To celebrate 40 years of publishing, Abacus Books have gone and reissued 18 classic books with new introductions by the authors and with brand new covers. I was lucky enough to do the above cover for David Sedaris' Me Talk Pretty One Day. And boy do feel lucky, as David Sedaris is one hilarious writer man. If you (whoever you are) have not read any of
his books or listened to any of his stories on
This American Life or seen any of
his readings on Youtube, then shame on you. Go and do that now. I will wait .......... Oh hi, thanks for coming back. You've been gone a while. That's fine, there is a lot to take in. He's good huh?
For this series of reissues, the brief was to focus on the title rather than the book as a whole. This meant a lot of the covers are purely typographical, as you can see from the other covers. It was a pleasure to play around with the type, as well as draw some of the bits and bobs mentioned within the book. (Like some fat suit legs.)
Above are some worked up roughs. Some using collage to focus on specific aspects of the book, another using some pretty phallic looking tongues flapping about. I was pretty excited by the bottom right cover, which I thought reflected the tone and odd nature of Sedaris' stories. As well as the fact that it included a picture of some meat, a fly and a shoe, which, in my opinion, all book covers should include. I do concede however, that the final cover probably answers the brief more succinctly and fits in better with the rest of the covers in the series. So there.
Head over to
Foyles where you can try and win the whole set that includes such classics as Ian Banks' The Wasp Factory and Christopher Brookmyre's Quite Ugly One Morning.
