Jackets Required: Snuff and A Wolf at the Table
By Fwis -- Publishers Weekly, 4/9/2008 11:00:00 AM
This is the latest installment in a weekly column by Fwis, a graphic design group that blogs on book jacket design. The Fwis designers judge a recent book by its cover each week on PublishersWeekly.com.
Title: Snuff
Author: Chuck Palahniuk
Designer: Rodrigo Corral
Publisher: Doubleday
Title: A Wolf at the Table
Author: Augusten Burroughs
Designer: Chip Kidd
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
We’re often bewildered by the propensity of the A-list novelists—the bestselling of the bestsellers—to get mediocre treatments, no doubt designed by committee to maximize sales (we’re looking at you, King). Which is weird, because these are the books that reliably sell themselves; there’s no reason to pick apart the demographic. Thankfully, the cult novelists—weirder writers with a smaller but reliable and rabid readership—seem to get attached to the A-list cover designers.
This is often based on mutual fandom; we’ve heard memoirist Augusten Burroughs speak publicly about his admiration of Chip Kidd, and this latest volume is a clear example why. Kidd likes to create a visual brand for his “regulars.” In the case of Burroughs, this brand consists of quiet type and a single object subtly Photoshopped into a subtle visual joke about the content matter. But a joke wouldn’t quite be appropriate for A Wolf at the Table, an account of the years of emotional abuse—or “games”—that Burroughs suffered under his father (“Learn why the author of Running with Scissors was running,” reads one cheeky bit of promotional copy). This will be Burroughs’s darkest and most serious book, and Kidd has responded with a cover that maintains the weird, funny vibe of the brand, but with a sinister twist. Incidentally, we sincerely hope that the fork from this photo is sitting on either Kidd’s or Burroughs’s mantle.
The designer of choice for cult icon Chuck Palahniuk is Rodrigo Corral, who, unlike Kidd, has strived to avoid any visual consistency at all. Corral dabbles in a myriad of styles from the trendy flourish treatment of Survivor, to the modernist dead canary of Lullaby, to the recent fleshy, heavy metal-esque Rant. The only near-consistent element is that Palahniuk’s name is completely missing from the front covers of the later books, boasting an amazing confidence by the publisher for the “cultists” to be aware of the author’s every move.
Snuff is Palahniuk’s book on pornography, a seemingly trendy post-millennial theme as evidenced by recent books from such respected novelists as Martin Amis and Irvine Welsh. In fact, Snuff is even highly reminiscent of Welsh’s Porno, which features the gaping plastic lips of a blow-up doll. But where the cover of Porno has all the subtlety and charm of that titular toy, Snuff’s playful candy-colored weird silhouettes and gonzo-type (which evokes Cooper Black, a faddish font during pornography’s golden age) are playful and inviting—a different sort of sinister trick, given the sort of sickness and depravity that is Palahniuk’s forte.
