The Unbinding
Author: Walter Kirn
Designer: David High
Art Director: John Gall
Publisher: Anchor Books
Typefaces: Hefty, Helvetica Roman, Futura Book
Here is a cover with a story that may be just as interesting as the book's content. I loved the cover when I first saw it in the bookstore, but I can't help but love it more now that I know everything that went behind it. If you think designing a book cover is always a straightforward process, please read on… I'm thinking of writing a book called "The Unbinding, The Cover". Thanks for this beautiful work David! (and John Gall) Also, make sure you go through all the slideshows.
—Jason Gabbert
I think in order to talk about The Unbinding I would need to start with the first book I designed this cover for, which was called Backward-Facing Man, for Ecco.
BACKWARD-FACING MAN
Backward-Facing Man (according to the Amazon description) is: A dark elegy for '60s campus radicalism and its turn toward violence in the years that followed. My initial presentation had two directions: The first was based on the concept of a crushed or distressed daisy, sort of what happened to the idealistic flowers that were placed in the soldiers barrels in that famous anti-violence protest (a). I showed these covers: (b) is using a daisy being crushed by my scanner’s transparency attachment, and the (c) image I got from nøn-stock. (d) I presented with another nøn-stock daisy, with the explanation that we would shoot a crushed, or dead daisy (they do not have stock-shots of distressed daisies, I looked everywhere). This is the cover they ended up picking (d) and my partner, Ralph, bought daisies, slowly killed them, and the shot a few (f). The cover ended up on the shelves looking like this (g).
The other direction that I wanted to pursue, if just for pure graphic pleasure and a chance to illustrate, was to make the book actually LOOK like it came from that time-period, during the height of Saul Bass and Charley Harper. I didn’t really think they would go for it, and, honestly, most of my focus went to the damaged daisy concept, but I thought it wouldn’t hurt to throw into the mix anyway. I showed these 2 (g) and (h). To my surprise, the editor really fought hard for (g), but in the end they felt the other direction was more marketable. (i) and (j) are 2 more I threw into the first presentation (as my least favorites) because I am so indecisive.
Funny, but looking at these now I realize the illustration would’ve be better-suited if the novel was called Backward-Looking Man, so it’s good that it ended up on The Unbinding after all.
THE UNBINDING
From the back cover verso:
Kent Selkirk is an operator at AidSat. An omnipresent subscriber service ready to answer, solve, and assist with the client’s every problem, AidSat monitors subscribers’ vital signs and responds to more than 600 common Life Challenges.
Through the AidSat network Kent has a wealth of information at his fingertips, so when he notices that his foxy neighbor Sabrina is a subscriber, he can't help but try and use his resources to seduce her. But Sabrina is spying on him too. And so is someone else, noting the videos they rent, the diaries they keep online, and watching carefully for something called The Unbinding. Diabolically contemporary, funny, and whip-smart, Walter Kirn’s The Unbinding is a dark comedy of our not-so-distant future.
I immediately thought of my paranoid-backward-looking illustration, and I revised it to these: (k), (l), (m). Publishing is so fickle, though, and at the time I presented these it was during a seemingly across-the-board “No Illustration, All Photographic” phase, so I gave them some photographic options, which I liked a lot. (n), (o), and (p). These focus on the spying-satellite aspect of the storyline. I’m not sure if John presented both directions— or just the one he liked— but they ended up going with the illustration, with 2 requests: try another color scheme and lose the thin linear waves. Funny, I completely forgot about them and, I have to admit, they kinda made me gasp when I saw them again after so long. What in the world was I thinking? On the next pass I showed them the orange color-scheme (q), and one that would use metallics (r), and they went for the orange. I wanted this to be on uncoated stock to make it feel more like an old silkscreened cover, and John fought for that, but they were worried about wear-and-tear so we went with the matte finish instead.
JOHN GALL'S COMPS
The first attempt, the all type, had to do with the state of entropy that particular world was evolving into and the fact that the author was publishing the book, on line, chapter by chapter, as he was writing it. Hence the raw, un-typeset, disconnected feel.
Well, of course, all type fiction is a tough sell. I had to humanize the cover a bit, so I used the girls eye (Spyware! Romance!). At this point things get a little hazy, I know there were some other variations on this theme and the author was having a hard time with them all, so I figured it was time to stop fooling around and get a real designer on board. David High, do your thing.
