Incarnations – Cover Redesigns

JA June 25

This post is thanks to Ampersand Duck, who brought up the question of what makes a great redesign on my non-fiction cover post a while back.

I’m no expert here and I have no idea how much the brief from the publisher/costs/time etc influence the final product (designers please feel free to jump in at will). However, from a reader’s perspective, there seems to be a variety of ways to go about tackling new editions.

First, there are those that simply build on the elements of the existing cover, a kind of homage if you like, that tweaks or reworks the overall look. The UK cover of The Slap is one example, incorporating the green suburban lawn of the Australian edition. This is tricky territory though, because if you’re going to replicate something, then you’ll have to do it and do it better. The UK version falls short in my mind, lacking the punch and aggression of its Australian counterpart. In the latter, the feel is bold and outrageous – not only the child but the bright green grass as well screams out at you from the shelf. The UK version, on the other hand, seems too watered down, and quite a stretch from the feel of the book (suits and heels? Is this a suburban barbeque or a day at the races?).

The various reincarnations of Margo Lanagan’s Tender Morsels have played along these lines as well – reworking the image of the girl/bear/dark forest. But even though Shaun Tan’s rendering (last) came out later than the previous covers (I think), it trumps them all in my mind. Here again is a girl in the bear’s embrace, with illustrated trees in the background, but it says everything it needs to about the story – the bleakness, violence and, above all, the tenderness and feeling, which the other three seem to lack.

Of course, the alternative is to charge completely into new territory. Here are a few examples of how different various editions can be for Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange, picked at random for blessed Google and The Book Cover Archive.

The one that stand out for me here is the 1972 edition of A Clockwork Orange by David Pelham (last). Of the former, Creative Review has put up the transcript of a great talk by Pelham in which he describes the process of coming up with a new cover under immense pressure:

Barry Trengove had designed a delightful cover for the Penguin edition of A Clockwork Orange and then the movie came along. While the Penguin marketing department was desperate to tie in with the film graphics, the director of the movie Stanley Kubrik [sic] wasn’t at all interested in tying in with the book. Consequently I was given the task of commissioning an illustration that gave the impression of being a movie poster. Sadly I was subsequently let down very badly by an accomplished airbrush artist and designer (whose name I will keep to myself), who kept calling for yet more time and who eventually turned in a very poor job very late. I had to reject it which was a hateful thing to have to do because we were now right out of time.

… Well there I am, late in the day and having to create a cover for A Clockwork Orange under pressure. Already seriously out of time I worked up an idea on tracing paper overnight, ordering front cover repro from the typesetter around 4.00 am. I remember that my type mark-up was collected by a motorcycle messenger around about 5.00 am. Later that morning, in the office, I drew the black line work you see here on a matt plastic acetate sheet, specifying colours to the separator on an overlay while the back cover repro was being pasted up by my loyal assistants who had the scalpel skills of brain surgeons.

… Since those times I have often been amused to notice that my hurried nocturnal effort of so long ago appears to have achieved something of iconic status, for I’ve seen this cog-eyed image on fly-posters in Colombia, on t-shirts in Turkey, and put to a variety of uses in Canada, Los Angeles and New York.

Finally, although not official redesigns, I have to point to the great competitions run by Venus febriculosa, who routinely ask readers to come up with new versions of classics such as Nabokov’s Lolita, Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose and Eugenio Montale’s The Eel. Suzene Ang’s brilliant renditions are below. Even John Gall, who himself designed an earlier version of Lolita had this to say:

It takes a second before you see what is going on. It’s abstract enough to keep it metaphorical, yet literal enough to imply a sense of story. I love the tease of having the type run up the leg. Elegant, with a sense of humor.

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