LITERARY LUNCH - Various
Literary Lunch combines two of the best things in life – food and literature. From Bridget Jones’s Blue Soup to Mary’s Mango Pickle of Guilt from Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, there’s a dish and a story for all tastes. Dublin based commercial artist Niall McCormack was tasked with the job of creating a suitably enticing cover design:
The starting inspiration was some recipe book covers from the late 1940s and early 1950s, The Small Canteen by G. Cumberlege and Mushrooms Galore by André Simon.
I created some designs based on repeat patterns using book and food icons as elements. I use a lot of texture in my work and love the look of rough print on coarse paper that is particular to so much mid-century ephemera.
A new colourway was suggested along with a move away from the repeat pattern approach, although one of the original designs, in the new colours, appears as a pattern on the inside cover of the finished book.
I developed some new drafts using bold silhouettes of cooking utensils and stationary in various combinations. A typewriter was introduced to address the balance and a final arrangement agreed upon.“
Literary Lunch is
published by Vintage books today.
THE SONG MACHINE - John Seabrook (part 2)
A book about music needs a little music… so get your headphones on!
VERMILION SANDS - JG Ballard
October 21, 2015 marks Back to the Future Day – and while flying cars and hover boards are still yet to take off, forward thinking design is very much at the heart of our growing series of 3D covers.
An early pioneer in the popular genre of modern dystopian fiction, J G Ballard’s Vermilion Sands is set in a fictitious desert resort populated by the rich and disenchanted. We commissioned design duo Kai and Sunny who shared some of their thought processes behind the cover:
‘Designing in 3D was a new challenge after research and testing we worked out how we could apply it to our design.
The main issue for us was playing with the amount you split the colours to create different depths.
We wanted the cover to feel dynamic with movement to enhance the 3D concept. We wanted the cover to be suggestive of another worldly place. We’ve used sharp angular shapes to convey flying debris. The idea of futuristic rubbish, decaying strewn over the hot sand. The background lines represent the sand and also adds movement. The type links with the debris and strengthens the idea of this rusty jagged and fractured world’.
WORLDS ELSEWHERE - Andrew Dickson
Anti-apartheid Activist, Bollywood Screenwriter, Nazi Pin-Up, Hero of the Wild West: This is Shakespeare as you have never seen him before.
Travelling across four continents, six countries and 400 years, Worlds Elsewhere sees author Andrew Dickson take us on a personal journey rich in insight and surprise. From the sixteenth-century Baltic to the American Revolution, from colonial India to the skyscrapers of modern-day Shanghai, Shakespeare’s plays appear at the most fascinating of times and in the most unexpected of places.
For the cover we commissioned Andy Bridge to take the iconic Shakespeare bust and illustrate him in different guises. Working with metal and paint, Andy created the cover image in 3D which was then photographed from the front and behind to create the finished jacket.
Available now from The Bodley Head.
The Man Booker Prize 2015
The winner of this years Man Booker Prize will be announced tonight at The Guildhall. Congratulations to our two Vintage authors for being shortlisted, and the best of luck tonight.
THE BODLEY HEAD - Trade Paperbacks
Five all-time classic titles that have had a deserved makeover for our Bodley Head Trade Paperback series - see more of the series on the CMYK Facebook Page.
Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation has been described as ‘Probably the single most influential document in the history of animal welfare’.
Goddesses, Whores and Slaves is a foundational text of feminism that sits alongside Germaine Greer’s ‘The Female Eunuch’.
Walter Benjamin needs no introduction - simply one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century.
The Rise of the Novel by Ian Watt is a landmark classic that reveals the origins and explains the success of the most popular literary form of all time
And Colin Turnbull’s The Forest People - an intimate account of a hunter-gatherer tribe living in harmony with nature.
These books speak for themselves, so it was important to not overcomplicate the message. The clarity of a single, strong image was the key to making a successful cover.
THE RACER – David Millar
As one of the country’s most talented cyclists, David MIllar was the first Briton to wear the leader’s jerseys in the Tour De France, Vuelta a Espana and Giro d’Italia. With The Racer, he offers us a unique insight into the mind of a professional in this brutal sport.
Featuring beautiful photography by Nadav Kander, The Racer reveals the scars, sights, smells and sounds of life on the World Tour.
It is a love letter to cycling.
The Racer is published by Yellow Jersey Press.
