book design magazine
ISSUE 1
Welcome to issue 1 of SPINE magazine. This first issue aims to serve as both a source of inspiration, and a summary of the best designs published within the last few months; allowing us to keep up to date with what’s going on in the world of book design. Edited by Emma J Hardy
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Fiction Non-Fiction Series BDBC
(Book Designer’s Book Club)
fiction | 5
FI CTION
fiction | 7 Amnesia Peter Carey Faber & Faber Design by Alex Kirby
publisher’s description: Has a young Australian woman declared cyber war on the United States? (The Justice Department thinks so). Or was her Angel Worm intended only to open the prison doors of those unfortunates detained by Australia’s harsh immigration policies? Did American suffer collateral damage? Can she be extradited to a country with the death penalty? Is she innocent? Can she be saved? Enter her mother, the actress Celine Baillieux. With Celine comes the outrageous Woody Townes, a Melbourne property developer, millionaire, and patron of left wing causes. Murray delivers half a million dollars bail to the court, appoints a distinguished lawyer, and hires an old mate to write a biography to vindicate the young woman. The old mate is Felix Moore, known to his fellow journalists as Felix Moore-or-less correct. His politics are far too left. His grasp of reality is sometimes unreliable. He is a magnet for law suits. His career is over, and then he gets this chance. I had fought the good fight all my life, he confesses, but I had also become an awful creature along the way. It will be our great good fortune to live inside Felix’s comic, cowardly, angry, fundamentally humane character as he attempts to find redemption. Amnesia is a masterful novel, both dark and funny, whose tangled roots drive deep into the denied history of the United States, the CIA, and its relationship with it’s old friend and client, Australia.
fiction | 9 Amnesia Peter Carey Faber & Faber
publisher’s description: When Noel Bostock is evacuated from London to escape the Blitz, he ends up living in St Albans with Vera Sedge - thirty-six and drowning in debts and dependents. Always desperate for money, she’s unscrupulous about how she gets it. Noel’s mourning his godmother, Mattie, a former suffragette. Brought up to share her disdain for authority and eclectic approach to education, he has little in common with other children and even less with Vee, who hurtles impulsively from one self-made crisis to the next. The war’s thrown up new opportunities for making money but what Vee needs (and what she’s never had) is a cool head and the ability to make a plan. On her own, she’s a disaster. With Noel, she’s a team. Together they cook up an idea. Criss-crossing the bombed suburbs of London, Vee starts to make a profit and Noel begins to regain his interest in life. But there are plenty of other people making money out of the war and some of them are dangerous. Noel may have been moved to safety, but he isn’t actually safe at all.
fiction | 11 Duffy Dan Kavanagh Orion Publishing Co
publisher’s description: When Brian McKechnie finds his wife attacked, his cat killed, and himself blackmailed by a man with a suspiciously erratic accent, he engages the services of London’s most unusual private eye - Duffy. A bisexual ex-policeman with a phobia of ticking watches and a love of Tupperware, Duffy is anything but orthodox. But he’s street smart, savvy and takes no nonsense from anyone. Intrigued by McKechnie’s case and the ineptitude of his ex-colleagues on the police force, Duffy heads to his old patch - the seedy underbelly of Soho - to begin inquiries of his own. Helped by some shady characters from his past, Duffy discovers that while things have changed in his old stomping ground, the streets are still mean and the crooks walk arm in arm with the blues. Full to bursting with sex, violence and dodgy dealings, DUFFY is a gripping and entertaining crime novel with a distinctly different and entirely lovable anti-hero.
fiction | 13 Hold Your Own Kate Tempest Pan Macmillan
publisher’s description: Kate Tempest’s first full-length collection for Picador is an ambitious, multi-voiced work based around the mythical figure of Tiresias. This four-part work follows him through his transformations from child, man and woman to blind prophet; through this structure, Tempest holds up a mirror to contemporary life in a direct and provocative way rarely associated with poetry. A vastly popular and accomplished performance poet, Tempest commands a huge and dedicated following on the performance and rap circuit. Brand New Ancients, also available from Picador, won the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry and has played to packed concert halls on both sides of the Atlantic.
