Dalkey Disappointments

This blog has shown much love for Dalkey Archive in the past, especially for the cover designs of Nicholas Motte, who did most of their recent output. However, I saw that their books from late 2013 onwards were getting a new look. here are some examples shown in various online catalogues:

I actually really like these: simple, bold, classic and, while not as colourful and pop as the Motte designs, quite appealing. I ordered a number of them. However, the books themselves turned up looking like this.

Presumably the original images were just placeholders. This is fine in itself--sometimes you need a picture for the catalogue or Amazon, and you put something there, knowing it will be changed later. But almost all of the final, actual covers are much uglier than these placeholders. The cover for Adibas is OK, and at least makes play with the Adidas logo that gives the book its title (Adibas being knock-off or counterfeit consumer goods). But Leningrad is a murky mess, and The Maya Pill is a truly ugly cover: the sort of thing that might have produced by a vanity press outfit in 1993.

Adibas, by the way, is also one of the worst books I've read in quite some time. It consists of extremely disaffected/affectless fictional vignettes of life in Georgia during the Russian invasion a few years ago; everyone keeps shopping or clubbing or fucking while Putin's tanks roll down the streets. The impression you get is that Burchuladze has read Brett Easton Ellis and nobody else ever. It's also one of the most misogynistic boioks I've read in a long time: women are defined almost entirely by the tightness of their vaginas, with their willingness to provide oral sex a vague secondary characteristic. I know you shouldn't confuse the writer with the narrator, and the shallowness is part of the book's point, but you honestly don't get anything from reading the whole book that you wouldn't have got from its blurb.

I don't know what's going on with Dalkey at the moment, but I hope it stops.

More Motte

The first book designer who was kind enough to let me interview him was Nicholas Motte, who (in collaboration with Danielle Dutton) creates the wonderful covers for Dalkey Archive. (The Motte interview is here, Dutton's follow-up comments are here, and an overview of Motte's first Dalkey covers is here.)



Since then, Motte has produced a huge number of further Dalkey covers, remaking that publisher's line into one of the most eye-catching and unusual on the shelves. Using often abstract shapes, lots of white space and heavy black lines, fields of solid (usually primary) colour, and frequently with much of the illustration apparently falling off the edge of the cover, or zoomed in on to the point of losing obvious meaning, these are bold, beautiful graphics.

So here's an extensive selection of Dalkey eye-candy, both recently published and due later this year and in early 2010. Click for bigger versions.

Nicholas Motte Follow-Up

In the comments to the Nicholas Motte interview, Dalkey's book designer Danielle Dutton expanded further on the book design process. I thought it was too good to leave there, so here it is, with pictures!

Nick's work came to us at a really interesting time. We at Dalkey had talked for a while about doing covers that used a detail from some larger artwork and had just a tiny piece sticking onto the bottom of the cover. This was the idea behind the Hotel Crystal cover (which was one of the first I designed with Nick's art) where I took a detail from one of his drawings and left most of the cover white.



We liked that minimalism and this became the basis for the designs of the other covers. What we liked about Nick's art was his unexpected use of color but also, primarily, the looseness of his lines. There's a story about a Paul Klee scholar who happened to line up 50 or so of Klee's nonrepresentational pencil sketches and noticed that the lines from one ran into another. When he organized them a certain way, the result was a giant portrait, which Klee had secretly cut to pieces after it was done in order to isolate the rhythms of the lines themselves.

Above: Paul Klee's Contemplation
Below: Klee in his studio


This is more or less what we've tried to do with Nick's work. He sends us pieces without knowing what the books are, and I typically pull some detail or details to stretch or turn etc. to create the cover design. Lately, there have been a few cases where Nick did a straight-up representational image for us because the book needed that - that was the case with A Nest of Ninnies, for example.



For the most part, though, what's made these covers seem so vibrant to us is precisely the element of surprise that comes from this combination of constraint and collaboration. It's a kind of OULIPAN attitude toward cover design, I guess, which seems appropriate given that, as Nick says, he came to us/we came to him through his father, Warren Motte.

