Jackets Required: Icarus at the Edge of Time

By Fwis -- Publishers Weekly, 8/20/2008 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: Icarus at the Edge of Time
Designer: Chip Kidd
Author: Brian Greene
Publisher: Knopf

The retelling of Icarus' tale has been re-imagined by Brian Greene as a short science-fiction tale about a young man who runs away from his traveling, deep-space home to explore a black hole. Chip Kidd writes in his blog that the challenge was making the entire book a visual experience in addition to the cover; to somehow represent the story outside and throughout. Kidd used Hubble Telescope imagery to illustrate the story, and a simple visual device used throughout the book (a large, black splotch) to represent the growing proximity to the black hole. Like Mark Danielewski's Only Revolutions (right), the text and the design change throughout the book, eventually taking up the entire space before receding.

The cover itself is simply a continuation of the interior concept; thus the cover is derived directly from the interior and is treated exactly the same, without any embellishment. Attractive on the shelf as both contemporary and science-focused, it is exactly what the author is trying to accomplish with his re-told fable, as well as a fine treatment of already beautiful imagery; not a lot of pushing and pulling is needed.