The Picador Book Room

mcnallyjackson:

Those books are:

• Morrison
• Mantel
• Patchett
• Adrian
• Mitford
• Saba

Bookselling humor after my own heart.

Last night at the Happy Ending Music and Reading Series at Joe’s Pub, Picador author Chris Adrian read eight one-star Goodreads reviews of his work as part of the series’ obligatory risk/dare. Unfortunately, I only captured numbers four through eight in this video. (The cackling you hear is a certain Picador publicity assistant.) 

For Chris Adrian’s The Great Night (available in paperback on May 8th), the goal was to create a cover design that conveyed the feeling of magic. We searched for photographs of trees, forests, night skies, stars, and magic, and ultimately chose the photograph that appears on the cover now. 

For the type, we first collected small twigs, arranged them into letterforms, and scanned them. This looked nice, but was a bit too organic and fought with the beauty of the image. The solution to this was to search for a font on myfonts.com, and we found Barocca Monograms. Its magical, hand-drawn, twig-like effect worked well with the image and created the mood we wanted. At first the type was large and filled the entire cover, passing over the tree and sky. Rather than keeping the type over the image, we made the type smaller to integrate it with the image, fitting it both within the tree as well as outside of the tree in the night sky. Our final choice was to keep the entire type treatment contained within the edges of the tree silhouette, yet just about to break out, giving the final cover design a quiet energy.