The Book of Numbers
is a book of ideas fizzing with energy. The novel touches on
autobiography, family memoir, phoned-in ghostwriting, geeky tech
history, transnational surveillance thriller and sex comedy – it is an
epic journey through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first.
The theme of surveillance was the spark of this cover. We had admired the RGB wallpaper work of Carnovsky
for a while (a Milan based artist/designer duo comprised of Francesco
Rugi and Silvia Quintanilla.) Their RGB work experiments with the
interaction between printed light and colours. Images in these colours
are overlaid, lines and shapes entwine but when seen under a
filter/coloured light one of the three layers is revealed.
The duo
were given a large list of subjects from the novel, highlighting the
ones that felt particularly important to be included. We then gave
Carnosky an unusual circular grid. The idea was that this circle would
fold down to wrap around the book as a jacket but when opened out would
for an extraordinary poster of the novel.
Below is a brief bit from Carnosky:
‘When we were approached by Vintage to illustrate the cover artwork for Joshua Cohen’s Book of Numbers,
we accepted with enthusiasm. Literature has always been one of our
passions and we are avid readers. Another aspect that fascinated us is
the book’s complexity and the richness of iconographic elements it
contains. We have always loved complexity: indeed minimalism is not for
us. What we tried to do, and most of all when Vintage allowed us to work
in a magnificent round foldout format was exactly this, to try to
render the book’s complexity by creating a sort of great celestial map,
or zodiac, inhabited by the most diverse objects, animals, characters
and deities. A zodiac of the absurd where the most strange and surreal
encounters, between a pigeon and Krishna, an old Mac and a monkey or a
buffalo and a helicopter, take place, just like in the popular phrase
by Comte de Lautréamont ‘As beautiful as the chance encounter of a
sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table.’
An epic, compelling, adventure-filled historical novel from the creator of Sherlock Holmes.
The year is 1366 and Europe is embroiled in the Hundred Years War. At the age of twenty, Alleyne – intelligent but naïve – leaves the Catholic abbey where he’s been raised and goes out to see the world. At an inn, he meets a veteran archer who is recruiting for the White Company, a legendary group of battle-hardened mercenaries.
We wanted our cover to represent the glory and adventure that awaits our protagonist as he and the the troops journey towards the Black Prince’s war.
The latest from the creator of Fight Club brings short stories that are funny, caustic, poignant and bizarre. Everything his readers have come to love and expect from Chuck Palahnuk.
The lightning bolt on the cover references the story Zombies.
Where that ‘emergency heart shocker’ the cardiac defribrillator makes
an appearance and acts as a good visual aid when representing the
electric tone of Chuck’s writing.
THE DUST THAT FALLS FROM DREAMS - Louis de Bernières
Just in from the printers, is this sweeping, epic new novel from Louis de Berniéres. The jacket, beautifully illustrated by Nicholas Frith, hints at the magnificent and moving story, with a cast of unforgettable characters.
Furo Wariboko wakes up on the morning of his job interview to discover he has turned into a white man. The world is seemingly his oyster – except for one thing: despite his radical transformation, Furo’s ass remains robustly black…
A bold and striking cover design was required for this funny and provocative, modern satire.
When Norman Tanner kills his workmate with a spade on a cold
February morning, he thinks he’s got away with murder.
But Norman doesn’t know about the workmate’s girlfriend, or the child
that will come back to haunt him; and how he is caught up in a story
that stretches back over a century.
Set in a small Lincolnshire village, this is a gripping tale of interwoven lives and layers of history that come back to bite.
We wanted the jacket to be beautiful yet slightly sinister, alluding to the dark secrets that lie under the surface. The cover was brought to life by illustrator Joe Mclaren
‘As long as I breathe, I attack’ Bernard ‘the badger’ Hinault
Bernard Hinault was the dominant force in cycling for almost a decade, winning five Tours de France and taking part in the controversial 1986 Tour, where his apparent attempts to undermine his teammate, Greg LeMond, resulted in one of the greatest races of all time.
In William Fotheringham’s new book he shows that while France may one day find a new champion, there will never be another Bernard Hinault.
Bernard Hinault and the Fall and Rise of French Cycling is published today by Yellow Jersey Press.
Schlump an anti-war novel published anonymously in 1928, which was banned by the Nazis. The story depicts the First World War from Schlump’s perspective.
The cover needed to convey that the novel is brutal, funny and charming with a great sense of the era. Research for the project, threw up A Specimen Book of Pattern Papers designed for and in use at the Curwen Press with designs by Enid Marx, Paul Nash, Eric Ravilious and Edward Bawden. The patterns used for endpapers are very geometric, and the ink has a beautiful hand-printed quality, especially where colours overlap. This inspired the commission of lino-cut artist Clare Curtis for the cover and endpapers. Her brief was to produce a similarly geometric pattern, where Schlump would be the lone soldier that breaks free from the regimented German troops.
‘Flaubert believed that it was impossible to explain one art form in terms of another, and that great paintings required no words of explanation. Braque thought the ideal state would be reached when we said nothing at all in front of a painting. But we are very far from reaching that state. We remain incorrigibly verbal creatures who love to explain things, to form opinions, to argue… It is a rare picture which stuns, or argues, us into silence. And if one does, it is only a short time before we want to explain and understand the very silence into which we have been plunged.’
Fully illustrated in colour throughout, Keeping an Eye Open contains Barnes’ essays on Géricault, Delacroix, Courbet, Manet, Fantin-Latour, Cézanne, Degas, Redon, Bonnard, Vuillard, Vallotton, Braque, Magritte, Oldenburg, Howard Hodgkin and Lucian Freud.
