Vintage Vonnegut
Cover designs by Matt Broughton
If I had the time and energy to go around the streets of London shouting from the top of my lungs about how great Kurt Vonnegut is, I probably would. I don’t have the time and energy to do that, and I doubt people would listen to me, but that’s besides the point. The point is that Kurt Vonnegut is one of the most celebrated American authors with an incredible talent of incorporating satire, fantasy, and science fiction into his novels.
If some sort of mandatory universal reading list were to exist, I would put my name on the line and say that at least one of Vonnegut’s novels would make it to the top five. Not necessarily because of the content of his stories, but because of his utterly captivating and unique writing style that makes any story feel incredibly dynamic. Being immersed in one of his novels has always been a very rich experience for me so coming across a series of covers that so accurately reflected his writing style was like finding a golden ticket. Vintage’s latest reissues of Vonnegut’s works do exactly that by being playful, cheeky and incredibly captivating.
A couple of weeks ago, I had the pleasure of attending one of Penguin’s JobHack events where senior designer Matt Broughton talked through his creative process when designing the book covers for the series.
Matt started off by saying that he was given a brief to recreate and further develop Kurt Vonnegut’s existing series of work. This was a small run so the publisher will probably only print a few hundred copies at any one time but the idea is that demand will be high so these are titles that will always be subject for reprints.
Matt pointed out that because other publishing houses also have rights to publish Kurt Vonnegut’s work, part of his job was to create and define Vintage Vonnegut and give it a new look that customers would be able to easily identify. The general idea was that anyone who picked up a copy of Slaughterhouse Five would be drawn to pick up Palm Sunday and Welcome to the Monkey House further down the line.
“How did I design them? First of all, I asked myself, who is Kurt Vonnegut?”
Matt explained that he wanted to find out who Vonnegut was and what his writing represented as a whole. What does he write? Where is he writing from? Matt sees Kurt Vonnegut as the sort of guy that you imagine sitting in a bar or a café and taking in people’s conversations and seeing how it fits with the wider perspective of America. Vonnegut will pick up on anything that’s cheeky.
Vonnegut has themes that run through his books such as anti-war and anti-capitalism. There is a common trope found in many of his books where the main character becomes a sort of machine or vessel for stating his anti-war and anti-capitalist themes. Matt says this understanding he had of Vonnegut’s books was his starting point when thinking about what he could say about his writing. Vonnegut’s tone of voice is also very emblematic for being humorous, which gave Matt fertile ground to play with in terms of design.
As he started designing the cover for Breakfast of Champions, Matt tells us he paid a lot of attention to how Vonnegut deals with objects that seem to come to life on the page. Vonnegut has a great interest for simple objects that leave the reader feeling like there is always something more to them; a telephone is never just a telephone and a toilet seat is never just a toilet seat.
When coming up with the idea for the cover of Breakfast of Champions, Matt reveals he went back to the first American edition of the book that featured a breakfast cereal typeface. He then thought that a cereal box could perfectly represent the main character in the book. By adding quotes from Vonnegut’s writing into parts of the physical cereal box he created, Matt was able to make it more fun and animated. Finishing this first cover then gave Matt a way forward and clear idea of how the rest of the series could go.
For Mother Night, Matt first looked for another object that he could focus on, which in this case was the typewriter. The main character in this book works on a typewriter for the Nazis writing propaganda, which was his starting point. He then bought an authentic period typewriter, added the SS key, and sprayed it to illustrate the intertwining of the various factions present in the book (US, USSR, and Nazis) and play with the idea of ‘who is pressing who’s key’.
Matt tells us that Slaughterhouse Five was more difficult because there are a lot of visual tropes in the book, but the clock seemed like the most obvious object to go with because of the prominence of time travel in the story. The idea of the alarm becoming a bomb also alludes to the themes of anti-war present in the book, almost becoming an anti-war wake-up call. Matt also added several details to the cover that makes it stand out such as quotes within the clock. He adds that, “the devil is in the detail with Vonnegut”.
The Vintage Vonnegut branding at the top right corner is extremely playful and adds an extra layer of detail that a big name like Vonnegut calls for. Matt explains that his intention was for the label to suggest that time has its price and once that was established, he developed it across all the titles in the series.
When it came to designing the cover for Slapstick, Matt admitted it was easy because he knew what he wanted to do even before reading the book. He says it’s a book about physical comedy and Vonnegut states that is what life feels like to him. Vonnegut writes about bodily functions quite a lot so a whoopee cushion seemed like the perfect fit. For this cover, Matt worked with American illustrator Gary Taxali who made the design and helped make the object animated and witty to reflect Vonnegut’s writing style.
Matt explains that designing the cover for God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater was a more complex job because Kurt Vonnegut titles almost always come in two parts which can be a bit tricky typographically. But in this case, the second half of the title of this book being Pearls before Swine, gave him an instant visual world to work with. The piggy bank represents the themes of money and inheritance that run through the book. He adds that the lettering is stencilled on the piggy bank and cleaned up in Photoshop.
Learning about how the ideas for all these covers were developed was fascinating, but perhaps what impressed me the most (apart from how well they reflect Vonnegut’s tone) was the fact that all these objects were created physically and then manipulated online. Matt’s idea of creating animated objects with a humorous twist that allude to recurring themes in Vonnegut’s books was absolutely fascinating and successfully accomplished the hard task of doing justice to Vonnegut’s writing.
Matt Broughton is a senior cover designer currently working at Vintage Publishing, part of the Penguin Random House Group. You can find out more about his work here.
You can browse and purchase any of the books discussed above here.
