Elsewhere: What is your book cover trying to tell us

Gary Sullivan has spent the last few days looking at poetry book design on his blog Elsewhere, examining some of the cliches and conventions of covers. Something for DIYers to consider, since many of us do the designing ourselves.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

A few related posts on other blogs:

K. Silem Mohammad at Lime Tree

Elisa Gabbert at Pshares

Peter Davis at Hitler's Mustache & again (NB: I love Peter's cover, as well as the book it wraps.)

Clay Banes at Eyeball Hatred

François Luong at Voices in the Utter Dark

I'm sure I've missed some? And check out this cool assembly of small press book covers pulled together by C. E. Putnam (from which the image above is clipped, gracias).

In addition to a bunch of the same things mentioned by these folks--especially the Big Game stuff, Katie Degentesh's The Anger Scale from Combo Books, James Meetze's designs for Tougher Disguises--here are a few covers I think work particularly well:



That's Johannes Göransson's A new quarantine will take my place, from Apostrophe. (NB: Dear Apostrophers, that link to JG's book page is broken! working now.) At their book table at AWP, I immediately gravitated toward this anti-design cover. The bold, flat ground with tiny abstract-looking black graphics is compelling, and interesting because it fails to observe any of the rules. Soon you realize the abstract markings on the front cover are actually the negative spaces which would be enclosed by the letters of the title, if the title were not the same color as the ground, i.e. invisible. The title does appear conventionally on the spine, and in mirror image on the back. You can also see (via that link above) that this second book from Apostrophe bears some visual relation to their first book, Catherine Meng's Tonight's the Night. Both books feature the title in/around the center of the book on a solid ground, with the author's name at the bottom. So there's some coherence, without them being identical. More on this idea below. (Also, the ghosting/repetition of Meng's title has a kind of tremelo or reverb effect that's interesting in light of the book's Neil Young connection, but that's a bonus for people who already know that.)

I'm already revealing a personal preference, no? A bold, flat, graphic style--a little pop, a lot mid-century mod, a palette of primaries or brights, "clean" designs with lots of space. (Well, that's one kind of thing I like.) Another example: I've always really liked the look of Toner by Ron Silliman. Annoyingly, there's not a single jpg of it anywhere on the internet. (WTF?!) It's a flat red-orange ground with TONER in yellow about a third of the way down, a pyramid of yellow dots (like a rack of billiard balls, but just 6 in a 1, 2, 3 formation) and his name in yellow below. The back is flat yellow with red-orange type. (Potes & Poets.)

Update: Ron comments to offer this jpg (thanks!), says he designed this one himself (cool), and explains that what I called billiard balls is the low-toner symbol from some copy machines. (Never seen that myself--the copiers I've wrestled just say it in lame prose. Heh.)



These next two are by Jeff Clark, a.k.a. Quemadura, already mentioned several times in the posts and comment streams above.



(So, yeah, I'm a fan, as I'm sure I've mentioned here or on my main blog before. I think Quemadura designs sometimes overuse italics tho. And Clark has a distinctive style--maybe too distinctive? His designs are recognizably his, sometimes to the point of distracting from the press branding or inherent book identity--the book sometimes feels more like a Jeff Clark product than that of the press or the author. Am I making sense? There's no denying that the books are beautifully done, and individually they are knockouts.)

Anyway, what I like about these John Clare books is first that they work well together as a set (though they are sold separately). The paperback design (I haven't actually seen in person the hardcover shown here) takes the classic "portrait painting of a dead author" convention and infuses it with with contemporary feeling, by using halftone screening and clever cropping. At the spine, the portrait wraps and continues without the screening (so as it appears on the hardcover) after a "violator" bar containing the spine copy. I don't have a shot, but that puts a seductive slice of the poet's face on the spine--most of an eye, his handsome nose and slightly parted lips. Spines are usually so spare--mainly because poetry books are so thin. On the back, a bare hint of hair, facial contour and half an eye peeks in from the edge. Even though the portrait itself is very lovely, the usual treatment of slapping it centered on the cover would have placed this paperback square in boring dead-author territory. This would be hard to repeat, however. Or rather, too easy to repeat.

