Phantom of the opera mask template11/14/2022 ![]() ![]() Especially in the Age of Kindle (speaking again of Amazon’s flattening influence), a book should be a joy to hold in your hands. The stories told between these covers deserve a more intentional artifact. It’s not cost-effective to represent the spirit of the page, and safer not to stray far from the zeitgeist. Although many of these narratives wrestle with themes of identity as experienced by women and people of color and diaspora, few have a specific visual identity themselves. ![]() Neither should we lump books together under this murky camouflage as if they are broadly alike. No, you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover. This strategy doesn’t just create a pet peeve for engaged readers who’d prefer to buy books with more individualistic outward personality, it also does a disservice to the writers, because there is no perspective to it, just the vaporous vibes of existing, or whatever. ![]() īy (quite literally) blurring a whole group of authors together with bright, often meaningless shapes, the major book publishers hope to maintain a financial consistency through an aesthetic one - playful but inoffensive, Instagram-baity though refined. Or perhaps you’ve noticed the more recent phenomenon of long and precious lyrical titles, in the vein of Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. Maybe you recall when every book was titled “The ’s Wife” or “The ’s Daughter,” another outcome of the publishing world trying to style new novels according to the blueprint of established bestsellers. Among these is Amazon’s recommendation engine, a mechanism that constantly equates products as interchangeable and therefore incentivizes a kind of uniformity. There are even larger industry forces beyond an artist’s control. You Exist Too Much by Zaina Arafat Catapult Notably, both books are from the Penguin Group’s Riverhead imprint, suggesting an in-house directive. Lauren Peters-Collaer, who gave Brit Bennett’s 2020 novel The Vanishing Half perhaps the seminal blobby book cover, has a portfolio bursting with diverse and impactful compositions, and only occasionally returns to the splotchy fields of color - as on the 2021 novel After the Sun, by Jonas Eika. But on other projects, she has turned to clever photography and vivid painterly detail. Nicole Caputo, creative director at Catapult Books, contributed to the abstract fashion with her cover for Zaina Arafat’s 2020 novel You Exist Too Much, imbuing the art with attractively shimmering gold stripes, and selected similarly vibrant, dancing flames for Shruti Swamy’s story collection of that same year, A House Is a Body. It’s not a case of one or two designers running amok. It’s important to say here that neither authors nor the artists themselves can be blamed for the trend. For all their potential verve, these geometries are a far cry from the emphatic expressionism that dominated 20th-century painting - they are tepid and hesitant, more like the palette itself than any arresting vision one might create with these saturated hues. As critics and influencers continue to point out, cover art has in recent years regressed to a sort of algorithmic average: the colorful, crowded blobs. ![]() Wouldn’t it be nice to have that experience when browsing contemporary fiction today? To pick up a volume because it stands out as peculiar on its face? Too bad. I loved it, though, and not just for the arresting visual I also knew there was nothing like it in any bookstore I’d visited. I realized why my publishers had worded their message so gently: not every young author will be thrilled to see themselves removed from the prime real estate on their finished work. The front cover had become a striking, enigmatic image without context, one that invited curiosity and even a slight alarm. It also removed my name and the title of the novel, relegating those to the spine alone. The updated version that landed in my inbox kept the mask but changed the background to a violent red. We’d been going back and forth on a few concepts, including one design that featured a large respiratory mask seemingly strapped around the book itself - a reference to a fictional gaseous drug in the story. ![]()
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