Notes on a Book Cover
The reading public rarely suspects the blood, sweat, and tears that go into designing a book’s cover. Creating a jacket that will entice bookstore browsers and visually convey a book’s essence (in a glance) is ultimately more of an art than a science. Ancora Imparo ran my story of how the cover of Monuments came into being, illuminating the process that occurs before a book begins its public, published life. Like memorials encountered in the landscape, a cover design can take years to gestate, weathering conflicting opinions about how it should look and whom and what it should address, ever vulnerable to budget and construction considerations. Whether a book or a monument, the final product is ultimately a story of the journey—circuitous, strenuous, serendipitous, and often untold—that brought it into being.