A while back, I was contacted by writer / publisher / literary powerhouse Jenny Forrester to design a cover for a new project. I was excited to work with Jenny because I love her writing (particularly her beautiful memoir Narrow River, Wide Sky) and her magazine Mountain Bluebird.
Her new book was going to be called The Book of Solitude: The Art of Cherishing Spaciousness. From the beginning of the project, she had an idea of what she wanted the cover to look like. She was interested using handmade paper as the background, and she knew roughly how she wanted the text to be presented over that background.
The minute she mentioned handmade paper, I thought, I know exactly what to do. I contacted friend and fellow writer Beth Kephart, for whose book Wife | Daughter | Self I designed a cover using her husband's beautiful art back in 2020. Along with being an elegant writer and teacher, Beth makes hand-crafted paper! She even wrote a book about it: My Life in Paper.
Beth's handmade paper is beautiful and she makes journals and other lovely things and sells them through her Etsy shop here. I contacted her about Jenny's book project and she found us some gorgeous paper for Jenny to choose from, and when Jenny had made her choice, Beth photographed it for my use.
She told me, when she sent the pictures, that it had photographed darker, grayer than the actual paper and gave me permission to alter it for my use. I did a lot of work on that paper, actually, lightening it, brightening it, removing the background. That took some doing because I wanted to leave the paper edges looking delicate and as beautifully... I don't how the word for it... tattered as they are. Then Jenny wanted her book to be square, so I photoshopped the rectangular paper into square.
Jenny was interested in the title text swooping through the layout. She even sent me a sketch of her thoughts. When I'm working with an author or publisher very hands on, I love stuff like this.
I explored fonts and colors and experimented with laying the text out in a way that had Jenny's swoop in mind. I sent her samples that included one with a circular title as well.
When Jenny first contacted me about the project and we were starting to explore possibilities, she was still deep in the process of writing the book. Time went by and I worked on other projects. A year went by, in fact. When she was ready and came back to me to continue working, the title had changed. It was now Love with a subtitle of The Art of Cherishing the World.
She said, "I love the flowing of the waterfall of the title. 'Love' in a waterfall will be a challenge but maybe?"
It was too much of a challenge to make look good, but if I let the subtitle be the waterfall, love, particularly with the slant of its letter V, was the perfect word through which the waterfall could flow.
I tried that love with different fonts and played around with the space between the letters...
...until I found a layout we both liked. Then as a last step, Jenny asked me if I'd be able to make the text look debossed (the opposite of embossed, where the lettering is pressed into the paper). To do that, I experimented with adding shadow and lightness until it looked right. The hard thing about this is that the text is light yellow and white. Lighter colors tend to pop and dark colors recede. Even when the light and shadow are applied correctly, it tends to create an optical illusion where one minute it looks debossed, the next it doesn't. Next I played with the lettering so that it wasn't all one shade of yellow or one shade of white across the words, and I also brought up a little of the texture of the paper underneath to add to the effect.
In the end, we were both happy with what we had...
...but then the project took an eleventh hour turn when folks Jenny consulted with didn't like our doing the cover against a paper background and we went back to square one.
Plot twist!
Or, if you're talking about a project in terms of one to ten, maybe we could say square five? We kept the fonts and the layout, lost the paper and debossing stuff. Lost some of the text too. She decided to remove the mention of the book award finalist and the blurb snippet and add a tagline: as ideological battles escalate, what are we to do? We discussed an illustration of the mountains, which is not only a prominent figure in her book but a strong part of her, if you'll excuse the markety expression, brand.
What we ended up with was a much simpler, elegant style cover, and my final touch was to add the sun shining through and behind the big O in Love.
Love: The Art of Cherishing the World will be out this coming August. And in the meantime, Jenny is putting out yet another book (I don't know how she does all that she does): a writing instruction manual and manifesto called Brilliant: The Art of Literary Radiance. She will be in Portland celebrating its launch and her wonderful literary magazine Mountain Bluebird on June 6 and 7 at BOLD Coffee and Books (start time 7 PM). If you're in Portland and free, come out and have a gander at the many lovely things Jenny has been doing. More information on Jenny is here.
And here's a little snippet of Love:
*
Adam kisses me when I sit down again, puts his hands on the small of my back which isn’t small but in his large, capable, and calloused hands feels small. I wish I were free of body shame like the activists in the disembodied bubbled digital world, but I’m only human … raised in particular ways … having had particular experiences inside my body and because of my body…Later, when I tell my friend named Fun about Adam and his hands, she says, “Those men who work with their hands …” I tell her Adam is meaty with a yummy belly, that he’s sturdy, strong. Fun says, “I just love a meaty man.”
Adam doesn’t push his tongue into my mouth, the way some Adams do. He’s a decent kisser with sweet, whiskeyed lips.
He’s shit-faced, he says. “But I can handle my liquor, I’m not saying that.” I nod. Of course, he can handle his liquor—that’s what we’re supposed to do, we’re supposed to be able to handle things, like everything, even the poison that is alcohol. The Devil’s Bar is the devil’s bar.
I say, “It’s fun making out with you.”
He takes a swig of his drink, and says, “We’re not making out.”
I listen to how people define things. I wonder what his definition of making out is.
“Kissing then?”
I’m painfully aware of My Pool Mate watching me and this public display of affection. I hope I don’t look too awkward, but the reality is that I’m in my late 50s and so is Adam and so, it probably disgusts some people to see us acting like teenagers. Part of me thinks, fight ageism, and the other part thinks, what in the actual fuck are you doing?
