Books
Cover story
by Chris Hunter
Why are so many covers of New Zealand books – especially novels – so rotten? Is it because most publishers have no idea what to look for?
Next time you’re lying on the sofa or propped up in bed, take a look at the novel you’re holding in your hands. Why did you choose that book? Did it get a good review? Did a friend recommend it? Or did the cover catch your eye, prompting you to pick it up?
For a lot of people, the cover clinches the purchase. So, are local book covers any good? The annual Spectrum Print Book Design Awards are supposed to answer that question, and give New Zealand designers some exposure. The winners are announced at a ceremony next week, but you probably won’t hear much about it; as usual, they’re likely to be eclipsed by the Montana Book Awards, announced just two days later.
If you look at the winning covers from the past few years, it’s obvious that we have a number of good designers. But most outright winners have been non-fiction books. Fiction and non-fiction design are two completely different areas of expertise, and New Zealand publishers seem to be struggling to create consistently good covers for novels.
Sometimes it’s hard to see if we’ve moved on from the dark days of the 1980s, when much of Penguin’s local output was marred by naïf cover illustrations from the likes of Sue Reidy. Many of those covers have been updated, but, two decades later, Penguin still serves up the occasional shocker – such as The Topp Twins Book, which looks as if it was designed by an eight-year-old messing around in QuarkXpress.
The problem is that most of the designers hired by local publishers don’t seem to understand the underlying dynamics of effective book covers. British academic Alan Powers, writing in Front Cover: Great Book Jackets and Cover Design, calls these dynamics "hidden eroticism". Powers is not referring to gratuitous titillation: he’s using a sexual metaphor to explain how good covers "tease" the casual browser. These covers hint at what you will enjoy if you take the book home to bed. They give you clues to the pleasures to be had, but no more. To enjoy the full experience, you need to buy the book.
An example is the cover of Sarah Quigley’s novel Shot. It’s a crisp photo taken from ground level, freeze-framing a young woman spinning around. The colours are heavily saturated: her red dress billows against a deep blue sky. The woman’s face is partly obscured, which rouses your curiosity and suggests an element of mystery in the book. The carefree spinning motion implies that this novel is also about freedom. And the red obviously suggests passion. The icing on the cake is the typeface used for the title of the novel: it’s quirky and distinctive, but not overpowering. This deceptively simple cover for a New Zealand novelist is a textbook example of compelling design.
But it was created by Virago’s in-house design team in London. Elizabeth Knox is another local author whose books benefit from overseas design expertise: their novels immediately stand out on the bookstore shelves and tables, giving them a head start over most other New Zealand authors.
The cover for Quigley’s latest poetry collection Love in a Bookstore or Your Money Back (Auckland University Press) is a local design. This image cleverly echoes the distinctive colours and composition of Shot, using a vivid red rose set against a cloudy sky. The long title of the book is typeset in a multi-hued strip running the full width of the cover. Neat and understated, it’s the work of Wellington graphic designer Neil Pardington.
Pardington believes that a handful of local designers understand the forces at play within good fiction covers. "I’m quite sure that the best New Zealand designers are producing work to the same level as their counterparts in other areas of the arts," he says. "I don’t see, however, that the best designers are necessarily being hired by publishers."
Small budgets are inevitably part of the problem: when Pardington’s Eyework studio tackles fiction and poetry books, it’s for love rather than money. "Nobody’s getting rich off a poetry book or novel in a market of four million people – certainly not the authors or publishers … Smaller budgets necessitate simple, cost-effective designs, but this isn’t always a bad thing."
Another leading book designer is Sarah Maxey. (And yes, it’s a fair bet that you’ve never heard of her, either.) Her covers include My Heart Goes Swimming (a poetry anthology edited by Jenny Bornholdt and Gregory O’Brien), Sing Song, by poet Anne Kennedy, Roger Horrocks’s biography Len Lye and William Brandt’s novel The Book of the Film of the Story of My Life. Maxey is a regular at the design awards; her striking image for C K Stead’s Dog is in the running for this year’s best cover. But, like Pardington, she says that there’s not enough income to make a living from book design alone, even from her exalted position at the top of the trade. And to compound matters, she adds, "Publishers often do not place enough trust in designers and often don’t seem to consider it a specialist skill."
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