers from the editorial/book jury at the annual D&AD Awards and the expensive entry fees. So, like the early pioneering designers who started D&AD back in 1963 to create a greater awareness of design and art direction in the UK, Jon and Jamie started their own awards, but this time to fly the flag for book covers in all their categories. Over the past five years, the duo have created a standalone, democratically run, annual awards event, centred firmly on the design discipline of book covers. There is no entry fee, no annual and no exhibition, and I think the awards evening is free too.
Last year, over 1,000 covers were entered, broken down into ten categories. PDFs are distributed to specialist juries, who are all designers who are either freelance or working within publishing houses. It is their task to whittle down the entries to six covers in each category. Presumably, embossing, varnishing, paper or board is not considered in the process. Finally, on the awards night, everyone that entered covers is invited along. With a beer to hand, the collective vote on each category to select a winner. The results are announced on the night. Even the physical award tends to be a recycled book with a clever addition to make it memorable. Now in their sixth year, the ABCD Awards have gained attention from the publishing industry as a barometer of the best work emanating from the world of book cover design and recognition of the many young designers working in a highly competitive area.
I have to own up to the fact that I’d never heard of the ABCD Awards until I received a number of tweets, unhappy with an unfavourable comment I’d made about a cover design, along with the fact that I had mentioned that no book covers were included in last year's D&AD Annual. “Look at the ABCD Awards!” many tweeted. So I did and even met with one of the organisers. However, looking more closely, they are very London centric. Checking through the recently announced jury for 2019, everyone is here in the capital. I think it unlikely that small regional publishers or designers would travel hundreds of miles to attend the event. So, I suspect we are only getting a London take on cover design. Also, I’d be interested to know just how the big vote on the night actually works.
My original premise for these blog posts on the state of British book cover design, which have become rather elongated, came from my regular Facebook posts showing covers, mostly on the tables of Waterstones. My comments were generally disparaging, and my reasons for this were twofold. Firstly, the cover presentation had remarkable similarity. Secondly, many of the covers were overly burdened with ever-larger type and additional copy on the fronts.
“In an analysis of 2017’s books and reading habits, the appearance of hand-painted letters dominated US book cover designs this year. So did orange-red covers with black and white font and close-ups of a half-occluded face awash in gold and shadows.”
AMAZON
Amazon, along with an increasing number of blogs, has taken to spotting trends in book covers, as in the above.
I also felt that there was a lack of individuality. Ironically, the works of two design heroes of many of the current generation of book cover designers, Alvin Lustig and Paul Rand, are both instantly recognisable. Today, the idea of ‘the personal hand’ seems to be a no-no. The American ‘rock star’ designer Chip Kidd, who surfaced in the ’80s, quickly demonstrated ever-increasing variation in his design output, and the ‘no style’ approach caught on with the wider design community. Publishers now expect a continuous flow of variety from commissioned designers, but very few can successfully achieve this. So, you tend to see a lot of replication and borrowing going on. Pinterest geeks love pairing covers that use identical techniques, such as water-blurred type, torn internal spaces, layered paper, consciously naive hand-painted lettering, string, elastic bands, Elastoplast, pins, retro aged covers, printed ephemera, etc. And the quote above shows that Amazon is on the trend-setting hunt. I find it depressing. A scroll through the websites of many designers working for the publishing industry, both here and in the US, will also demonstrate what I mean. Everything is instantly available to appropriate, quote or steal. None of that delayed gratification from those hazy old analogue days: it’s here and right now.
“Nobody ever built a statue to a committee.”
ROGER STONE
Until relatively recently, publishers had to pay for their books to be placed on the tables in bookshops or for specific positions in the store. No doubt when that happened, a lot more pressure was put on the cover to perform miracles. Sales, marketing and promotion departments pile in with their suggestions, with the resulting compromise through design by committee. The age-old formula for achieving this starts with “make the type as large as possible”, blah, blah, blah. If it were only that simple, there would be no remaindered books being sold at a fraction of their cover prices in the graveyard bookshops.
