Recently, I had an email from Leland Cheuk, the publisher of one of my favorite small presses, 7.13 Books, asking if I had time in my schedule to design a book cover. All he said in that initial email was, "It’s a special one!"
Leland's promotional text for the back of the book explains it best:
From an automaton navigating a forbidden relationship with a man in post-apocalyptic Australia to a reimagining of a friendship between Franklin Pierce and Nathaniel Hawthorne, Nawrocki’s short fiction ranges from futuristic to historical and everywhere in between. House Fire, the winner of the 2009 James White Poetry Prize, judged by Mark Doty—a book that was never published—blazes with poems that are erudite and precise, even when confronting the messiness of love, grief, and mortality.
The work of the late Jim Nawrocki, who died of cancer in 2018, is poignant, rangy, and genre-bending, and House Fire is a debut collection from a literary voice gone far too soon.
So, a special one, indeed. I've never before designed a book cover for someone who wouldn't see it. I definitely felt the tension of that as I experimented with colors and shapes and lines. And what a tragedy that the original book never happened for him in his lifetime. But how lovely that, recently, when Jim's partner Jason approached Leland with a pitch for finally making this book happen, Leland said yes.
Then Jason shared that another image that had been talked about for the cover of that original book was an old photo of two men that Jim had picked up somewhere, an antique store or a bookshop: "Jim had always projected onto the photo the idea that these two gold rush-era men were lovers or partners of some kind."
I loved the photo—and the back side even appeared to have the names of the men on it.
But I did worry about copyright issues in using it outright on a book cover. Even with antique photos, copyright stuff can be a bit of a minefield. And then I saw that the image was too small to reproduce well in print.
But I started thinking. Why not combine both of these directions into one? Why not make a stencil of sorts out of Charlie and Roy's picture?
I started by drawing lines around the various areas of the men's forms and creating shapes in Illustrator
After I had created Charlie and Roy simplified down to just three colors each, I worked on a couple layouts incorporating title, author name, and place for a blurb. And added some stencil-like texture. The lettering I played with was a stencil font, which I figured I'd refine and make more my own if they decided they liked that direction. My original idea for color was reds, oranges and yellows—fire colors.
So, okay, it's a little harsh on the eyes.
Tarantino-y is what Leland called it when I sent him the samples.
He said he and Jason liked what they saw but were interested in a softer, more obviously historical tone. "The stories and poems are wide ranging," Leland said, "contemplative, about art and history and gay identity. There’s a level of erudition in the work as well. Would love to see something a little softer to reflect that."
To get more of that historical feel, I chucked the stencil font and played with adding a decorative border. I experimented with different color schemes, including shades that could evoke a sepia tone.
They liked the border and the sepia-like color scheme, and we refined it further. Bringing the colors up a little brighter. Trying a very deep red for the main text.
"I actually read about Leland and 7.13 in an article/blurb in Poets & Writers magazine," he said, "which Jim was still receiving for a bit after his death.
"After reading more about Leland’s journey, I wrote him a heartfelt email (taking a chance to stray from the usual query letters I saw Jim had used for many of his past submissions) about how similar their journeys seemed to be, with one major exception—Jim didn’t make it through his illness.
"I felt like I needed to do this for Jim, to finish his life’s work ❤️❤️❤️ As I wrote to Leland, who wouldn’t do something like this for someone they loved?"
House Fire will be out in the world on May 18th. More info on this and other 2022 7.13 titles is on the 7.13 Books site here.
And here's a little sneak peek from the very first story:
*
Severin Park was, almost literally, a work of art. The creation and crowning achievement of Chansen Soo Park, the eccentric, reclusive, and infamous cybernetics genius of Seoul, Severin had been the world’s first fully functioning automaton (to use the archaic parlance his creator preferred). He was virtually indistinguishable from a human, but for the strange and almost ethereal cast of his skin, which Park père had fashioned from a mysterious kind of advanced ceramic, durable and specially developed for his robotics work.
Severin had become a celebrity of sorts. He’d been deliberately gifted with a combination of a face and physique considered both unusual and attractive. Seen often at art and fashion-world fetes, he had more or less stumbled into a kind of side career as a model, appearing in several high-end European fashion magazines. He’d had some roles in films in what had been called independent cinema. He was even something of a playboy; his creator had also taken care to endow Severin with not only the functioning anatomy required for physical intimacy, but the desire (albeit a moderate one) to use it as well, and there hadn’t been a shortage of women, or even of men, who coveted the chance to earn a turn in Park’s bed.
His wealthy creator had appeared indifferent, at least publicly, to the unusual life assumed by his handiwork. His only formal statement on the matter had been a manifesto, which, true to his preference for old technologies, he published in a limited edition and expensively produced letterpress book On the Moral Autonomy of Automatae. As its title suggested, one of its proposals was a radical addition to the system of Linnaean taxonomy, a recognition of cybernetic creations and artificial intelligences as worthy categories of “life.” The manifesto was quickly reproduced on electronic media and available to everyone. It was widely read and debated at the time. While it was clear that the inventor had used his considerable wealth to finance Severin’s emergence into the world at large, it was also evident that, after a certain interval, the quasi-human being he created had been able to support himself and live independently. Park and his creator had little contact after that threshold had been crossed.
Well done - bravo!
ReplyDeleteThank you for honoring my friend's work so beautifully!
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