Little, Brown’s After the Fire Jacket, Before and After
By Lynn Andriani -- Publishers Weekly, 6/17/2008 10:18:00 AM
When Little, Brown creative director Mario Pulice began designing the jacket art for After the Fire: A True Story of Friendship and Survival, he thought the story—about the fire at Seton Hall University that killed three students and injured 58 in January 2000—demanded a strong and commanding jacket treatment. “We 
wanted an all-type, powerful jacket to reflect the power of the book," he said. Pulice went with red, green and yellow all-caps lettering against a black background, a look reminiscent of Knopf’s jacket art for Joan Didion’s Year of Magical Thinking. Galleys went out to booksellers and the media bearing this design, with the subtitle “A True Story of Love and Survival.” Yet the book that will appear on bookstore shelves in late August bears no resemblance to Pulice’s original design. Instead, customers will see a jacket bearing a photograph of two 20-something men walking down a tree-lined path on a sunny day, with the subtitle “A True Story of Friendship and Survival.” What happened?
Editor Geoff Shandler explained: “We had a good response to the type jacket, but there was thought that was it too abstract in some way. When the story is so hopeful in the end, was it too dark—literally?” The new jacket shows the book’s central characters, Shawn Simons and Alvaro Llanos, victims of the fire, walking side by side. One has a friendly hand on the other’s shoulder, and 
they seem relaxed and happy. “It’s cliché,” said Shandler, “but a picture can help tell a story. The emotional bond between those boys, which is so strong, wasn’t necessarily coming across in the original jacket. Now it does. You have a sense of friendship, of journey. You see them there and see that they have made it.”
