Worldwide Pants Showcase: The World Is Flat

Thomas Friedman was just on Late Show with David Letterman and David held up my book cover. Nice.

The Resurrectionist

by Jack O'Connell

Art Director: Anne Winslow // Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill

Your only child is lost between this world and the next, and more than anything you want him back. A controversial doctor and a mysterious stranger claim they have the answer. Who do you trust? Are you willing to risk everything? Are you prepared to enter Limbo?

Part classic noir thriller, part mind-bending fantasy, The Resurrectionist is a wild ride into a territory where nothing is as it appears. It is the story of Sweeney, a druggist by trade, and his son, Danny, the victim of an accident that has left him in a persistent coma. Hoping for a miracle, they have come to the forbidding, fortresslike Peck Clinic, whose doctors claim to have “resurrected” other patients who were lost in the void. What Sweeney comes to realize, however, is that the real cure for his son’s condition may lie in Limbo, a fantasy comic book world into which his son had been drawn at the time of his accident. Plunged into the intrigue that envelops the clinic, Sweeney’s search for answers leads to sinister back alleys, brutal dead ends, and terrifying corners of darkness and mystery.

With The Resurrectionist, Jack O’Connell has crafted a breakout thriller that’s mesmerizing, suspenseful, and all-out heart-pounding.

Other concepts:



Hand-lettering isolated:

Fixing Failed States

by Ashraf Ghani and Clare Lockhart // Oxford University Press

Ashraf Ghani, who played a central role in the design and implementation of the post-Taliban settlement in Afghanistan, has been nominated for the job of Secretary General of the United Nations and considered for the job of President of the World Bank. 'In Fixing Failed States,' Ghani, along with co-author Clare Lockhart (Director of the Institute for State Effectiveness), argues in that only an integrated state-building approach can heal these failing countries.

This job request came to me from an unlikely source. I was hired by the author's agent. I was sensitive to the fact that it can be tricky and awkward when the publishing house's art department is forced to work with an outside designer. Working on this cover was the very definition too many cooks. I worked directly with both authors and a representative at Oxford who I thought was the Art Director but later found out was the Marketing Director. Despite the tight deadlines, and the logistics of who's seen what version and will I be setting the back ad and flaps and who get what when, it went fairly smoothly and on time. But damn, I didn't have enough time to revise the art so that the globe wasn't kissing the "I". But overall, I liked how this turned out very much.

Below is a detail of the revised Fractured Globe "X":


Concepts leading up to final:

The Bonfire of the Vanities: final

by Tom Wolfe // Picador

Cover photograph by Jeff Spielman

• A redesign:related selection with links to original hardcover designer/illustrator Fred Marcellino.

The corporate kingdoms of New York City printed over metallized stock to make it look like a city built of tarnished gold.
I was thinking Ayn Rand by way of Donald Trump.



Tom Wolfe to be judged by his 10 reissued covers // USA TODAY



“Hats off to Henry” for those designs.
—Tom Wolfe

The Bonfire of the Vanities: sketches

I was thinking of a big bonfire.


I was thinking an Empire State Building is just an Empire State Building. But it looked more like a hypodermic needle/drug story.
And tried to use an 80s color palette inspired by Playboy pin-up / Duran Duran's RIO artist Patrick Nagel.


with Olga Grlic // Go Studio

I was thinking 1980s NYC and Sherman McCoy, a Wall Street “Master of the Universe” who has it all—a Park Avenue apartment, a job that brings wealth, power and prestige, a beautiful wife, an even more beautiful mistress as a retelling of The Fall of Icarus.






Pieter Bruegel, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus c. 1558
Oil on canvas, mounted on wood, 73.5 x 112 cm
Musees Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels

The Right Stuff: final

by Tom Wolfe // Picador
February 20 1962, Cape Canaveral, Florida. The 134-ton Atlas rocket with Astronaut John Glenn in the Mercury capsule roars from the launching pad at 9:47 AM, EST, on flight that put him into orbit just minutes later.


The Right Stuff is the latest selection for the ONE BOOK, ONE CHICAGO program for Fall 2008. This award-winning program presented by the Chicago Public Library encourages all Chicagoans to read the same book at the same time, and to come together with friends and neighbors to share and discuss a great work of literature.
What a great idea! And check out their awesome resource guide. It's chock full of great interviews, articles, historical background and timelines. Really well done.