Which brings me to my next point. I go back and forth on the "series design" idea for much the same reason I sometimes find the Quemadura "house style" a little distracting. The uniformity of the City Lights pocket books, the textured & uncoated Black Sparrow covers, or the New Direction B&W covers work as a branding device for sure--very effective. The templates are hot, but the resulting coherence tends to overemphasize the press identity rather than say anything about the books/authors themselves, to my mind. This is less important with reprints than with first editions--so for the Penguin Classics or Everyman's Library, etc.--this kind of thing seems fine. It also works fine for Vintage (under the direction of Chip Kidd?) on their Black Lizard crime novel series and other stuff like the Philip K. Dick catalog. One of my favorite series: these old-school Penguins, yum.

I can think of at least one instance where the poet & poems come through, being supported rather than muted by a series design. David Trinidad's books from Turtle Point: Hand Over Heart, Answer Song, Plasticville, etc. They share certain elements--poppy colors, stripes, an op-art kind of flatness. Unfortunately I can't find a pic of Hand Over Heart or find my copy in this mess right now--but it's black with a hot pink heart and some stripes if I remember correctly. Even his new book, The Late Show incorporates some stripes, while moving away from the flat graphics to a sketchier, warmer style:


My favorite book designer is Charlie Orr. Of course, he's one of my very best friends and a huge influence on my own design sensibility, so I'm plenty biased! I should post a bunch of Charlie's designs, but it will have to wait for another post. I've dawdled here long enough today.





What are your favorites?

Playing ketchup: New release roundup

Oh, what happened to January? February? Yeah, well, things have been in flux 'round here. I can't possibly catch up with everything I missed, & many ephemeral chaps have already come & gone in that time, but here are buncha things with noting. After this, I'll try to keep up better! (Keep sending me yr announcements, links, etc., please.)

In no particular order:

Zachary Schomburg's The Man Suit is available for preorder from Black Ocean Press. (& they've been added to the resource links.) I haven't seen the book yet, but I like Zach's work a lot & have been looking forward to this. It'll be shipping April 2. 112pp. $12.95. They take PayPal. Get it here.

Jen Tynes has a new chapbook, from Dancing Girl Press, called See Also Electric Light, for a mere $5. I think this might be the one with Jen's poems riffing on a vintage book about boys and electricity, yes? She told me about it in Cambridge, but didn't read from it, so I'm curious about this one too. Get it here.

Speaking of both Zach Schomburg & Jen Tynes, lookie what they've done now: Horseless Press just published Zach's chapbook Abraham Lincoln's Death Scene. (I have read an earlier version of this, when it appeared in LIT a while back. Good stuff.) 22 pp. $5 via PayPal. Sorry, no cover image up yet. Get that here

Octopus #8 has also been released. (Gee, Zach has been really busy.) This boxed chapbook issue includes The Knife Grasses by Julie Doxsee, The Ohio System by Jen Tynes & Erika Howsare, Perfect Villagers by Sueyeun Juliette Lee, DJ Spinoza's Dozen by Eugene Ostashevsky, The Tides by Genya Turovskaya, The Continuing Misadventures of Andrew, the Headless Talking Bear by Jonah Winter, & Goodnight Lung by Samuel Amadon. You can also get the chaps individually ($6 each), but it's a much better deal (& idea) to collect all eight ($28) here.

Apostrophe Books has just released their first title, Catherine Meng's Tonight's the Night. At 80 pp at $13.50, it can be had via SPD (though maybe not quite yet), Amazon, or directly from Apostrophe (checks only, no online store yet). Details here. (Looks like they've got some other interesting things coming up too, including books from Elizabeth Robinson & Johannes Göransson.)