fiction | 15 Infidelities Kirsty Gunn Faber & Faber
publisher’s description: This new collection of stories offers a candid peek at infidelity in all its guises. These are tales of lust, deceit, resentment and regret - and of the secrets and lies that can chip away at human relationships. In a series of interwoven dramas, we find mothers yearning for adventure, for the exhilaration of the open road or the anonymity of the forest; fathers absent in body or mind; husbands who look the other way; complacency turned to spite and apathy turned to betrayal. At the same time Gunn pursues the glorious rush of a snap decision, the liberty of answering that siren call of a better life elsewhere. Written with Gunn’s trademark attention to nuances of behaviour, motive and even landscape, Infidelity is a temptingly beautiful work that asks ‘What if?’ and dares to find out.
fiction | 17 Kerrigan in Copenhagen Thomas E. Kennedy Bloomsbury Publishing PL
publisher’s description: Kerrigan is writing a guidebook to the city of Copenhagen. Specifically, a guide to the city’s drinking establishments - of which there are over 1,500. Thus, it is a project potentially without end, and one with a certain amount of drunken numbness built into it. And that’s the point: for Kerrigan, an American expat fleeing a terrible betrayal, has plenty he wants to forget. The only problem with his proposed project is his research associate, a voluptuous, green-eyed beauty who makes him tremble with forgotten desire. Kerrigan in Copenhagen is both a love story and a Joycean romp through a magical city.
fiction | 19 All the Light We Cannot See Anthony Doerr Fourth Estate Ltd
publisher’s description: The epic new novel, set during WW2, from Sunday Times Short Story Prize-winner Anthony Doerr. Marie-Laure has been blind since the age of six. Her father builds a perfect miniature of their Paris neighbourhood so she can memorize it by touch and navigate her way home. But when the Nazis invade, father and daughter flee with a dangerous secret. Werner is a German orphan, destined to labour in the same mine that claimed his father’s life, until he discovers a knack for engineering. His talent wins him a place at a brutal military academy, but his way out of obscurity is built on suffering. At the same time, far away in a walled city by the sea, an old man discovers new worlds without ever setting foot outside his home. But all around him, impending danger closes in. Doerr’s combination of soaring imagination and meticulous observation is electric. As Europe is engulfed by war and lives collide unpredictably, ‘All The Light We Cannot See’ is a captivating and devastating elegy for innocence.
fiction | 21 The Age of Magic Ben Okri Head Of Zeus
publisher’s description: The Age of Magic has begun. Unveil your eyes.’ Eight weary film-makers, travelling from Paris to Basel, arrive at a small Swiss hotel on the shores of a luminous lake. Above them, strewn with lights that twinkle in the darkness, looms the towering Rigi mountain. Over the course of three days and two nights, the travellers will find themselves drawn in to the mystery of the mountain reflected in the lake. One by one, they will be disturbed, enlightened, and transformed, each in a different way. An intoxicating and dreamlike tale unfolds. Allow yourself to be transformed. Having shown a different way of seeing the world, Ben Okri now offers a different way of reading.
fiction | 23 The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher Hilary Mantel HarperCollins Publishers
publisher’s description: A brilliant - and rather transgressive - collection of short stories from the double Man Booker Prize-winning author of ‘Wolf Hall’ and ‘Bring Up the Bodies’. Hilary Mantel is one of Britain’s most accomplished and acclaimed writers. In these ten bracingly subversive tales, all her gifts of characterisation and observation are fully engaged, summoning forth the horrors so often concealed behind everyday facades. Childhood cruelty is played out behind the bushes in ‘Comma’; nurses clash in ‘Harley Street’ over something more than professional differences; and in the title story, staying in for the plumber turns into an ambiguous and potentially deadly waiting game. Whether set in a claustrophobic Saudi Arabian flat or on a precarious mountain road in Greece, these stories share an insight into the darkest recesses of the spirit. Displaying all of Mantel’s unmistakable style and wit, they reveal a great writer at the peak of her powers.