An Interview with Nicholas Motte

A recent post looked at the beautiful and striking new covers drawn for Dalkey Archive books by Nicholas Motte. Mr Motte was kind enough to agree to be the first artist interviewed on Caustic Cover Critic.

***

CAUSTIC COVER CRITIC: I know your work from the new Dalkey Archive covers: how did you come to be involved in this?

NICHOLAS MOTTE: My father, Warren Motte, had been working with Dalkey Archives for a while—he’d put out his Fables of the Novel through the press in 2003. Warren had finished work on his most recent book entitled Fiction Now, and he asked me if I’d like to design the cover. I was immensely touched by the offer and set about making the image.


I submitted the design to Dalkey and they responded really favorably. John O’Brien and Danielle Dutton asked me if I’d like to provide more material of similar tone for other books in their catalogue.


CCC: What's it like doing covers for such a wide range of books?

NM: It’s a real pleasure. I love getting a crisp bundle of books wrapped in my drawings hot off the press, and Dalkey’s a joy to work with.


The work has been an odd coupling of restriction and freedom. On one hand, it has been useful to produce work that is thematically unspecific because the designs can be applied to a wide spectrum of books. I have to parse my drawings with those restrictions in mind. On the other hand, the Dalkey team has not sought to limit my submissions in any way at all. I’m free to provide them with anything I find attractive/evocative—work is PLAY for these books.

Danielle is great at laying these things out. She’s got a fine sense for typefaces and she’s able to drop the designs into contexts of the titles nicely.

CCC: What cover work do you have coming up?

NM: The next line of Dalkey books, I hope.

CCC: What's your illustration/design background?

NM: I’ve loved drawing since I was little. I collected “albums” and comics as a kid and tried to mimic those drawings, studied architecture in college, started a t-shirt brand in 2001 (rxmance), worked as a ‘concept artist’ for a while and moved to Boulder in 2006 to work as a designer.

CCC: You work in a mix of pen and digital design: what's the process? Are the sketches done in pen and then coloured?

NM: I love the quill pen very much because of the varying line-weight that one can achieve with a single stroke. I love Chinese brush for the same reason, but the resulting work from that form is often too big to easily scan.

The scanner’s great because it totally transforms the native scale—a 2” drawing can become a building-sized monster. Because of the scanner, I’ve been drawing smaller and smaller. I guess my goal is to make all the lines in a drawing please me. Smaller drawings have fewer strokes, and my chances of making every line ‘correct’ increases at that scale.

I bring the black and white drawings into Illustrator and drop blocks of colour behind the lines.


CCC: What would your dream book be to work on, from any era, if you could do all of the design, the covers and interior art?

NM: One Thousand and One Nights!

CCC: Are there any other book designers do you admire?

NM: Jack Kirby, Moebius, Hugo Pratt, Enki Bilal.





CCC: Ever been asked to design/cover/illustrate a book you couldn't stand?

NM: No, but I was asked to make a McCain cool hip t-shirt. I submitted some cellphone camera shots of the inside of my throat.


CCC: Thank you, Mr Motte!

Dalkey!

I've long been a fan of the eclectic literature put out by the fine Dalkey Archive, a non-profit press based at the University of Illinois whose aim to is to keep fine books in print and bring them to a wider audience; a significant chunk of their list is the sort of wonderful literature in translation most publishers don't see enough money in publishing, but which we are poorer for not having available to us. Also, how can you not love a publisher who takes their name from the work of Flann O'Brien?

One thing I haven't particularly admired in the past has been Dalkey's covers: they've tended towards the dull but worthy. But recently they've been having a bit of an overhaul under the artistic direction of one Danielle Dutton, with illustrator Nicholas Motte providing bold pen-and-digital sketches with large areas of flat colour, giving the books a unified, striking look.












As you can see, they're about to republish A Nest of Ninnies by James Schuyler and John Ashberry. If you haven't read the two brilliant novellas by Shuyler already available from NYRB...




..then you must go and get them and read them NOW.