Cover of the Week: The Dead by Christian Knacht
Picador (2019). Cover design by Sungpyo Hu\ong
I still buy books because I love the cover design. I don’t expect the content to be what the cover promises. Most of the time the cover has nothing to do with the book's contents (mostly in fiction, rarely in non-fiction).
Early in paperback publishing (1940s), cover illustrators like James Avati made it standard practice to read the book first and then sketch cover design ideas to discuss with the book’s editor. They’d decide on a design, Avati would hire actors (or friends) to stage the design look, and then he’d photograph the scene. It was only then that Avati would start painting the actual cover illustration.
Today, we have Adobe Photoshop and huge digital photo archives. Cover designers often work from a book summary and can create a nearly finished design in several hours. They can create several iterations of the design to present to the editor. The goal for the publisher is to reduce cost, shorten turnaround time and end up with a cover that will sell the book to their target audience.
However, this new cover design process rarely results in a cover that is not only compelling, but appropriate for the book’s theme and story.
Designer Sunpyo Hong designs with an artist’s sensibility. His choice of the classic photo of “bad girl” Jean Harlow as the central image for his book design is inspired. It is also surprising since the topic of the novel is Hitler’s Germany and Fascist Japan. The Dead also has a strong supernatural element (it’s what makes it an excellent and unique novel). One could see any number of cover designs for this kind of story, but Hong chose the Harlow image with a bold font in red. An inspired and compelling choice in my opinion.
Christian Knacht is a Swiss novelist with a gift for original storytelling. Here’s from the blurb on the back of the book:
“The Dead reads like a reboot of J.G. Ballard’s Crash in a treatment by Wes Anderson, after a weekend spent binge-watching John Scheslingers version of Day of the Locust.”
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More from Sungpyo Hong and Picador paperback publisher.
"cover illustrators like James Avati made it standard practice to read the book first and then sketch cover design ideas" I find it weird that it was ever done any other way. But I guess that most hardbacks had pretty plain covers, so the idea of a cover illustration was in itself fairly new.
I'm pretty sure that a lot of Golden Age SF illustrators hadn't read the books either. That's why we have so many generic spaceships, square-jawed heroes with ray guns, or semi-clad space princesses, even if they have nothing to do with the book.