Book Cover: Moss-Covered Claws

Recently, I was excited to be asked to create a new cover for the short story collection Moss-Covered Claws by Jonah Barnett. The book, published by Blue Cactus Press, came out two years ago, and I loved it and blurbed it. When the second printing got low and Blue Cactus started prepping for a third, they decided that it would be fun to give it a whole new edition with new content inside and a cover refresh. Publisher Christina Vega contacted Laura Stanfill, publisher of Forest Avenue Press, to be a consultant on the project, and Laura has been acting as a go-between, tossing out ideas and helping me refine my work.

The main element of the original cover is a painting by Sam Breaux. Look at that cool minotaur! For the redo we wanted to keep that art and build around it. 

(If you look close, you may notice that the author's name is one letter off from the name on the cover of the book. Originally their name was Jonah Barrett. But after being recently married, Jonah and their partner decided to combine their two last names into something new—and the best combination turned out to be only one letter different. I love that this new edition of the book also serves as a bit of a celebration of that new name.)

I met on Zoom with Laura, Chris, and Jonah to discuss the book and throw out ideas. Then Laura emailed with a comprehensive rundown of her thoughts. Right away, she had super fun ideas about new approaches. 

"I wondered if you could create some kind of layer effect around the monster that would give it more dimension," she suggested. "Maybe even looking like the monster is being torn out of the background of the painting or separated from it somehow."

She also said: "You are so awesome at frames and borders. I’m not sure if a border would work with this illustration as-is, but I could also see shrinking the art and putting a border around it, or making it look like we’re viewing it through a telescope or cave or something—distorting the space on the outside."

Jonah forwarded a great collection of imagery to use for fodder as well, including some fonts they liked and an array of vintage book covers. Thinking on Laura's ideas and Jonah's fodder, I started picturing the cover of Moss-Covered Claws as a storybook gone rogue, where at first it looks like a sweet old-time fairytale book—but the monster in the forest is ripping its way out and into your world.

I started simple, with the paper of the illustration tearing to reveal the title text behind, the minotaur popping out of that confined frame. I knew I'd need to do some toning to the original artwork, but I figured I'd wait until we had a colorway decided for the cover before I did any tinkering. I would also eventually want to add some shadow behind my emerging minotaur. (And I would also-also eventually notice and fix the typo that sneaked into (or more specifically out of) the terrific blurb by the equally terrific Sequoia Nagamatsu, a writer I was fangirling all over the whole time I was working on this cover, I can't lie.)

But with Laura's suggestion of working with borders, and Jonah's examples of vintage book covers, I started to get a little more fancy as I went along. Jonah liked fonts with a swoop in them, so along with my chunky, modern-looking original font, I folded in a more classic font that I could get fancy with, for the text that lived within the bounds of what I was thinking of as my storybook portion.

(You might notice some dropouts at the very bottom of the painting in a couple of these samples. That's where the painting ends, and I knew I may have to photoshop a little more in to make the layout I wanted work—but I'd cross that bridge when I came to it.)

There was back and forth with Laura and I came back to her with more samples. This time I dispensed with the paper tear, playing, instead, with the idea that the minotaur is busting through the border, itself.

Getting more elaborate with the border and futzing with the title, even, in this last sample, cracking it up a little.

As sometimes happens when you get more and more elaborate with your tinkering, Jonah, when we shared samples with them, preferred the most simple. The no-border approach with the paper tear at the top and bottom. They had some suggestions for tweaking, including updating the title color because "I don't like yellow. Maybe it's because I hate sunshine, who knows." Haha! But they also had a new suggestion: "What if the cover took on more of a Jules Verne vibe? Think old dark green covers with nice gold type, and a bookplate-ish illustration (there's probably a better word for this) based on the minotaur painting."

Here's the example of Jules Verne they forwarded along.

And here's one of my own that I had saved because I love, and have a file of, those wonderful vintage book covers.

I got really excited about the prospect of going full-on Jules Verne with this book cover. Sometimes I muse on the question, what are the dream projects. The ones that give me the most joy. And again and again I think it's those projects where I get to go all in on a theme—and particularly where I get to have the book cover be something more than a book cover. Like how the cover to City of Weird got to also be an old pulp magazine cover. And the cover to Queen of Spades got to also be a playing card. In a way, it's like being a set designer for the movies. How immensely fun would it be to get to create a set that's New York City in 1955 or Amarna in 1346 BCE? To try to be absolutely meticulous in creating something genuine. I like book covers that allow me to do that: recreate and emulate. 

So yes, I got very excited at the prospect of emulating, of recreating one of those fabulous ornate Victorian-era book covers.

I've done something like that before, with Froelick's Ladder. That one was such fun. But it was a modern take, and for Moss-Covered Claws, I would let the design stay in and of its time.

So, I did have plans to work on Jonah's tweaks to the paper-tear cover, but first I couldn't help myself. I started playing with a Victorian-era design.

I started by building a decorative frame for the painting. Designing a piece...

Duplicating and rotating it.

Adding another detail to duplicate and rotate, duplicate and rotate.

When I had a frame, I started to build banners to place my text inside.

And then I spent an inordinate amount of time creating what I thought would be the best scrollwork to fit the space.

There were other steps, of course. Finding fonts I liked and working the text in. Fiddling with the color of the minotaur painting until I liked the tone and contrast and vibrancy. Adding all the tiny details. But most important was going back to Laura's original idea of the minotaur breaking out of the background. When I shared this direction, it was obvious that I wasn't going to go back to the paper-tear concept. We had our cover.

As an addendum, with a design like this one, and a nice, thick spine width, you can even get fancy with the spine.

I love those old ornate, gilt-stamped book spines, and because Jonah had enough pages in their book, it gave us room to create horizontal decorations to break up the space.

I used some of the elements of decoration from the cover to create the elements for the spine, and it was fun to fake-gilt-stamp the logo of Blue Cactus Press at the bottom.

The new edition of Moss-Covered Claws will be releasing soon. More info is here.

Here's an excerpt!

I walk to the edge and look down into the dark abyss. At this time of day—the very beginning—the sunlight hits the water just right, and you can see down to the peat floor in honey golden rays. I peer into the water. It’s filled with shapes—shapes that are familiar and yet so remote. There are people down there, so many people, just lying at the bottom as if in slumber.