Normally the story I tell about a book cover is about brainstorming concepts, experimenting until I find something I like, maybe trying a new technique. But for POST-Apocalyptic Valentine, the upcoming poetry collection by Linda Watanabe McFerrin, and published by 7.13 Books, the cover story was something altogether different.
We had a tight timeline, just a few weeks, but luckily the author had a photo she wanted to use and a strong idea about tone and type treatment. We met on a Zoom call to discuss.
Linda described just why she thought the photo, which showed a lonely looking, graffitied phone booth sitting in the middle of a wide sweep of sand, would be the perfect image for her book. I jotted notes of what she said:
junk, abandoned, writing in the sand, writing on the wall, missed connections...It wasn't until the next day, when I sat down to play with how I might work this image into a book cover with the added elements of title and author name that I realized we had a problem. I think the reason I didn't make the connection the night before is that when I'm Zooming (or god forbid chatting with someone on the phone) half my attention is always taken up with the social aspect of the call, social anxiety, the effort of needing to appear normal in the world. Somehow I didn't make the connection between the phone booth picture and the other handful of pictures Linda had offered up as possible cover fodder, all of which were taken on the sand at the Salton Sea. One showed a giant metal cricket. One showed a curved sculpture built of toilets.
The phone booth was an art installation.
Which meant in order to use it, we needed permission from not only the photographer (Linda's husband, so: check), but also the artist.
Linda said the art installations at the Salton Sea were not signed, so we didn't know who had made this particular piece. I asked Linda to think through other images that might work for the cover, and I set to trying to track down the artist. I knew Linda had her heart set on this particular photograph, and I, too, wasn't keen on having to find something new. With only a few weeks to create a cover, we really didn't have time to come up with a whole new direction.
I got lucky. I don't really remember the words I put into Google. Public art... Salton Sea... Phone booth... I Googled at random. Phone booth on the sand. But it didn't take me long at all to track down other images of the phone booth art piece, and the name of its creator, through some recent news articles.
This sent me down a whole new rabbit hole. Iröndäd, as he's known, has been on a quest to save the Salton Sea. "Few issues need the attention of Californians more than the ecological crisis here at the Salton Sea," he says in this article on KSUI News San Diego. "Since 2018, the sea has been shrinking at a rapid rate, exposing vast playas that emit toxic dust in the air as the wind blows across them." To bring the ecological crisis to the public's attention, Iröndäd started the Salton Sea Run, in which he runs the entire shoreline (around 95 miles, taking about 30 hours), tracking his GPS coordinates as he goes, thereby recording the shrinking of the shore in a very particular way through run after run. He does this in a gas mask, keeping himself safe from those toxic fumes but also, again, bringing attention to the crisis.
Here's another article about it in The Guardian.
I was captivated by Iröndäd's quest, but more importantly for my purposes, I had found the name of the man who created the art Linda wanted to use for her book cover.
One task down of three. I'd discovered who he was. Now we had to find his contact information, and contact him in hopes of getting permission.
I Googled Iröndäd, with and without umlauts, looking for a website or social media accounts, something with contact information. Turns out there are a lot of people using Irondad as a social media name. I think it's a term having to do with running (he's completed triathlons and ultramarathons) and there's also some sort of Spiderman connection to the word. I didn't delve too deep. I was looking for a real, non-superhero man (or maybe superhero if he can save the Salton Sea).
I couldn't find him on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram... but I did find some sort of Bombay Beach art association Facebook page, and I slipped in there, asking if anyone knew him. Wasn't hearing anything back. Time was growing ever shorter. I jumped on an email thread I had going with Linda and with publisher Leland Cheuk, to tell them I wasn't having any luck. I got halfway into that email and thought, what if we could contact the reporters or news platforms of the articles about him. I clicked into one. Would they give out contact info? That felt unlikely. Privacy issues. Scrolling through the article, feeling like I was grasping at straws with no time left, my eye caught something. Right there in the middle of the feature, plain as day, was a link to the artist's website.
I don't know why I had missed it before or why I had been unable to find his website by Googling him. But suddenly I had a website with a contact page.
Finding him didn't guarantee in any way that we'd be able to secure permission, but I took a flyer on it and while Linda reached out to him, I started working the image into a cover.
First I needed to build a little more of the photo. I needed more space around the phone booth for my text. So, I took it into Photoshop and added more sky and sand by cutting and pasting pieces of the existing photo and using the clone brush to clean it up and get rid of obvious duplication.
Then I experimented with the type treatment. Linda had said she was interested in lettering that looked like graffiti. I had a graffiti font I liked, and I played with that, manipulating the duplicate letters so that they were all different from each other. I also looked at pictures of graffiti and built some lettering based on that.
Time was going by and I wasn't hearing back about the artist, but I just kept experimenting. The photo seemed to want the lettering to be slanted, so a lot of my samples did that. The couple book covers that Linda had said she favored (I always ask an author what book covers she really likes) had some element of curved lettering so I tried doing my lettering in an arch as well. For colors I stuck mainly with sky and sand colors, sometimes using the red of the phone and the pink of the antenna heart as accents.
On impulse I also tried a different direction, thinking what if, instead of graffiti, the title and author looked like they were written out by hand. Something loose and thin that allowed more of the background picture to show through, left more air in the image.
And then I got an email from Linda: Iröndäd had said yes.
Hurrah! I kept working and finally sent some samples out to Linda and Leland. Linda loved the handwritten sample and said it looked like skywriting to her, which hadn't occurred to me. We had some back and forth about the blurb snippet and then finally, and in the nick of time, had our cover, with special thanks to Iröndäd.
When I share these little blog posts, I, of course, hope that folks might enjoy hearing about the design process and be interested in the book, but in this case I also hope you might delve a little deeper into Iröndäd's art and his cause and what's happening out there at the Salton Sea.
POST-Apocalyptic Valentine will be out officially on September 3. More info on Linda Watanabe McFerrin is here. More info on Iröndäd and the Salton Sea Run is here. The photo of Free Love Phone Booth by Iröndäd was taken by Lowry McFerrin.
Here's one of the poems from the book for a little taste:
"POST-Apocalyptic Valentine"
My heart, my love,FRAGILE
was on the line
HANDLE WITH CARE
when everything went haywire.
CONTENTS MAY SHIFT UNDER PRESSURE
You, a zombie now,
CONTENTS MAY SPILL UNDER PRESSURE
without a clue about me
or you—
promises all broken and
an apocalypse looming …
URGENT
URGENT
URGENT
I need to send a bullet
SPECIAL DELIVERY
into your brain.
EXPRESS MAIL
I am so sorry.
RETURN TO SENDER
ADDRESSEE UNKNOWN
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