Looking Ahead: New Covers

Clustered around a laptop on the conference table, we’re looking at covers for our spring list. It’s a small screen, and there are six of us, so we have to jockey—gently—for position; a memory of standing in front of a TV in a Chicago bar on the night of the moon landing forty years ago springs to mind. Right now I’m having a little bit of the same sensation (while aware that our achievement is one really small step for mankind compared to what those guys did). There is the cover—or, I should say, four covers; our task here is to choose—of Jonathan Littell’s essay, Triptych: How to Look at Francis Bacon, with a curled-up Baconian figure, vividly grotesque, a gorgeous and disturbing piece of meat, in swirls of pink and purple. In other covers, Bacon’s painterly presence is less in-your-face; the figure is broken up into pieces, barely visible through an opaque window. But my first impulse is pure, undifferentiated excitement: We’ve done it. We’ve made a book. It’s real.

To see the image of a book cover after all the labor it’s taken to reach that moment is—if you majored in English literature and happen to remember a few random lines of poetry—to feel something of what Keats felt in his sonnet “On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer”:

…like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star’d at the Pacific—and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

There are some women, too, around the conference table, and our silence doesn’t last long: Everyone has an opinion. The image is too dark; the typeface is too light; it’s hard to understand the designer’s intention—until we read the accompanying memo. The best designers are good writers: they know what they’ve done and how to explain it. After much collegial but heated debate, we take a vote: split down the middle. More discussion, followed by a second vote that comes out four to two in favor of the easily recognizable Bacon figure. “He’s a great artist,” someone says: “Why not take advantage of it?”

We click on covers for other books: a stunning image of a recumbent Susan Sontag for Sigrid Nunez’s memoir; split images of forests, festooned with a trail of post-its for Red Dust Road, Jackie Kay’s quest-memoir about going in search of her Nigerian father. There’s the all-type hardcover design we'll carry over for the paperback of Dominique Browning’s Slow Love: How I Lost My Job, Put on My Pajamas & Found Happiness, the words in bright letters against a cream-colored background. (The book did well, so why change a winning game?) And then there's Scott Savitt's For the Amusement of Sergeant Huang, a cover we labored over with the designer but eventually got exactly right. They’re all beautiful.

 I don’t think I’ll ever cast my eye over the front table at Barnes & Noble in quite the same way: I’ll see it as the wall of an art gallery, laid out flat.