fiction | 25 The Book of Strange New Things Michel Faber Art direction and design Rafi Romaya illustration Yehrin Tong
publisher’s description: ‘I am with you always, even unto the end of the world ...’. Peter Leigh is a missionary called to go on the journey of a lifetime. Leaving behind his beloved wife, Bea, he boards a flight for a remote and unfamiliar land, a place where the locals are hungry for the teachings of the Bible - his ‘book of strange new things’. It is a quest that will challenge Peter’s beliefs, his understanding of the limits of the human body and, most of all, his love for Bea. The Book of Strange New Things is a wildly original tale of adventure, faith and the ties that might hold two people together when they are worlds apart. This momentous novel, Faber’s first since The Crimson Petal and the White, sees him at his expectation-defying best. As heard on BBC Radio 4.
fiction | 27 The Moon Pool Sophie Littlefield Head of Zeus
North Dakota is like nowhere Colleen has ever seen. Vast rolling plains of silvery snow, studded with shimmering black pools, lit by occasional flares of orange light. It is a landscape both beautiful and terrible. It is the landscape that swallowed her son. Across town, another mother also searches for her missing boy. He too went missing from the oilfields where he worked. And no-one - not his employers, not the police - seems to care that he is gone. As long as they are alone, these two women will never find out the truth. But if they team up, and help each other, then maybe, just maybe, this freezing wilderness will give them back their sons.
fiction | 29 The Smoke is Rising Mahesh Rao Daunt Books
publisher’s description: The future is here. India has just sent its first spacecraft to the moon, and the placid city of Mysore is gearing up for its own global recognition with the construction of HeritageLand – Asia’s largest theme park. From behind the formidable gates of Mahalakshmi Gardens to the shanty houses on the edge of town, the people of Mysore are abuzz as they watch their city prepare for a complete transformation. Susheela, an elderly widow, is forced into a secretive new life. Uma, trying to escape her painful past, learns the lasting power of local gossip. And Mala must finally confront the reality of her husband’s troubling behaviour.
fiction | 31 To Rise Again at a Decent Hour Joshua Ferris Penguin Books Ltd
publisher’s description: As Paul tries to work out the meaning of life, a Facebook page and Twitter account appear in his name. What’s at first an outrageous violation of privacy soon becomes something more frightening: the possibility that the online “Paul” might be a better version of the man in the flesh. Who is doing this and will it cost Paul his sanity?
fiction | 33 Us David Nicholls Hodder & Stoughton Ltd
publisher’s description: David Nicholls brings to bear all the wit and intelligence that graced ONE DAY in this brilliant, bittersweet novel about love and family, husbands and wives, parents and children. Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2014. ‘I was looking forward to us growing old together. Me and you, growing old and dying together.’ ‘Douglas, who in their right mind would look forward to that?’ Douglas Petersen understands his wife’s need to ‘rediscover herself ’ now that their son is leaving home. He just thought they’d be doing their rediscovering together. So when Connie announces that she will be leaving, too, he resolves to make their last family holiday into the trip of a lifetime: one that will draw the three of them closer, and win the respect of his son. One that will make Connie fall in love with him all over again. The hotels are booked, the tickets bought, the itinerary planned and printed. What could possibly go wrong?
fiction | 35 The Coincidence Authority J. W. Ironmonger Phoenix
publisher’s description: Thomas Post is an expert on coincidences. He’s an authority. People come to see him, to ask him if he can explain strange events that have befallen them, and he can always explain these things away. We poor humans, he would say, have a tendency to make patterns out of random shapes, or to construct meaning from the random behaviour of the universe. But one day Thomas gets a visit from Azalea Lewis, and his world will never be the same again. For Azalea’s coincidences seem to go off the scale. The lives of Thomas and Azalea become entwined, their destinies entangled. And now, with Azalea apparently dead in a foreign land, Thomas must reassemble the pieces of her life in search for the patterns that drove it. And that means he must try to unravel the coincidences that so afflicted her.
