How to Judge the Cover of a Book
An author discusses the process of designing a first impression for his debut work
I’ve been thinking about fog for years now. Since before I ever moved to San Francisco. What intrigues me most about the fog, I think, is that it is ever changing. It comes to life out of nowhere, is there right in front of you, yet it is always just out of reach.
For a long time I told people that I was writing a book about San Francisco’s fog, and I was, though in truth the book I ended up writing is as much about my brother Kris’s suicide twenty years ago.
A book about fog is by necessity a book concerned with images. How one sees, what one sees. The thousands of shades of whites and grays that play upon the palette of the sky.
How does one choose from all the images within a book just one that will stand alone, never changing, on its cover?
If you choose to publish an old-fashioned paper book in this internet age, the whole book matters, not just the text between the covers. Books are portable works of art. Or they should be, anyway. Anything less is just information or diversion, and it’s hard to compete with the internet when it comes to either of those.
I must admit, I approached publishing my book with a little trepidation. Some publishers still treat books simply as commodities. And it’s not uncommon for authors to be left out of discussions about cover art, marketing, and the like.
My book tells a very personal story. How could I spend years working on the text and then hand it over for someone else to do with as they pleased?
I ended up selling The Beautiful Unseen to Counterpoint, a small West Coast publisher, which was lucky, because they’ve included me in a lot of conversations that authors working with major houses are often left out of. Cover art, for one.
I’m not a designer. I know that. I’ll always defer to a real designer when it comes to design work, the business of creating beautiful visuals, but I like to be in on the conversation.
My design sensibility tends to be spare, clean, minimal. I once worked in an office where everyone’s cubicle was covered with stacks of papers, take-out containers, and years of accumulated odds and ends. Mine was comparatively Spartan—my coworkers might have thought there was something wrong with me—no stacks, no debris, just a desk, a chair, a computer, an extra chair for visitors, and a few framed photographs I found in a storage room.
My writing tends to fall in line.
It would be tough not to put an image of fog on the cover, I told my editor, Rolph, when the subject came up. And it should evoke San Francisco, the land, my place in it.
A few weeks later, Rolph sent me an email with four comps attached.
I liked the first one (1) — it was a beach scene, but one more typical of San Francisco than Miami. The only problem was that there were too many people on the beach for my somewhat solitary tale.
The second one (2), with the Golden Gate Bridge and cursive script, was fine, but it looked too much like a novel. It also suffered from what John McMurtrie of the San Francisco Chronicle has observed: so many San Francisco books have the bridge on the cover that it’s become a cliché.
The third one (3), the one inside the fog, I liked right away. It was subtle and intriguing. But it failed to really evoke San Francisco.
As for the fourth one (4), the one with the bridge just barely peeking out at the top, I told Rolph that if the folks at Counterpoint felt they needed the bridge on the cover, this was the way to do it. Just a hint of it, engulfed in fog.
As for typography, I knew the cursive wouldn’t work. I also felt the large, all-caps of (3) and (4) was too solid, too heavy-handed for this book, a book of questions rather than answers. I liked (1) the best, mostly because it included lowercase and left ample negative space.
We decided to move forward with (1) and (4).
We all learn early on not to judge a book by its cover. It’s good advice in general, perhaps, but like all sayings it has its limitations.
I own two copies of Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. One is the Bantam Books edition (1975). It’s the bargain version (“low-priced” it says on the copyright page, having been “reset” but containing “the complete text of the original”) and it looks it. It was first printed a year after the first edition, and was the form in which I first encountered the book.
My second copy is a Harper Perennial (1985), a copy I may have lifted from my parents’ house, if memory serves.
The Bantam cover does little to entice a would-be reader (though not for lack of effort), but I love the book’s small size, which makes for an enjoyable, tactile reading experience. The Harper Perennial edition is part of a Dillard series from the ‘80s, all featuring a similar cover design. They are not remarkable, but as a series they are readily identifiable, and I like them for what they are.
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is, among other things, a book about seeing:
“I walk out; I see something, some event that would otherwise have been utterly missed and lost; or something sees me, some enormous power brushes me with its clean wing, and I resound like a beaten bell.”
