Cover Story

This week I received the cover art for The Book of Lost Things, which we should have on the website by early next week. I think it’s a small work of art. It’s quite beautiful, one of those instances where an illustrator - in this case, the wonderful London-based illustrator Robert Ryan - seems to have perfectly understood the writer’s intention with the book, which is rarer than one might think.

It’s a curious thing, but that old adage about never judging a book by the cover applies pretty well to most things in life, with the exception of books themselves (and possibly cobras and scorpions, but that’s another matter entirely.) In fact, most browsers in a bookstore are probably attracted to new authors by the cover image of the books in question. The title plays a part too, obviously, but it’s interesting that a literary medium should rely so much for its primary impact upon a visual stimulus. For that reason, writers do fret a lot about their covers, and publishers offer them varying degrees of input. Sometimes, the author may feel that it’s not his or her place to offer suggestions about the cover, but I’ve found that, by and large, design departments are at least open to an author’s ideas, as long as they’re not completely off the wall.

In the past, I’ve tended to have more to do with the U.K. covers than the U.S. covers. For Every Dead Thing, The Killing Kind, and The White Road, I provided illustrations that I thought might be particularly striking, most of them from 16th and 17th century sources. Looking back, they were rather skeletal, and not a little gruesome, but they certainly stood out.

The problem, though, was that they were putting off some readers, particularly female readers. My UK publishers decided to go with a new look, that was much more neutral, for Bad Men. Unfortunately, that didn’t quite work either, as the covers went a bit too much in the opposite direction and looked rather bland as a consequence. So, for the publication of Nocturnes and The Black Angel, the covers were redesigned again, and I think the right balance has now been struck. Obviously, different readers will have their own opinions, and I still hear from those who were fond of the initial designs, but there’s very little point in writing and publishing a book that puts people off picking it up because of the cover.

The changes in the U.S. have been more gradual, but Atria, my American publisher, has put a lot of thought into the presentation of the books. In fact, U.S. book covers in general have improved a lot over the last ten years. For a long time, it seemed that American publishers, or certainly the big publishers of commercial fiction, didn’t care about much more than making sure that the author’s name and the title of the work were visible on the front of the book. Now they rival, and sometimes better, their British equivalents. It says a lot about Atria, though, that when the British cover was presented to them they saw that it was stronger than their own, and a decision seems to have been made to go with the British cover, or a version of it, in the U.S. as well. I suspect that many of those who publish the book in translation may follow suit, and so The Book of Lost Things will have a single identity across countries and continents. That thought leaves me feeling both happy and relieved. It’s a strange little book, but very personal to me, and for that reason I am very protective of it. It seems to have been born for its cover, and I imagine it will be comfortable in that skin.

Anyway, one more important step has been taken on the road to its publication. Next month, the proofs - the soft bound copies of the uncorrected final text - will begin to filter out to booksellers and others in the trade, and I’ll start to get an idea of how others feel about it. The book, for so long known only to me, then to a handful of people in the British and American publishing houses, will slowly become public. It is a difficult time, perhaps more difficult even than the initial presentation to the editors and my agent. After all, if they are unhappy with it they can send it back. Changes can be made. Nobody will be any the wiser, apart from perhaps three or four people, and it will be in all their interests to remain quiet about the book’s history, troubled or otherwise. Out in the public domain, though, the book has no such protection.

There’s a pair of lovely verses, close to the end of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, where the poet writes:

Go, litel bok . . . /
And red whereso thow be, or elles songe,
That thow be understood, God I biseche!

It should be the author’s prayer: Go, little book, and wherever you are read, I ask God only that you be understood.
And so I’ll say that prayer now for The Book of Lost Things.

This week John read:

The Janissary Tree by Jason Goodwin (uncorrected proof)

and listened to:

Fox Confessor Brings the Flood by Neko Case
Fab Four Suture by Stereolab

The Fatal Books

I’m touring at the moment, so this post may be a little shorter than usual. It struck me, though, that for last week’s post I’d read only one book - Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men - while the week before I read six. Now admittedly four of those books were relatively short, and I did take two airline flights that week, but it was still quite an achievement. I’m not quite sure what happened last week. I mean, the McCarthy book wasn’t hard going by any means, but I made slow progress on it.

I suppose I’m conscious of the fact that more and more books keep appearing in my house, and my reading isn’t keeping pace with my purchases. In an ideal world, I’d be book-neutral, in much the same way that one can contribute to the damage done to the environment by one’s airline flights through contributing to forestry and climate friendly energy projects. (And FYI on this, one short haul flight contributes as much to global warming as driving a 1.4 litre car for three months, according to www.carbonneutral.com. Unless, of course, you’re a member of the US Department of Energy, in which case it’s all lies and you should just go ahead and upgrade to that SUV.)

Anyway, in the last two weeks I’ve bought ten books and read seven, so I’m still plus three on the book front. The problem is that the space I have for storing books is not getting any bigger. It’s not as if I own Doctor Who’s Tardis, which is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside, in which case I could accommodate potentially infinite numbers of books. Instead, it’s as if my books are breeding. Every time I read some, more appear. It distresses me mildly that the cover for one of my heaters in my dining room has become a bookshelf due to lack of space, and I can now no longer turn on the heat in that room for fear of damaging my books. Books are potentially contributing to my future ill health. Worse, they’re potentially damaging the health of my visitors, who are blameless and don’t deserve to suffer arthritis or flu simply because their host feels that the well-being of his books are more important.

There was a time when I wouldn’t get rid of the books that I’d bought, even after I’d read them, but that time is now gone. I’ve become quite ruthless, and my local Oxfam bookshop has been the main beneficiary, but I still haven’t quite managed to cull my shelves to the extent that I should. For example, I have two copies of a particularly well-loved collection of Donald Barthelme short stories. One is a paperback, the other a signed hardback bought more recently. In theory, I should be able to get rid of the paperback, but I can’t. I remember buying it. I remember being struck by some of the stories in it. I associate not just that book, but that particular copy of it, with a certain time in my life. I can’t get rid of it. In fact, I probably have less affection for the more expensive signed copy than I do for my mauled, broken spined paperback.

That’s the dilemma, in a nutshell. There are books that I have read, and that I will probably never read again, and yet I can’t part with them because those books mean something to me, not just as abstract ideas or memories but as physical entities. So I guess I will just have to resign myself to the fact that my shelves are destined to become more untidy, that increasingly unlikely corners of my house are going to be pressed into service for book storage and that, at some point in the future, I may well end up as one of those old people who are found dead after an unfortunate incident with a dodgy pile of books or an overburdened bookshelf, much like Leonard Bast in E.M. Forster’s Howard’s End.

And do you know what people will say about me if that happens?

“It’s how he would have wanted to go.”

Well, let me tell you now: no, it’s not. To quote that lovely joke, I want to die in my sleep like my grandfather, not screaming and crying like his passengers . . .

This week John read:

Fiddlers by Ed McBain
Will Storr Vs The Supernatural by Will Storr

and listened to:

That Striped Sunlight Sound by The Go Betweens