The brief sounded easy: a pub table, a glass of beer and a newspaper folded to the crossword, three clues filled in, ‘ALAN’, ‘UXORIOUS’ and ‘THANATOS’.
This shouldn’t be a difficult cover to design.
Yes. And, well…
The book was the new novel from Andrew Dutton, The Crossword Solver, the follow-up to his excellent and well-regarded debut, Nocturne: Wayland’s Sky. Centred around a group of regulars at pub under threat of closure thanks to a corporate take-over, The Crossword Solver combines observation, whit, a healthy dash of politics and philosophy, and an abiding humanity with a deceptively simple style that belies the craft that underlies it. Andrew walks that fuzzy line between contemporary post-modernism and late-century modernism, ducking the irony of almost-ran literary movements like avant-pop but also side-stepping the choking earnestness of the (unrealistic) realist narrative. An understated stylist and innovator, he keeps a recognisably personal voice while crafting each book to suit the story. A good writer, in other words…
So maybe not so easy a design brief to meet.
A-hem…
Okay, so, first things first. Setting up on the kitchen table — newspaper crossword, beer glass, clues filled in — the first couple of photographs were enough to suggest exactly how the final image should be framed to give something that might fill a book cover. But — should the cover be just a photograph of the crossword?
A trawl through contemporary book cover archives suggested not but it also suggested very little else.
Inspiration? Not at home.
After chatting to Andrew a little over the time he’s been a Leaf by Leaf author, it’s clear music is a big influence on him and that he’s particularly fond of the (sadly overlooked) 80s band, Twelfth Night. Hmm… 80s…
The late 70s in the 80s was not only the point where post-modernist literature came firmly into its own, it was the time of scary corporate expansionism, the founding of the consumerist worldview, and a
period when modernism rubbed a cheery shoulder with post-modernism as a design aesthetic. Think: The Face magazine and Factory Records and Kraftwerk and all that.
Even keeping all the above comments about Andrew’s writing in general and The Crossword Solver in particular in mind, the first draft of the cover was four-square, raggy and more hotchpotch than potlatch. But it was a place to start and it established a couple of ideas that led to later drafts: don’t fill the cover with the pub table photo, use cup-rings and distress marks as design elements (on the one hand, the cover looks like it’s been passed around the pub a few times; on the other, it’s visual metaphor for thanatos — erosion, impermanence, entropy, but also the way in which corporate culture wrecks human and community cultures), halftone screening (the dots of a pre-digital newspaper photograph, another metaphor for imperfection, and also imperfect perception, and a straight-up nod towards 80s graphic design), and intersecting typography.
The next major draft came after another period of research and staring into space, sweating very slightly over the prospect of there being no next major draft. This time around, Neville Brody’s referencing of Constructivism in his early work (especially for The Face) mixed in with the cover of The Man-machine to help shape the design. The photo element got smaller to allow the typography to dominate. The off-set between the title words was emphasised — no easy answers, no perfect answers, only the search for answers. The dividing triangle — a nod to El Lissitzky’s ‘Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge’ as well as Brody — cleaves the design, breaking up the old comforts and forcing a search for a new equilibrium.
Great! A good design. Coffee break…
Except…
No. Not satisfied. The very elements of disruption worked metaphorically but not graphically. First Rule of Book Cover Design: the cover has to get a reader to pick up the book. Everything above that is icing, if the truth be admitted. And the second draft didn’t live close enough to the First Rule to pass.
Okay. So… What works? What doesn’t? What next?
Still with The Man-machine in mind but also Neville Brody’s layout for The Face’s March, 1982, Kraftwerk interview, ‘The Werk Ethic’, as well as thinking of El Lissitzky and Alexander Rodchenko. Thinking: bold, off-kilter. And also certain that the title text should be the core of the design, although it had to interact or interconnect with the crossword photo…
And then, one of those wild card moments, leaping off the halftone treatment of the crossword to thinking of the brilliant Swiss designer, Max Huber, as modernist — a-hem, pardon: Modernist as they come…
So: skewed title text, bold and 80s-modernist. Likewise skewed author name. Red and black rules, heavy pencil lines to recall the lines of a crossword grid but absolutely no respect for the regularity of such a grid. Coloured circles — part Huber, part Rodchenko, part Brody, suggesting centres and focus points colliding. Cup rings. And plenty of scuff and distressing.
Then sit back and hope…
Nope, not disappointed at all. The opposite, in fact…
Cheekily sending Andrew only the final draft, he very sensibly asked to look at the previous iterations, following the development of the cover and deciding that yes, this off-kilter meeting of modernism with a post-modernist sensibility certainly abided by the First Rule of Book Cover Design and possibly a bit more besides.
Icing, indeed.
Andrew Dutton’s The Crossword Solver is a compassionate, vivid look at the ways in which we find meaning in a world that, by its own admission, is usually meaningless. It’s also the work of a fine and true voice. Look at the cover by all means, but read the book.
Andrew Dutton’s The Crossword Solver will be published in November.