The text of every edition of Pilgrim is identical, sure. But the books are not.
In Chapter 2, “Seeing”, Dillard tells us that some blind children who regain their sight through cataract surgery are aghast at what they see and “refuse to use their new vision.”
Blindness can be dangerous, but sight brings with it its own calamities.
“On the other hand, many newly sighted people speak well of the world, and teach us how dull is our own vision.”
Of all the Pilgrim covers, I like the first edition best. It’s simple, not overcrowded with praise or marketing copy. It speaks to a sense of place, engages with the theme of sight (obscurity, reflection, clarity), and hints at mysteries to be found within. This cover has stood the test of time better than many other editions of the book, though as far as I know, it has long been out of print.
The second round of comps showed up in my inbox.
The first one from the first round remained as a control (2.1). That image had also been scrubbed of some of the people (2.2), leaving a more solitary scene, one much closer to the tone of the book. I liked it quite a bit. The same image was retained in the third one (2.3), but with the large, all-caps text. And finally, (4) became (2.4), another control.
I liked the beach scene, which had been Rolph’s favorite in the first round, much better now. But I wasn’t sure about the typography.
Could we do a new one, I asked Rolph, with the text from (1) and the image from (4)? And can we swap the place-holder subtitle for the real one, “A Season in San Francisco?”
The third round of comps arrived.
To be honest, I think I would have been happy with any of these. The bridge said “San Francisco,” no doubt, but that cover also subtly undercut the Golden Gate Bridge cliché by hiding most of it. The beach scene, while not screaming “San Francisco,” definitely captured the tone of the book. A solitary figure walking beside the surf, separate but not isolated from those nearby, searching.
As for the text, I was reminded of two editions of Peter Handke’s A Sorrow Beyond Dreams. On the NYRB Classics edition, the text is solid, all-caps, while the FSG edition is softer, with some lowercase in addition to the all-caps. The images are not the same, so it’s hard to compare the typography separate from the background, but I preferred the softer FSG cover.
Meanwhile, another conversation was taking place at Counterpoint (actually, according to Rolph, “a vigorous debate”). There were questions about the subtitle: A Season in San Francisco.
I’m wary of most nonfiction subtitles; they’re often bland synopses that would never fly with a novel. For this reason, I liked A Season in San Francisco. It squarely placed the book in the city—and reminded me of Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness—without limiting the book by subject matter.
Luckily, again, Rolph included me in this conversation, and I came up with a list of possible alternative subtitles. Among them, Variations on Fog and Forgetting, which identified a set of themes and a tone, rather than simply a list of marketing keywords.
The fourth and final round appeared.
“We’re all comfortable with the subtitle Variations on Fog and Forgetting,” wrote Rolph, before adding that they’d used “A Memoir” to help readers identify the genre.
It seemed an odd term, memoir, for a book about forgetting. But it’s a recognizable category that booksellers and book buyers understand. Had it been solely up to me, I would not have used the term. I might have called the work an essay. But working with a publisher is a collaborative process. I didn’t object.
Though the bridge comp had hung around for a couple rounds, mostly as a foil, the beach scene was the clear winner. It lacked an obvious connection to San Francisco, especially with the new subtitle. But, in truth, though set mostly in San Francisco, the book is not a regional book, it’s something that people across the country might pick up. The beach scene set a tone for the book that the other image couldn’t match.
As for typography, I was leaning toward (4.1), which I felt was more classic, while (4.2) seemed to be more of-the-moment, design-wise. (Glance at the New Release shelf of your local bookstore and you’ll see how many books are being published with TEXT FILLING UP THE WHOLE COVER. Maybe it’s because the cover is so often first seen these days as a tiny JPEG on a tiny screen.)
Still, I went with (4.2).
I ended up supporting it for one simple reason: I liked how the author’s name, my name, seemed to disappear. The designer, Debbie Berne (with whom I hadn’t been in direct contact, but who, I should emphasize, did all the actual work) had taken seriously my point about the large, all-caps being too assertive. In response, she delivered a cover in which my name seemed to fade, ever so slightly, into the horizon. It was as if the fog were building out over the sea, soon to overtake me.