fiction | 37 Worst. Person. Ever Douglas Coupland Windmill Books
publisher’s description: A razor-sharp portrait of a morally bankrupt and gleefully wicked modern man, Worst. Person. Ever. is Douglas Coupland’s gloriously filthy, side-splittingly funny and unforgettable novel. Meet Raymond Gunt. A decent chap who tries to do the right thing. Or, to put it another way, the worst person ever: a foul-mouthed, misanthropic cameraman, trailing creditors, ex-wives and unhappy homeless people in his wake. Men dislike him, women flee from him. Worst. Person. Ever. is a deeply unworthy book about a dreadful human being with absolutely no redeeming social value. Gunt, in the words of the author, “is a living, walking, talking, hot steaming pile of pure id.” He’s a B-unit cameraman who enters an amusing downward failure spiral that takes him from London to Los Angeles and then on to an obscure island in the Pacific where a major American TV network is shooting a Survivorstyle reality show. Along the way, Gunt suffers multiple comas and unjust imprisonment, is forced to re-enact the ‘Angry Dance’ from the movie Billy Elliot and finds himself at the centre of a nuclear war. We also meet Raymond’s upwardly failing sidekick, Neal, as well as Raymond’s ex-wife, Fiona, herself ‘an atomic bomb of pain’. Even though he really puts the ‘anti’ in anti-hero, you may find Raymond Gunt an oddly likeable character.
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NON-FI CTION
non-fiction | 41 Napoleon the Great Andrew Roberts Penguin Books Ltd Design by Isabelle De Cat
publisher’s description: From Andrew Roberts, author of the Sunday Times bestseller The Storm of War, this is the definitive modern biography of Napoleon. Napoleon Bonaparte lived one of the most extraordinary of all human lives. In the space of just twenty years, from October 1795 when as a young artillery captain he cleared the streets of Paris of insurrectionists, to his final defeat at the (horribly mismanaged) battle of Waterloo in June 1815, Napoleon transformed France and Europe. After seizing power in a coup d’etat he ended the corruption and incompetence into which the Revolution had descended. In a series of dazzling battles he reinvented the art of warfare; in peace, he completely remade the laws of France, modernised her systems of education and administration, and presided over a flourishing of the beautiful ‘Empire style’ in the arts. The impossibility of defeating his most persistent enemy, Great Britain, led him to make draining and ultimately fatal expeditions into Spain and Russia, where half a million Frenchmen died and his Empire began to unravel.
non-fiction | 43 Comics Feeeever!! Victionary
publisher’s description: Comics is a frenzied world that seems realistic yet unattainable. Creatively woven out of wit, fascination, hope, and lust, this graphic art category progressively develops into a rich, graphic projection of human nature and realities of life. Up in the cosmos, down to hell or far to a future space, these thought-provoking artworks reflect different world views on politics, religious, social norms, good and evil that identify with cultures in the West and the East.
non-fiction | 45 Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe Simon Winder Pan Macmillan
publisher’s description: For centuries much of Europe was in the hands of the very peculiar Habsburg family. An unstable mixture of wizards, obsessives, melancholics, bores, musicians and warriors, they saw off - through luck, guile and sheer mulishness - any number of rivals, until finally packing up in 1918. From their principal lairs along the Danube they ruled most of Central Europe and Germany and interfered everywhere - indeed the history of Europe hardly makes sense without them. Simon Winder’s extremely funny new book plunges the reader into a maelstrom of alchemy, skeletons, jewels, bear-moats , unfortunate marriages and a guinea-pig village. Danubia is full of music, piracy, religion and fighting. It is the history of a dynasty, but it is at least as much about the people they ruled, who spoke many different languages, lived in a vast range of landscapes, believed in many rival gods and often showed a marked ingratitude towards their oddball ruler in Vienna. Readers who discovered Simon Winder’s genius for telling wonderful stories of middle Europe with Germania will be delighted by the eccentric and fascinating stories of the Habsburgs and their world.