The fact is that there are some terrific covers being designed, but finding them in bookstores is another matter. When there were a greater number of independent bookshops, you would find them. It’s a bit like choosing between going to a multiplex cinema, where you find a diet of blockbuster films, with all the noise and hype that accompany them, or going to a Curzon cinema, where the films have been carefully selected for an audience looking for something more meaningful that expands the notion of cinema. Sadly, the independent bookshop equivalent of Curzon is a dying breed, brought about by escalating rents and the might of Amazon.
BRAND AUTHENTICITY
“Miss Lewis had, at last, managed to get the new Kate O’Brien for me. I believe she’d kept it hidden under the counter for two days.”
LAURA, 'BRIEF ENCOUNTER' (1945)
But there are still single-minded independent publishers dotted around Britain, quietly doing great things with the minimum of staff or the specialist departments of the London-based conglomerates. One of these is Persephone Books, tucked away in Bloomsbury, just a short walk from Mecklenburgh Square, home to Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press back in 1917. I met with Persephone’s founder, Nicola Beauman, to talk about how it all started. There is a scene in the classic British movie Brief Encounter (above) where Cecilia Johnson (as Laura) is collecting a book she had ordered from the Boots Library – yes, Boots had its own libraries in the 1940s/’50s. Nicola kept that image in her head when she was formulating her idea for Persephone. What books would Laura have read and loved? Now in its 21st year, Persephone has gone from a few hundred enthusiastic readers back in 1998 to over 30,000 today. And what occurred to me while talking to Nicola is the fact that she has created the true meaning of a ‘brand’. It is a complete reflection of what she believes her publishing house should be, down to the last detail. No committees, just her. It is such a delight to know that this kind of independence still exists in this crazy age. Ironically, the Woolfs’ Hogarth Press is now part of the conglomerate Random House.
“...whether they are on an office desk, by the Aga, or hanging in a bag over the handles of a pram, it is important to take pleasure from how they look and feel.”
NICOLA BEAUMAN ON PERSEPHONE BOOKS
Persephone hunts down neglected fiction and non-fiction by mid-20th-century women writers and now has 150 books in print. It is located in a little shop on Lamb’s Conduit Street, Bloomsbury. Here, everyone, including Nicola Beauman, often glimpsed behind a vase of freshly cut flowers, sits working away in the space. The lighting is warm and at a low level. On the walls are an eclectic mix of posters from the 1920s to ’50s, juxtaposed with a classic Massimo Vignelli wall calendar, along with aprons and mugs for sale. Below that are shelves filled with Persephone books, sporting their distinctive grey covers. “I don’t like book covers,” Nicola told me over a croissant and coffee in a nearby cafe, but what is very clear is that she does care. There is an intuitive sense of style ticking away in her heard. She takes great care over her books’ production. Printed in Germany, the process uses what is known as ‘dispersion binding’ – this allows the book to open and lay flat, with none of that irritating springing shut. The endpapers are carefully selected textile designs sourced from the period of the novel’s publication. The distinctive grey covers were inspired by the New York coffee shop Dean & DeLuca’s cardboard cups.
The Persephone shop is instantly loveable, with all of Persephone’s staff making it their place to keep in touch with their customers on social media and running afternoon events throughout the year where authors and books are discussed. Persephone is one woman’s vision realised.
“...investing in the production, presentation, and design, of quality books”.
FIGHTING HIGH PUBLISHING
Another small independent firm is Fighting High Publishing, based in Hertfordshire. The company specialises in non-fiction books focusing on human endeavour, particularly in a historical military setting.
(Above) A sampling of beautifully considered covers by Truth Studio.
The Sheffield-based design group Truth Studio, founded by Michael Lindley, has worked closely with Fighting High, creating a stream of rather wonderful covers that are intelligent, sensitive, carefully considered and a delight to look at –far removed from the aggressive, shouty approach of the London-based conglomerates. I applaud Fighting High for their care and individuality in the presentation of their covers. There is a distinction in their consistency.
