Blog

Artists have to take a dive and either you hit your head on a rock and you split your skull and you die, or that blow to the head is so inspiring that you come back up and do the best work you ever...  >

Elsewhere
Ultimate Guide to Writing Better Than You Normally Do >

Other

< Back to Blog
0 Comments

Watch your spines

JA February 14

spines_2 (image via Creative Review and Fixabook)

In an industry where book covers tend to take centre stage (even in talks about their imminent decline), spines remain an oft-neglected part of literary commentary.

When you think about it though, this is odd, especially given that, as noted by Creative Review, spines are what end up the crowding the shelves after titles are unceremoniously carted off the new release stand.

Luckily, Fixabook are hoping to ease this balance, running a series of posts that takes spines to task. Here’s what they thought of The Hiding Place by Trezza Azzopardi:

Two things make this spine (albeit rather faded from 10 years on my shelf) special and well crafted.

The stripes of vibrant colour give it a very simple point of difference in section, and draw your eye to the title and author name.

But what’s really innovative is that Picador acknowledged that the spine had to do a different — and much harder — job than the front and back. It is completely different to the monochrome images on the rest of the cover. To try to run a black and white photo across the spine would have been a disaster for standout.

Great to see such a thoughtful approach to spine design. So often spines are an afterthought, when in fact they’ll be doing the hard selling for most of the life of a book.

thumbs_the-hiding-place

I also like this one – The Raw Shark Texts by Stephen Hall:

This is, quite simply, one of the greatest spines of all time. It is so obvious that the publishers thought this book could be a cult hit and therefore spent a long time ensuring every detail is cool and sophisticated. The spine is just one example of how this extra care and attention paid off. How simple and yet how clever to use a spine to deliver reviews.

thumbs_sharksp

More here, including the UK design for Christos Tsiolkas' The Slap (which, as it turns out, didn’t fare so well).


 

Our Friends


 

Only the comment field is required. Omitting the ID fields increases your risk of being mistaken for spam.