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Judging books by their covers,
Madam Secretary Also discussed: In the Name of Ishmael At first glance there’s very little to say about the cover of Madeleine Albright’s memoir, Madam Secretary. It’s a simple, classy affair, with a few little points on which to comment. I probably would have made her name smaller. The title speaks to her being the first female U.S. Secretary of State, and though her name is important, it could be ten or twenty percent smaller, and it would still be prominent, and the balance would be a little better. One little thing that’s worth noting is the way Miramax Books brands their books. That red bar there is it. It’s kind of like Peter Gabriel’s Real World label, with the multiple boxes of color running down the side, but in Miramax’s case, it’s only one box, and it’s red. The red bar is a little imposing, certainly much more so than Real World’s tiny boxes, and in Albright’s case probably a little ironic as well, given how anti-Communist she is considered to be. The most interesting thing is the typeface chosen for the cover. Trajan, based on the inscriptions on Roman columns from the time of Emperor Marcus Ulpius Traianus (AD 98-117), is yanked out every single time a designer needs something serious for a book cover or a movie poster. I’ve been wanting to do a Trajan movie for some time now, to show just how ubiquitous it is (you can see it on no fewer than three current movie posters and countless others at your local video store), but it just hasn’t come together. Here, though, Trajan is actually an appropriate choice, since it’s about a powerful former Cabinet member. Moreover, she served an administration that inspired a popular television drama, the logo of which looks like this:
Life imitating art, or just a coincidence? Wait — are those wings on the pin she’s wearing?
However, as I was collecting information on the books for this issue, another cover caught my eye. Giuseppe Genna’s In the Name of Ishmael is designed almost exactly the same way, though on this cover the title and author type size is even larger and more out of proportion to “A Novel” than Albright’s is to “A Memoir.” The odd thing is that this is not a standard design direction for the rest of the titles published by Miramax Books, most of which (if not all) are designed by Doyle Partners, who did the red-bar identity in the first place. Maybe the folks at Doyle Partners are trying to get Miramax Books to agree to a template, one book cover at a time. At any rate, now I know that their use of Trajan wasn’t deliberate in Albright’s case after all. It’s still clean and all, but now it’s just that much cheaper to me. Judgment: Disappointed!
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