CITY ON FIRE - Garth Risk Hallberg
The build-up to Garth Risk Hallberg’s forthcoming novel is gathering pace. Back in June we introduced you to Charlie Weisbarger, Billy Three Sticks amongst others as part of our seven part superproof http://bit.ly/1MI2edM. With the book cover to be announced next month, this short animation of the cover artwork hints at the novel’s scope and the sights and sounds of New York 1977.
This is a book you wouldn’t want to miss.
Based on original artwork by Bill Bragg.
Published by Jonathan Cape next month
(Source: youtube.com)
GHOSTLY - Audrey Niffenegger
Ghostly, the eclectic collection of short stories featuring haunted houses, spectral chills and the odd cat. The book is edited, illustrated and introduced by Audrey Niffenegger. Ghostly is published by Vintage Classics.
THE WHITE ROAD - Edmund de Waal
‘It is really quite simple, a pilgrimage of sorts – a chance to walk up the mountain where the white earth comes from.’
Acclaimed potter and author of The Hare with Amber Eyes, Edmund de Waal shares his obsession with porcelain in this beautiful new book. He sets out on a journey which spans a thousand years, and enlightens us with the story of ‘white gold’.
The jacket, photgraphed by ian Skelton, shows some of the pieces Edmund unearthed during his quest.
BLACK EARTH - Timothy Snyder
We have come to see the Holocaust as a factory of death, organised by
bureaucrats. Yet by the time the gas chambers became operation more than a
million European Jews were already dead: shot at close range over pits and
ravines. They had been murdered in the lawless killing zones created by the
German colonial war in the East, many on the fertile black earth that the Nazis
believed would feed the German people.
In this epic history of extermination and survival, Timothy Snyder presents a new explanation of the great atrocity of the twentieth century, and reveals the risks we face in the twenty-first.
The evocative jacket photograph shows Cêsis in Latvia in 2004 and is by Magnum photographer Alex Majoli.
Published by Bodley Head, Black Earth is on the 2015 longlist for the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-fiction
NEMESIS - Misha Glenny
His name was Antonio, but they would call him Nem. From the infamous
favela of Rocinha in Rio, he was a hardworking young father forced to
make a decision that would turn his world upside down.
Nemesis
is the story of an ordinary man who became the king of the largest slum
in Rio, the head of a drug cartel and perhaps Brazil’s most wanted
criminal. A man who tried to bring welfare and justice to a playground
of gang culture and destitution, while everyone around him drew guns and
partied. It’s a gripping tale of gold-hunters and evangelical pastors,
bent police and rich-kid addicts, quixotic politicians and drug lords
with maths degrees.
This
is also the story of how change came to Brazil.
For the cover, Nem was redrawn from an existing photograph supplied by Agencia O Dia in Brazil, with the typestyle was influenced by favela grafitti.
Nemesis is published this month by The Bodley Head.
THE NOISE OF TIME - Julian Barnes
In May 1937 a man in his early thirties waits by the lift of a Leningrad apartment block. He waits all through the night, expecting to be taken away to the Big House. Any celebrity he has known in the previous decade is no use to him now. And few who are taken to the Big House ever return.
The novel is about the collision of art and power, about human compromise, human cowardice and human courage. Several different visuals and approaches, some of which are shown above, including cutting a figure in lino, were worked up in response to the powerful text.
The final image was chosen after much deliberation, as it succinctly captured the essence of the novel. We commissioned Vladimir Zimakov to produce a linocut. The figure is literally fenced in by the title typography, which has been sourced and then pasted together from a period sans serif font. The cover will be printed in vivid black and red foil, which will make the graphics more tactile and allow for an intense colour against the raw paper stock.
The bold graphics are referenced from the Soviet era for this cover: Soviet typography, film posters and matchboxes. Favourite pieces of this genre were pasted over the wall in the studio as inspiration during this project. One thing that stood out the most from this research was the stark grammar of simple geometry, typography and flat blocks of colour of Soviet graphics. Sans serif fonts and the colours red and black dominated the wall and therefore found their way into the finished design.
FIRST LOVE LAST RITES - Ian McEwan
The influential American designer, Herb Lubalin was the inspiration behind this cover. His style of expressive typography was at its height in the mid 1970’s when First Love, Last Rites was first published. The font used is Avant Garde, which Lubalin designed. The typographic device of repeating and overprinting the letter O suggests the themes of love and murder, sex and loneliness, adolescence and incest which run throughout the book.
