WHAT IS YOUR BOOK COVER TRYING TO TELL US?
PART TWO



Publishers Weekly recently interviewed poet, publisher, and now professional book designer Jeff Clark about the design work for which he’s becoming increasingly well-known.

As it turns out, I have several Clark-designed books, including at least one whose contents I actually like, Christopher Nealon’s The Joyous Age. That’s the front and back cover, above. Beautiful, right? And though I can’t, at least not this early in the morning, recall any specific relationship between the flames on the cover, the ship on the back, and the book’s contents, it somehow “felt right” as a cover for the book.

Clark says he reads everything he designs for, and that, “if I read a manuscript well, I'll be guided toward giving it the skin that would really fit.” But Clark has designed something like three dozen books, mostly poetry, in the last couple of years, and frankly, I would be surprised if he loved, or even terribly much liked, a good portion of that work.

Here is where the professional designer and the amateur tend to part ways, at least so far as poetry book design goes. The professional has to come up with something spiffy, no matter whether or not the work inspires him or her. The amateur designer—usually the publisher or the poet him or herself—tends to have a real investment in the work, if not the technical skills to pump the volume up to 11.

Clark has designed some breath-taking book covers, no doubt about that. And I appreciate the care and concern he brings to his work. The Nealon is only one of many I’ve seen that, at the very least, got me to thinking about picking the thing up.

But Clark has also done work that feels, to me, very “Looks Like the Latest Boring Mainstream Fiction Book Pretending to Be Hip That You See in a Row of 20 Similar Looking Books Staring at You Out the Barnes & Noble Window.”

Take a look, for instance, at the latest from Ahsahta Press. Clark has designed each of the books on their home page—and each is expertly done: crisp and beautiful. But how many of them particularly stand out?

Chris Vitiello’s Irresponsibility may be the only one that really pushes the contemporary book design envelope, with the black text running across—and made illegible by—the black obelisk-y looking thing running down the middle. I actually want a copy, based on nothing more than the way this looks and what I suspect, given that, might be going on inside.

The others? They look rather like things I see on the F train every morning on the way to work, books that I suspect largely contain “quirky” fiction by 20- and 30-something MFA-holders. Well, okay, maybe the Rusty Morrison looks more “Here’s Some Poetry” than Barnes & Noble-y.

That is not to say that these covers are doing the authors or publisher a disservice. They probably do accurately represent the books' contents, and may even be meant on some level to appeal to the kind of person who reads a lot of contemporary fiction and other things you’d browse through while finishing up your latte in the B&N café. That kind of person, after all, makes up the largest audience for literature outside of the captive audience of the university.

There's a very thin line between books that look well-designed and, for want of a better word, books that look "corporate." Clark walks that line, and the result is often Wow, but just as often When Will This One Hit the Remainder Bin?