The Right Stuff: sketches

My initial idea. A single gleaming silver star, ascending to the heavens, leaving the Earth's atmosphere and a trail of sound waves behind, just about to pierce the blackness of space to become one with the stars. Blah, blah, blah.
The gradient sky was inspired by the Japanese screen painter Ando Hiroshige.



Iconic Astronaut. I liked this idea very much. Which astronaut will be the chosen one with the "right stuff" to go to outerspace first? The silhouetted figure would've printed against a background of matte silver. In the end, I think this approach was too sexy for my cover.


The Mercury Seven: (left to right, back row) Alan Shepard, Virgil "Gus" Grissom and L. Gordon Cooper; (front row) Walter Schirra, Donald "Deke" Slayton, John Glenn and Scott Carpenter.

With Olga Grlic // Go Studio:

2008 New York Book Show Winner

I am pleased to announce that the Picador Art Department has swept the 2008 New York Book Show in the category of General Trade / Quality Paperback for Individual Book Cover Design.

Tom Zoellner's THE HEARTLESS STONE // Picador


Galt Niederhoffer's A TAXONOMY OF BARNACLES // SMP / Picador,
(illustrated by Pierre Mornet / Marlena Agency & Pete Garceau)


and Michael Cunningham's FLESH AND BLOOD // Picador.


Also Michael Lewis' THE BLIND SIDE, a freelance job I designed for Ingsu Liu / Art Director // W.W. Norton


We also won in the General Trade / Quality Paperback for Book Cover
Design / SERIES.

THE PARIS REVIEW INTERVIEWS, Volumes 1 & 2 // Picador / The Paris Review,


and the Laurie R. King crime series:
THE BEEKEEPER'S APPRENTICE, A MONSTROUS REGIMENT OF WOMEN, THE MOOR, and A LETTER OF MARY // Picador
(Major props to Adam Auerbach who illustrated this entire series).



Congratulations go to Lisa G. & Adriana C. in Production and our Printers, Phoenix Color & Lehigh Lithographers for their outstanding efforts, and my Publisher Frances C. and the incredible Picador Editorial staff for their trust.

The Hidden Man

by Anthony Flacco

Art Director: Beck Stvan // Mortalis / Random House

A historical thriller featuring a detective and a hypnotist/illusionist set against the backdrop of 1915 San Francisco during The Panama Pacific International Exposition.

The Diving Pool

three novellas by Yoko Ogawa / translated by Stephen Snyder // Picador

A haunting trio of novellas about love, fertility, obsession, and how even the most innocent gestures may contain a hairline crack of cruel intent. Spare, beautiful, and twisted, The Diving Pool is a disquieting and at times darkly humorous collection about normal people who suddenly discover their own dark possibilities.

• A young woman records the daily moods of her pregnant sister in a diary, taking meticulous note of a pregnancy that may or may not be a hallucination—but whose hallucination is it, hers or her sister's?

• A woman nostalgically visits her old college dormitory on the outskirts of Tokyo, a boarding house run by a mysterious triple amputee with one leg.

• The title story is about a lonely teenage girl who falls in love with her foster brother as she watches him leap from a high diving board into a pool, wishing that she was the water—a peculiar infatuation that sends unexpected ripples through her life.
  

Johnny One-Eye

by Jerome Charyn

Art Director: Chin-Yee Lai // W. W. Norton & Co.

Brief Descriptions:
Double agent John Stocking is seventeen when the novel opens in 1775. The son of a legendary, pipe-smoking whorehouse madam (a real historical figure) whose "nuns" cater to both rebel American and British military men, Stocking is a scholarship student at King's College. Working as a scribe composing love letters for high-ranking soldier, he has been caught breaking into George Washington's camp, and is accused of poisoning Washington himself. Historical characters including Washington, Hamilton, both General Howes, and a parade harlot dart in and out of the story, which features the burning of Manhattan by the British.

Direction: Strong, bold, edgy, fun and sexy.

The publishing house thought this was a wonderful cover for the title but unfortunately it was killed by a major bookseller buyer. Oh well.


I based my silhouette on the portrait of George Washington at the Battle of Princeton, 1781, by Charles Willson Peale.