non-fiction | 47 The Moth: This Is a True Story Catherine Burns & Neil Gaiman Profile Books Ltd
publisher’s description: With an introduction by Neil Gaiman Before television and radio, before penny paperbacks and mass literacy, people would gather on porches, on the steps outside their homes, and tell stories. The storytellers knew their craft and bewitched listeners would sit and listen long into the night as moths flitted around overhead. The Moth is a non-profit group that is trying to recapture this lost art, helping storytellers - old hands and novices alike - hone their stories before playing to packed crowds at sold-out live events. The very best of these stories are collected here: whether it’s Bill Clinton’s hell-raising press secretary or a leading geneticist with a family secret; a doctor whisked away by nuns to Mother Teresa’s bedside or a film director saving her father’s Chinatown store from money-grabbing developers; the Sultan of Brunei’s concubine or a friend of Hemingway’s who accidentally talks himself into a role as a substitute bullfighter, these eccentric, pitchperfect stories - all, amazingly, true - range from the poignant to the downright hilarious.
non-fiction | 49 The Gardener’s Garden Conceived and edited by Phaidon Editors Phaidon
publisher’s description: Featuring over 250 permanent gardens by leading garden designers, horticulturalists and landscape architects, from the 14th century to the present day, and covering all key types and styles of garden, this well-illustrated compendium combines images, text, key information and captions for each of the featured gardens, appealing to both amateur and professional gardeners, as well as garden designers.
non-fiction | 51 Plenty More Yotam Ottolenghi Ebury Press Design by Sakiko Kobayash & Caz Hildebrand
publisher’s description: Plenty More picks up where Plenty left off, with 150 more dazzling vegetable-based dishes, this time organised by cooking method. Grilled, baked, simmered, cracked, braised or raw, the range of recipe ideas is stunning. With recipes including Alphonso mango and curried chickpea salad, Membrillo and stilton quiche, Buttermilk-crusted okra, Lentils, radicchio and walnuts with manuka honey, Seaweed, ginger and carrot salad, and even desserts such as Baked rhubarb with sweet labneh and Quince poached in pomegranate juice, this is the cookbook that everyone has been waiting for.
non-fiction | 53 The Sense of Style Steven Pinker Allen Lane Design by Louise Fili
publisher’s description: What is the secret of good prose? Does writing well even matter in an age of instant communication? Should we care? In this funny, thoughtful book about the modern art of writing, Steven Pinker shows us why we all need a sense of style. More than ever before, the currency of our social and cultural lives is the written word, from Twitter and texting to blogs, e-readers and old-fashioned books. But most style guides fail to prepare people for the challenges of writing in the 21st century, portraying it as a minefield of grievous errors rather than a form of pleasurable mastery. They fail to deal with an inescapable fact about language: it changes over time, adapted by millions of writers and speakers to their needs. Confusing changes in the world with moral decline, every generation believes the kids today are degrading society and taking language with it. A guide for the new millennium, writes Steven Pinker, has to be different.
non-fiction | 55 The Compleat Social Worker David Howe Palgrave Macmillan Design by Liron Gilenberg
publisher’s description: This book provides a guide to the challenges and tensions bound up in the role of being a social worker. David Howe explores how practitioners have to contain sometimes quite opposing functions or philosophies in the work that they do, and demonstrates that in order to be effective and practise with skill and wisdom, they have to encompass it all.
non-fiction | 57 Explaining Social Life John Parker & Hilary Stanworth Palgrave Macmillan Design by Alex Connock
publisher’s description: A distinctive and accessible introductory text that presents social theory not as a specialist subject, but as a relevant resource for anyone wanting to explain social phenomenon. The text actively encourages those who are new to social theory, as well as more advanced students, to develop and practice their own capacities for social explanation
non-fiction | 59 The Simpsons, Satire, and American Culture Matthew A. Henry Palgrave Macmillan (US) Design by Will Speed
publisher’s description: How is The Simpsons a satirical artwork engaged with important social, political, and cultural issues? Matthew A. Henry offers the first comprehensive understanding of the show as a satire and explores the ways in which The Simpsons participates in the so-called “culture war” debates taking place in American society. Situating The Simpsons within the framework of satirical humor in American media, the tradition of the nuclear family sitcom, and the history of the Fox Television network, this book explores American culture thematically, examining how the show satirically engages with issues of race and ethnicity, national identity, gender and sexuality, social and economic class, and religion.