There are many other small publishers up and down the UK that present their covers in a non-hysterical or insulting fashion.
THE ATLANTIC DIVIDE
I promised to feature covers, both British and American, that I would single out as special. Here they are.
OUR AMERICAN FRIENDS
Henry Sene Yee
Pail Sahre
Rodrigo Corral
Peter Mendelsund
David Drummond
Chip Kidd
Ka Kim
Gabriele Wilson
Linda Huang
THE BRITS
Suzanne Dean
Jeffrey Alan-Love
Paul Wolterrink
Jamie Keenan
Sinew Erkas
David Pearson
Justine Anweller
Jon Gray (Gray318)
THE MAVERICKS
While many cover designers are having to be, or perhaps want to be, the Jack/Janice of all trades, there are others who present a clearly defined personality in their work. Here are six of my favourites.
Sara Fanelli A true eccentric in approach, producing playful and highly individual intelligent work.
Vaughan Oliver A designer with an instantly recognisable personality, often with a magical surrealist quality.
Alan Kitching The man who turned thousands of young design graduates of the digital age onto the physicality and potential of letterpress printing. His work is powerful, beautiful and individual.
Laura Carlin A major talent in illustration, hand lettering and composition. Her work conveys real emotion without sentimentality and is a joy to behold. Her influence over the last two decades is very clear.
Tony Meuwissen There are few whom I would attach the word ‘genius’ to, but Tony is one of them. The ultimate perfectionist with the ability to create pure magic on the page.
Marion Deuchars From the mid-1980s, Marion’s work has evolved from abstract paint and collage work, through developing her recognisable hand-lettering style (which has inspired designers around the world) on to reducing her tools to simple ingredients of poster paints, coloured paper, scissors and glue for the creation of exuberant and joyful books for the young to get physically stuck into, rather than being glued to a phone.
AND IN THE END...
In the final analysis, graphic design is the most interfered-with area of creativity: just about everyone has an opinion, especially when it comes to the book cover At the end of the line is the poor designer, who is never in the room when their work is being dissected, but they have to take the flack, brush themselves down and still try to pull something together. And if it were not hard enough, a sales director at one of the big three houses has got support from the industry, and The Publishers Association, to have traffic light labelling on front covers, for crime/romance/historical/adult*. So, watch out: you’ll soon have to accommodate that into your design.
And thinking about the long line of ‘artists’ who have designed book covers since the 1920s, including Edward Bawden, Paul Nash, Eric Ravilious, Rex Whistler, Graham Sutherland, Ben Nicholson, Barnett Freeman, Eric Gill, Ben Shahn, Picasso, David Hockney and many more, I very much doubt if any of them had to run the critical gauntlet imposed on the graphic designers of today. And on those rare occasions when the British graphic designer could shine (e.g. posters for the London Olympics and more recently the 2016 Rio Olympics), who gets the gig? Well, the fine artists of course...
Tracey Emin effort
And Eddie Peake
And as can be seen the results are underwhelming and embarrassing. But the establishment figures responsible for the commission, praise them to high heaven.
“Cover design is a ghetto that’s hard to get into but even harder to get out of...”
ANGUS HYLAND
Anyway, back on track. It is the publisher’s entourage who are responsible for suppressing great, original work. There is timidity, watering down and a committee mentality prevailing, and the overwhelming result of that can be seen in bookshops. It would be wonderful to distribute pens and sheets of blank paper to the cover approval group and say: “Okay, so you don’t think the cover is good enough? I’ll be back in an hour. Let’s see what you all come up with.” The fact is, they couldn’t design themselves out of a paper bag.
So, that is the end of my little story. As originally mentioned, I wouldn’t have bothered to share all this if I didn’t really care. But I do and will continue to do so because it is a potentially wonderful area of design to be involved in.
I have a simple solution when it comes to covers that I can’t bear: I cover them with brown paper.
* What, you actually believed that? Come on, it was a joke. I had to lighten this whole story somehow.
If you missed the other parts here they are: