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Calligraphic Book Covers
The Stranger, The Bell Jar, Cannery Row, and Rebecca are four books all united in featuring some of the most striking and well-known opening lines in literature. Started as my calligraphy final and continued as a personal project, I gave myself the challenge of designing the covers of these books as a set, using only calligraphy. With an emphasis both thematically and visually on text, my goal was to use calligraphic layouts to reflect the tones of each book, while featuring their opening lines on the back covers. An additional parameter of the project was that the covers be predominantly done in the Foundational hand, with no more that one third of the project being in blackletter. Lettered by hand, then scanned in and laid out digitally, no two letters are repeated to maintain authenticity.
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Calligraphy
Layout/Book Cover Design -
~4 weeks
April/May 2022 -
Calligraphy + Hierarchy + Tone
FINAL DESIGNS
“Mother died today. Or maybe it was yesterday, I don’t know.”
The Stranger, Albert Camus
Albert Camus’ The Stranger is known for its absurdist and societal themes as it follows main character Mersault as he goes through his life uncaring, from the death of his mother onwards. As such, my goal was orderliness for this cover.
The contrast in title case and capitalization of the title is meant to emphasize Mersault’s status as a “STRANGER” to society. The title and author are flush left to represent the formality of his apathy and lack of emotion. A shorter work, I designed the spine to be thinner than the rest of the set.
With “Mother died today,” as the true first line, I felt it should be emphasized with a larger size. In the second line, “yesterday” is in orange to point out that Mersault doesn’t know, or really care to know, when his mother actually died, a key point to his character.
“It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.”
The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
Regarded as semi-autobiographical, Sylvia Plath’s emotionally heavy novel is from the point of view of Esther Greenwood and tells of her decline in mental health, life as a woman, and stay at a mental hospital.
The center alignment and smaller size of the title as it hangs in the white space is meant to reference the shape of a bell jar as well as Esther’s mental state.
A key trait of The Bell Jar’s opening line is that it does a great job of establishing the initial setting of the novel. I chose to emphasize “the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs” as the most visceral. The quote felt at home at the bottom of the cover for a more somber tone.
“Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream.”
Cannery Row, John Steinbeck
Cannery Row is as much about the setting as it is the characters. The plot is relatively simple, following a group of friends as rough around the edges as the seaside canneries as they come together to try and throw a party for their friend Doc Ricketts. It’s a story about community.
I chose to capitalize and center the title to make it appear like it might on a large sign or storefront window, or when painted on the side of a building.
Since the novel is Steinbeck’s homage to the titular street, I wanted to emphasis the words he uses to describe Cannery Row in the opening line. To this point, the line is at a larger size as well.
“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.”
Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier
Daphne du Maurier’s novel follows the second wife of Maxim de Winter as she marries and moves to Manderely, the de Winter estate. There she is haunted by the legacy of Maxim’s first wife, Rebecca, and the housekeeper who is still devoted to her.
As such, the title sits prominently in the center of the front cover, and since Rebecca’s first initial often pops up throughout the estate, I emphasized its size in particular. I chose to execute this cover specifically in blackletter because I felt the hand fit its mysterious, thrilling genre.
In the line on the back, “to Manderley again” is in orange since Manderley is the central location where Rebecca haunts the second Mrs. de Winter and where all of the drama goes down. I wanted it to feel very stately.
PROCESS WORK
Using this project as an opportunity to continue the research into calligraphy we were doing in class, I found visual inspiration and motivation for these covers from old Nancy Drew book covers and the work of Ismar David, among others. Below are the scans of my original calligraphy work.
