Redesigning Blood Meridian.
Welcome to Working Title 52: Designing a book cover each week.
Welcome to Working Title 52, where I’ll attempt to redesign one book cover a week and blog about my process, my love of literature and share some inspiration.
For my first project, I’m tackling a big one: Blood Meridian.
First, a little background: I’m a graphic designer and art director by trade, working for a small ad agency in Louisville, Ky and occasionally taking on a small design project through my homegrown studio, Folk Hero.
I found myself running low on design energy as of late—the best time to do something stupid. Every designer redesigns movie posters. I’m choosing covers for books I’ve read and loved. Most already have incredible art — book cover design is a masterful discipline that can be beautifully conceptual, yet still need to be a strategic piece of visual communication. It plays an integral part in the successful selling of books.
Think about it. How many times have you bought a book not knowing the author’s previous work or not knowing about it through word of mouth or a great review. Chances are, the book cover design helped influence the purchase decision, if knowing nothing else about it.
I love literature. The experience of holding a book, the weight of it. The crisp sound of turning pages. Whether a hardcover tome or a yellowing paperback, from first editions to second-hand, there is something significant about the tactility of books that resonates with me as a designer and human being.
So, now for Blood Meridian.
McCarthy was already a great writer before Blood Meridian, and while many argue Suttree to be his masterpiece, BM cemented his status in the literary upper echelon. After Blood Meridian he would go on to win a Pulitzer for The Road, would write the romantic western opus, The Border Trilogy, and No Country for Old Men would be adapted by the Coen Brothers and win best picture at the Oscars. But having read nearly all McCarthy’s work, none compares to the viciousness, the allegories, and the depth of this incredible work of fiction.
Loosely based on historical events, the novel follows a fictitious 14-year-old called only ‘’the kid’’ — born in 1833, exactly 100 years before the author — as he drifts through the Southwest. He soon joins an outlaw band of Indian hunters who have been hired by a Mexican governor to return Apache scalps at $100 apiece. These misfits — including an ex-priest, a man with initials tattooed on his forehead and a mysterious, erudite judge named Holden — have a taste for blood and death that Mr. McCarthy seems to revel in.
http://www.nytimes.com/1985/04/28/books/mccarthy-meridian.html
The Design Process
As with all my design projects, I usually hunt for inspiration first. Even before I approach concept, I usually have in my mind a sense of the style I’m looking for when designing.
For this project, I knew I wanted to do something based more on evocative and highly graphic film posters vs. book covers. I’m a huge fan of Neil Kellerhouse, so his work was an immediate resource, but I also looked at movie one-sheets from the late 60s and early 70s. I felt those were inline with the nature of the book —rooted more in the thematic elements and atmosphere than necessarily concerned with a single character (though Judge Holden is highly compelling and scary.) The book is also incredibly violent and has been even called unfilmable. I imagined the visual in my mind as something between a midnight grindhouse horror movie and a Sergio Leone western.
Lastly, I knew I wanted the cover to be inline with some of the covers for earlier editions of BM — I loved the simple use of typography and the clear division between art and title.
Sketch and Gather.
Initially, I had three separate concepts in mind. The first was based on a historical photo of a man that had been scalped. A second idea was of a Native American warrior, perhaps his profile emerging from the bottom of the cover, a red strike across his throat. Ultimately, I felt both these directions were a bit obvious.
For the third idea, I wanted to tackle The Judge and was thinking of something painterly in the style of Lucien Freud or Jenny Saville (shown).
I felt this might be both very labor intensive and also open to much debate, the Judge being such a iconic literary character (not necessarily a bad thing, but when you’re trying to launch a new project…it could be discouraging.)
I finally landed on the idea of keeping it about the landscape and the violent journey the characters have taken part in. The old west of the early 1800s is known for being a tumultuous period in time. The story being told is as much about the landscape as the men living and killing in it. The story is about war, and man’s insatiable need to destroy every other living thing. McCarthy’s story is horrible, unforgiving, unflinching.
If it were a movie, it’d be an early 80s exploitation flick, banned in numerous countries for its graphic depictions of death. It’d be a VHS tape sitting next to Faces of Death and I Spit on Your Grave— abhorrent violence coupled with some underlying commentary on the nature of man. That was where I wanted the design to go.
I feel I was successful. Here is the finished piece.
Tell me what you think in the comments.
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Thanks so much for you interest. Another cover coming next week.
Let me know if there is something you’d like to see.
D