non-fiction | 61 Adventures in Stationary James Ward Profile Books
publisher’s description: We are surrounded by stationery: half-chewed Cristal Bics and bent paper clips, rubber bands to fiddle with or ping, blunt pencils, rubbers and Tipp-ex. They are integral parts of our everyday environment. So much so that we have no idea of the stories they have to tell. But James Ward is here to explain how important stationery is to us. After all, who remains unmoved by the sight of the first sheet of a brand new notepad? And which of humanity’s brightest ideas didn’t start life on a scrap of paper, a Post-it, or in the margins of a notebook? Exploring these everyday objects, Ward reveals tales of invention - accidental and brilliant - and bitter rivalry. He also asks the difficult questions, who is Mr Pritt? What does shatter-proof resistant mean? How many pens does Argos use? And what do design evolutions in desk organisers mean for society? Perhaps most importantly, it’s time to ask Blu-Tack: what are the 1000s of uses they claim?
non-fiction | 63 Convulsing Bodies Mark D. Jordan Stanford University Press Design by Anne Jordan
publisher’s description: By using religion to get at the core concepts of Michel Foucault’s thinking, this book offers a strong alternative to the way that the philosopher’s work is read across the humanities. Foucault was famously interested in Christianity as both the rival to ancient ethics and the parent of modern discipline and was always alert to the hypocrisy and the violence in churches. Yet many readers have ignored how central religion is to his thought, particularly with regard to human bodies and how they are shaped. The point is not to turn Foucault into some sort of believer or to extract from him a fixed thesis about religion as such. Rather, it is to see how Foucault engages religious rhetoric page after page - even when religion is not his main topic. When readers follow his allusions, they can see why he finds in religion not only an object of critique, but a perennial provocation to think about how speech works on bodies and how bodies resist.
non-fiction | 65 Smoke Proofs Andrew Steeves Gaspereau Press Design by Andrew Steeves
publisher’s description: Why do we accept shoddy books? This is the question at the heart of Smoke Proofs, a collection of six essays and one interview which takes a frank look at the state of the art of literary publishing, printing and book design in Canada. Ranging from the philosophical and the historical to the nuts and bolts of making books and getting them to market, Smoke Proofs argues for an approach to trade publishing which returns to its printerly roots, one in which the characteristics of various tools and techniques are considered alongside the broader implications of their use in the culture. Whether he’s discussing ebooks, the de-professionalization of typography, the design of poetry books, the fetish for colour pictures on book covers, or our complicated relationship with the notion of ‘beauty’, Steeves continually points the reader back to his or her own responsibility for the preservation and use of that amazing, wily and robust cultural tool–the book.
non-fiction | 67 Smoke Proofs Radio Benjamin Lecia Rosenthal Verso Design by Isaac Tobin
publisher’s description: From 1927 to 1933, Walter Benjamin wrote and presented more than eighty broadcasts over the new medium of radio. Radio Benjamin gathers, for the first time in English, the surviving transcripts. This eclectic collection shows the range of Benjamin’s thinking and includes stories for young and old, plays, readings, book reviews, a novella, and discussions of topics ranging from finding a job to the architecture of Berlin to an account of the railway disaster at the Firth of Tay. Delightful and incisive, this is Walter Benjamin directing his sophisticated thinking to a mass audience.
SERIES fiction | 69
publisher’s description: A gorgeous twelve-book slipcase edition of twelve amazing adventures about the twelve Doctors written by twelve of the most exciting authors living in our galaxy today. This edition also comes with twelve exclusive postcards. A must-have gift edition for all Whovians!
series | 71
Doctor Who: 12 Doctors 12 Stories Multiple authors Puffin Books
publisher’s description: Timeless yet urgent works of philosophical, political and psychological thought in tactile, pocket-sized form.
series | 73
Penguin Pocket Hardbacks Various authors Penguin Classics Design by Coralie Bickford-Smith
BDBC series | 75
bdbc | 77 Motto: Lorem Ipsum Dolor Set Amet A society of designers who, despite working full-time in publishing, can never quite get enough. Together, we are the Book Designers’ Book Club. Follow our reviews and meetings here as we get pretty obsessive about everything book related.