Mairéad Byrne has a new e-book, SOS, in PDF format from UBU Web's Ubu Editions here. [Link goes direct to PDF. For a complete index of UBU Editions titles, click here.] It's FREE to browse, print or save to your computer these 88 terrific pages. So you've no excuse. (& incidentally, Mairéad published all of the poems first on her blog Heaven, which you should really be reading, if you're not already. It's all poems, prose poems & poem-essays, all the time.)

Brian Kim Stefans has a new book, It's Not Time: Early Poems & Translations, which he's published through Lulu.com. It's available as a 151pp. paperback for $12 or a PDF download for $4. He talks about using Lulu a bit on his blog. Get it here.

Dusie entices us all to preorder Logan Ryan Smith's forthcoming book, The Singers. Here's more info.

Joe Massey has been busy too. A recent sequence of his (twelve short form works) called November Graph has been published by Bob Arnold's Longhouse Press in Guilford, Vermont, as an accordion-style fold-out booklet with wrap-around band. Only 50 copies were printed, & honestly, I may be too late. (Curses & apologies, if so.) But the website doesn't say sold out.) The chap is 7.95 and can be obtained directly from the press by check only. Checks should be made out to "Longhouse" & sent to LONGHOUSE, 1604 River Road, Guilford, Vermont 05301. (Sorry, no cover art to show ya.)

Also from Mr. Massey (as guest editor) comes the latest issue of Effing Magazine, with work by Zach Barocas, Christopher Rizzo, Mairéad Byrne, Andrew Mister, Rae Armantrout, Shannon Tharp, Aaron Tieger, Thomas Devaney, Julie Doxsee, Sandra Simonds, Jess Mynes & John Phillips. It's got a very beautiful letterpress cover featuring linocut lilies by Jared Faulkner. $6 for 64pp. Get it here.

Finally, if you're near Buffalo or in the lucky position to make the trip, the Buffalo Small Press Fair is coming up in a few weeks. Scheduled for March 31, the event schedule includes readings by DIYers Aaron Tieger, Jess Mynes, & others, plus music by I Feel Tractor & more. It's FREE to attend. (Wish I could.) Rocking.

OK, that's it for this update. I know, I know. I missed stuff. Pretend your fave missed project is that much cooler for being underappreciated. (It probably is.)

Announcing Apostrophe Books!

Editors/publishers Richard Greenfield & Mark Tursi launch their new venture with the following mission statement:

"APOSTROPHE BOOKS began as a discussion, not surprisingly, about the current conditions and circumstances of poetry publishing in America and internationally. Although there seems to be a proliferation of small presses—many of them interesting, complex, and compelling—we found a striking gap in work devoted to the hybridization and intersection of poetic discourse with theory, philosophy, cultural studies, and pataphysics. The potential to expand the definition of poetry—at this moment in time—to include these other modes of thought and representation seems crucial, urgent."

Read more here.

Call for Manuscripts

We are interested in writing that expands the potential definitions of poetry. With this in mind, we actively seek work that investigates language, and consciousness in language, in innovative and/or subversive ways. APOSTROPHE strives to publish work that complicates and challenges the idea of a “well-crafted” poem by disclosing its own operations and undermining presumptions about what actually constitutes a poem. This means we are pursuing writing that challenges the categories and generic distinctions most often associated with poetry. The editors find poetic writing that intersects theory, philosophy, cultural studies, and/or pataphysics to be especially compelling.

We are currently accepting manuscripts. Please send ONE book length manuscript (48 pages or more) to each address below:

Richard Greenfield
104 Poplar Hill Ext.
Johnson City, TN 37604

M.B. Tursi
66 Lenox Ave.
East Stroudsburg, PA 18301

DEADLINE to submit: April 1st, 2006

Manuscripts will be chosen by mid-June and you will be notified shortly after. Please include an SASE, an email address and/or a phone number. Manuscripts will not be returned, so please do not send your only copy. Electronic submissions will not be accepted.