Flexibility in Design: An Interview with Richard Green

In the middle of last year I featured the designs for a set of 10 Victorian Sensation and Gothic novels to be published by Penguin. Those books are finally out today, as beautiful as promised, and I was lucky enough to be able to talk to their designer, Richard Green.

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CAUSTIC COVER CRITIC: What's your design background? How did you get into book design?

RICHARD GREEN: I graduated from the London College of Printing in 1995 after 3 years studying graphic design. My first design job was for a charity back home in North Wales. I did that for a year before I got my first publishing job with HarperCollins Publishers in London. At that time the art department was responsible for designing covers for all the divisions: Fiction, Children’s, Collins Reference, and the Non-Fiction lists. So it was a great education for me having to be so flexible in my approach to design.

CCC: How did you come to work on the Victorian Bestsellers--are you a fan of Gothic and Sensation fiction?

RICHARD GREEN: I’d never read any of these books before I worked on them. My starting point was a new cover I had just designed for Phantom of the Opera which is a similar genre and the same format, so when this project came up it was a good opportunity to evolve the work I’d been doing on that. The end result turned out to be further removed than I had anticipated, but I was pleased to have come up with a new look for this series.

 

   

 

CCC: Do you work mainly with computer or old-fashioned materials? These covers have a nice, 
painted feel, however they were produced.
           
RICHARD GREEN: Most of my work starts on a layout pad I always have in front of me on my desk. I’ll usually sketch some initial ideas down then scan them into the computer. From there I find it much easier to try different colours/layouts, etc. On this occasion I had just bought a Japanese brush pen so was trying it out to see what effects I could get with it. I liked the looseness of the sketches I’d drawn so fitted them around some old Victorian woodblock type I found.

 

 

CCC: What are the challenges of designing a set of books, rather than an individual title?

RICHARD GREEN: The main challenge I found was retaining a sense of the series style whilst making each cover different from the last. There are 10 books in this series so it got pretty tough towards the end.

 

 

CCC: What is some recent work of which you're most proud? What about older work?

RICHARD GREEN: I’ve worked across a pretty broad spectrum of titles over the years that require different ways of working, but I probably enjoy the illustrative side of things the most, so they tend to be the ones I am happiest with. It’s not necessarily the most sophisticated designs that I’m most proud of; I think answering the design brief well is quite satisfying. Pop Goes the Weasel is a good example of that, it seemed to hit the spot and sold pretty well.

 

  

 

CCC: If you could design, inside and out, without budget limitations, any book from the history of literature, what would it be?

RICHARD GREEN: That’s a tricky one. I’ve never designed the interior of a book, so that would be a challenge in it’s self. But I guess something I could illustrate as well as design.
      

 

 

CCC: Is there any neglected book you'd love to draw to people's attention as something they should seek out?

RICHARD GREEN: I’m not a big reader of books, I’m more interested in their design so I often search out beautiful old books at markets or second-hand shops. I’m always looking for something new for inspiration, and to broaden my design knowledge. So keep your eyes peeled!

CCC: Thank you, Mr Green!

 

  

 

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By the way, I can't let this opportunity to quote from The Woman in White go past. It's a wonderful book (so of course Andrew bloody Lloyd-Webber had to go and make a musical of it), with some gorgeous writing and one of the best, most charming villains of Nineteenth-Century fiction (Count Fosco!). Here's the sequence where the book's hero first encounters the book's heroine (who was partly based on Mary Ann Evan, aka George Elliot).
 
I looked from the table to the window farthest from me, and saw a lady standing at it, with her back turned towards me. The instant my eyes rested on her, I was struck by the rare beauty of her form, and by the unaffected grace of her attitude. Her figure was tall, yet not too tall; comely and well-developed, yet not fat; her head set on her shoulders with an easy, pliant firmness; her waist, perfection in the eyes of a man, for it occupied its natural place, it filled out its natural circle, it was visibly and delightfully undeformed by stays. She had not heard my entrance into the room; and I allowed myself the luxury of admiring her for a few moments, before I moved one of the chairs near me, as the least embarrassing means of attracting her attention. She turned towards me immediately. The easy elegance of every movement of her limbs and body as soon as she began to advance from the far end of the room, set me in a flutter of expectation to see her face clearly. She left the window—and I said to myself, The lady is dark. She moved forward a few steps—and I said to myself, The lady is young. She approached nearer—and I said to myself (with a sense of surprise which words fail me to express), The lady is ugly!

Penguin Ramblings

Soon I hope to be able to publish an interview with the executive designer at Penguin Australia. As a vaguely related prelude, here are some recent and upcoming bits of Penguin cover grooviness.

First of all, here are the two covers that were missing from this round-up of Richard Green's cover designs for some 2010 reprints of classic sensation novels.




Bulwer-Lytton's Paul Clifford, by the way, was the novel that famously began with 'It was a dark and stormy night...' (Well, it does so once you get past Bulwer-Lytton's two prefaces and a chunk of poetry quoted from Crabbe. Technically it starts with 'This novel so far differs from the other fictions by the same author that it seeks to draw its interest rather from practical than ideal sources...", but that wouldn't have been emulated by Snoopy and inspired an infamous competition for bad writing.)

Secondly, Penguin appear to be slowly revamping the look of their Nabokov back-list, presumably to capitalise on the first publication of the incomplete and much-discussed The Original of Laura.



The Enchanter was another posthumous unearthing, and something of a dry-run for Lolita.

I'm not sure which of these will be the final cover for Mary.




Finally, Penguin South Africa have started releasing the Penguin African Writers series, with Penguin UK to follow suit in early 2010.








These books are by writers from, respectively, Nigeria, Kenya, Côte d'Ivoire, Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Guyana, so it's a good mix.

As Reneé Naudé explains, "Every book in the Penguin African Writers series is distinctly African and the illustrations should reflect a theme central to Africa. We are looking for creative representations of ‘African’, contemporary and/or traditional." These first covers certainly reflect that. The publishers have started a competition to design covers for further books in the series.

I also should point out that if you learn how to pronounce Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o properly, it's incredibly fun to say.

See Elsewhere

(A quick post about groovy things elsewhere on the web)

SEE! Poets talking about their favourite poetry book covers, at the Best American Poetry blog.



SEE! The newly expanded and, frankly, wonderful The Art of Penguin Science Fiction, put together by James Pardey!



SEE! Its work-in-progress sister site, The Art of Fontana Modern Masters!



SEE! A movie being unusually up-front about its literary origins! (Taken from here.)



It's sad to SEE! that one of my favourite blogs, that belonging to the bookshop Crockatt and Powell, has ceased, due to the fact that the bookshop itself has had to close down because of the unfavourable current state of publishing/bookselling.

And finally, SEE! some upcoming covers for Penguin, designed by Richard Green, for some 2010 reprints of classic sensation novels. There are 10 in the series, though I could only find 8 of the covers. I learned of these via the Casual Optimist.









I really like these, though they're almost too tasteful.

PS: For readers in Australia, I've just found that Angus & Robertson has joined Borders in jacking up almost all of their book prices by at least 10% above the recommended retail price. Scumbags. Don't shop there.