The Flame Alphabet Ben Marcus Vintage Design by Peter Mendelsund
publisher’s description: The speech of children has mutated into a virus which is killing their parents. At first it only affects Jews-then everyone. Living quietly in the suburbs, Sam and Claire’s lives are threatened when their daughter, Esther, is infected with the disease. Each word she speaks - whether cruel or kind, banal or loving - is toxic to Sam and Claire. Both morally engaged and wickedly entertaining, The Flame Alphabet begs the question: what is left of civilization when we lose the ability to communicate with those we love?
Last month the BDBC assembled for the first time; a momentous occasion for the club. Despite the fact that everyone forgot to bring a copy of The Flame Alphabet by Ben Marcus with them to the meeting, this book burns so vividly into your mind that there was no shortage of things to discuss. Firstly, as we are all designers, we started with the book cover. This is a cover with an interesting designer behind it – Peter Mendelsund started his career in graphic design due to a failed career as a concert pianist. His first job was working for Chip Kidd at Alfred A. Knopf and since then he has climbed the ranks up to associate art director of Knopf and the art director of Pantheon Books. Some comments about the cover from the BDBC designers: ‘It’s really eye catching and the spine stands out really well on a shelf.’ ‘I think his design for Ben Marcus’ next book, Leaving the Sea was much more successful.’ ‘It looks a bit too Photoshopped - the shadows don’t look quite real enough.’ ‘It reminds me of art foundation.’ The general consensus was that it was an eye-catching cover, but that it didn’t seem to match the contents of the book as well as we would have liked. However, as we’ll get to in a minute, the contents of the book are pretty hard to pin down so I do feel somewhat for Mendelsund in the task that he took on! Next we moved on to the book itself, we had brought along some questions to ask the group to get things going: How did you experience the book?
‘It was very frustrating because it made me seriously concerned that my English vocabulary was far worse than I realised – I kept trying to look up half the words but they weren’t real things!’ ‘I hated it, I’m usually a subscriber to the idea that a book is for life, but this one I cannot wait to give to a charity shop.’ ‘I really liked it because I felt like the author was putting me through what the characters were going through, it was painful to read.’ Do the main characters change by the end of the book? ‘No.’ ‘Sam does – he starts off not wanting the cure because he doesn’t want to hurt the children, but he does it for Claire which is the only selfless thing he does in the entire book.’
‘I loved the concept, so that kept me interested, What are the main ideas/themes of the book? but I couldn’t work out what was going on half the time.’ ‘Religion.’
bdbc | 79 Murphy
Claire
Esther
Sam
‘language – toxicity’.
Some general quotes from the evening:
‘It’s very apocalyptic, and it’s the first apocalyptic book I’ve read where I thought if I was in that world I would rather kill myself than be there.’
‘I feel like I now see the link between Power Rangers and the Kabala.’
When Sam has created his –supposedly- non toxic letter for Claire, what did you imagine it to look like?
Inspired by Peter Mendelsund’s recent book What We See When We Read in which he discusses how readers imagine characters, we rounded off the meeting by doing a drawing each of a main character. Sam and Murphy ended up looking surprisingly similar and Jesus-like whereas Claire’s main characteristic was her small face, and Esther was drawn with the comical tube face that plagues her throughout the book.
‘A sort of sack of rotting skin.’ ‘In the Hebrew alphabet there are a lot of serif ’s so I sort of imagined it to look like one of those with lots of other letters coming off it in a big jumbled mess.’ Is the ending satisfying? ‘YES! I was so happy that Sam didn’t have a happy ending.’ If you could go back and tell yourself not to read this book – would you? ‘Definitely, I feel like this book was a total waste of time.’ ‘Yes, I hated it.’ ‘No, I really liked it.’ ‘No, it was worth having read even if I didn’t enjoy it that much.’
‘I really resent the term “Jew Hole”.’
The next book we’ll be reading is Memoirs of a Geisha by American author Arthur Golden.