Judging books by their covers,
November 2003.

The Secret Life of Cowboys
Tom Groneberg
Jacket design: Paul Sahre
Cover photographs: Jason Fulford
Scribner

I come down a lot on designers who use handwriting fonts for things like titles, since the short length ought to allow the designer the room to do something actually unique. (At the very least, a designer should vary or tweak duplicate characters to avoid its looking like handwriting font.)

So it’s with a great deal of pleasure that I present The Secret Life of Cowboys, a wonderful new cover that mixes evocative imagery with some really telling, sloppy handwriting.

While each photograph is attractive in its own way, to use only one or the other would have made for a less interesting cover, I think. The title is intriguing enough that perhaps the designer could have just used the supermarket shot, but it’s the juxtaposition of that shot with the landscape that gives the cover its humor, because the designer first reinforces what you expect to see and then subverts it: on top you have one of the wide-open landscapes one romantically associates with the world of cowboys, while on the bottom you have the cowboy in a narrow urban canyon devoid of color or natural light, accompanied by a horse of an entirely different feather.

And then there’s that beautifully erratic handwriting. Its messiness is offset by “COWBOYS,” which is written in a dashed-off approximation of Old West wood type. It’s the kind of unexpected ornament that expresses the range of the ways a character might see himself, from humility to grandeur. It’s immediately endearing, all the more so by how different it is from many other covers, where individuality is sacrificed in favor of clarity and legibility.

And like other covers I’ve reviewed favorably, The Secret Life of Cowboys, for all its roughness, has a very strong sense of balance. That lets the handwriting go outside the lines without throwing off the overall care with which the designer has constructed this cover.

Judgment: I have to say, DiGiorno frozen pizza is really damned good. I swear it’s the best frozen pizza out there. In fact, I’m thinking of roping us some tonight.