Judging books by their covers,
November 2003.

Middlesex
Jeffrey Eugenides

Paperback:
Jacket design: Henry Sene Yee
Cover illustration: Olga Grlic
Cover concept: Karen Yamauchi
Picador USA

Hardcover:
Jacket design: Susan Mitchell
Cover photograph: Mark Yankus
Farrar, Straus and Giroux

At some point I may do a series just comparing the paperback covers and hardcover dust jackets of the same books, as it’s interesting to me how different they can be. (For that matter, at some point I may do a series about the different covers published in the US versus those published abroad.) Often the publisher of a paperback release is different than that of the hardcover; so goes the bidding in the publishing world, I suppose. It would be interesting to see how often a paperback retains the same cover as its cloth-bound sibling; I’m sure someone must have done a study on the practice.

At the moment, however, I’m just going to focus on Middlesex, because this paperback cover has been calling to me. When the hardcover came out last year, I thought it was good, more so the illustration than the typography.

But when the paperback came out recently, I was immediately entranced. The versatility with which the designer has employed the imagery of smoke — forbidden teenaged pleasure to steamship locomotion to ocean waves to smoldering city — is impressive. My favorite is how the designer uses the smoke as the waves: whereas all the other uses represent something literal or at least conceptually lateral, the water is a more inventive symbolism, perhaps that the ship is afloat on something less stable than water.

The typography here is not only subtler than the hardcover version, but there seems to have been space made for it, rather than looking like the designer had to find a place to put the type.

Most unusual about the design aspect of the paperback (as opposed to the illustration) is that it’s the rarest of covers of award-winning books, one where the gold seal announcing its Pulitzer is actually worked into the design of the cover, rather than having been plopped down onto it. This is perhaps the main benefit of getting to redesign for a different publisher for the paperback version, after the award has been announced. A designer doesn’t have to add the award seal to an existing design that was conceived without it. As happy as I am for writers who win major awards, I do feel for designers who have to cram an extra element onto their covers after the fact. At least in this case, I can be happy for both.

Judgment: I do love this cover, but no matter how sexy smoke imagery can be, I’m still not taking up cigarettes, you cancer-peddlers, you.