Jackets Required: The Mayor's Tongue

-- Publishers Weekly, 5/8/2008 12:10:00 PM

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: The Mayor’s Tongue
Author: Nathaniel Rich
Designer: Jon Gray
Publisher: Riverhead

An interesting cover twice over.

For one, it’s almost purely typographic; not something you see done often, and certainly not to this effect. Jon Gray's masterful use of color, size and font not only creates an engaging composition, it draws the viewer into one of the main themes of the book: a meta-novel within itself; a book about books, a narrative following a narrative. How better to communicate this than to saturate the cover with the author's medium of choice?

In response to this recursivity, a small community of designers has begun designing covers for the protagonist, Constance Eakins, and his fictional fictions. There is an entire array of styles and concepts for a library of imagined books. The quality of these designs is staggering (see for yourself at the author's web site), ultimately acting as a testament to the talent of the designers, the quality of the novel itself, and Gray's ability to design a cover which inspires.