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Judging books by their covers,
Under the Banner of Heaven Also discussed: Into Thin Air Into the Wild It’s begun to occur to me that “Jon Krakauer” may be a nom de plume of Steven Seagal. Let’s examine the similarities: Seagal, you may recall, became known with movies with three-word titles: Above the Law, Hard to Kill, Marked for Death. Krakauer became known with books with three-word titles: Into the Wild and Into Thin Air, which was probably the most controversial book of 1998 (because, let’s face it, the Starr Report can’t rightly be called a book, now can it?). Next, Seagal made a departure with Under Siege, a daring attempt to vary the number of words in the title. Krakauer has just made a similar departure with Under the Banner of Heaven, and he used the same exact preposition! Finally, Seagal’s movies basically look the same: Seagal using his black-belt aikido to beat the crap out of everybody. Krakauer’s books basically look the same, too, and that’s what I want to discuss here.
With Banner of Heaven, there seems to be a half-hearted attempt to turn Krakauer into a brand. Rather than establish a consistent look between the books, however, the designer of the latest book seems to have taken a Column A/Column B approach, appropriating various elements of the previous books as he pleases: the design of Krakauer’s name, for example, is copied from Into Thin Air, as is the image of a mountain; the title treatment is sort of lifted from Into the Wild, as is the extensive synopsis; the supermarket-paperback-style embossing on the letters disgraces all three. Since the appropriation is so piecemeal, the big question is, why do it at all? The name treatment is OK, I suppose, but it isn’t particularly distinctive; Futura is one of my favorite typefaces, but the heavy condensed version probably ought to be used for setting all caps and nothing more. That said, it made more sense on the Into Thin Air cover, where the title was set in the same face. But Banner of Heaven’s title is set in Trade Gothic Bold Condensed, which bears similarity but is just different enough to irk me. (See the review of Eric Schlosser’s latest for a more in-depth discussion of typefaces that are too close for comfort.) Into Thin Air’s cover is pretty compelling, though it would have been better had it just been the photo and the title treatment, with Krakauer’s name treated like it was on Into the Wild, before he got famous. The mountain looks incontrovertibly forbidding, and the title treatment, dwindling with each successive word, fills you with foreboding. On the Banner of Heaven cover, however, the mountain just kind of sits there. If the designer was trying to equate Canaan Mountain with the force of God, I think a better photograph would have been a view of the mountain from just behind the point of view of one of the houses under it. If Krakauer’s goal is to dig into the town to find out what made two fundamentalist brothers commit murder in the name of God, I’m not sure a photo of the town from several miles away is the best way to communicate that. And I know Krakauer has now arrived at the point in his career where he gets top billing, but putting his name in the clouds above the mountain seems to indicate a sort of equation between Krakauer and God. That’s taking star billing a bit too far. Finally, the title treatment, with its positive/negative split, doesn’t really seem to have a point. Like the discussion regarding Krakauer’s name, it just seems to have been picked up from other Krakauer books without good reason. Sure, maybe it’s supposed to symbolize that Krakauer sees both sides and is therefore fair and balanced (more on that next month), but isn’t that the job of any nonfiction book? Judgment: I know I’ve ripped into it pretty hard, but it’s not that bad a cover. It just seems like it could have been so much better, had the designer employed some original ideas.
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