The Rachel Shihor Interview
Graphs, Maps, Trees
As you can see above, Knopf has unveiled the cover of Haruki Murakami’s forthcoming, massive novel, 1Q84. It’s quite a pretty cover.
To mark the occasion, Knopf’s blog has an informative conversation with uber-designer Chip Kidd on how he built the cover:
Logistically the title is a book designer’s dream, because its unique four characters so easily adapt it to a very strong, iconic treatment . . .
Upon reading the manuscript, it soon occurred to me that the duality of Aomame’s situation could be represented by an interaction of the book’s jacket with the binding/cover underneath. By using a semi-transparent vellum for the jacket, and printing the woman’s image in a positive/negative scheme with the title on the outside layer and the rest of her on the binding, once the jacket is wrapped around the book it ‘completes’ the picture of her face.
If you head on over to the Knopf blog, they have images where you can see exactly what Kidd means.
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More from Conversational Reading:
- More Information on Murakami’s 1Q84 Between the widespread use of the Internet and Murakami’s huge reputation in English-speaking countries, it seems like 1Q84 is the most-widely-covered-upon-publication non-English title ever. Well,...
- 1Q84: It IS About Orwell The Guardian reports that Haruki Murakami’s gigantic new novel, 1Q84, is rooted in George Orwell’s novel 1984: Murakami has now admitted that he had “long...
- Lengthy Review of Murakami’s 1Q84 Another review of 1Q84, rather substantial. I can’t remember the last time a foreign-language book was covered as thoroughly in English upon publication as 1Q84....
- 1Q84 Street Date If you're one of the Murakami people out there, Amazon now lists 1Q84 for Oct 25 (though sans cover). . . . continue reading, and...
- 1Q84: English-language Publication To Start in Sept 2011 Scooped up by Knopf, as expected. Interestingly, the article only mentions the first 3 volumes, and as we all now know there'll be more, but...
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Pretty, but I wouldn’t say it’s particularly innovative. I’m surprised by how eye-catching it is (considering the pale colors and the vagueness of the facial expression) but that doesn’t make it very exciting or original… Anyways, I think many readers won’t care much what the cover looks like but will focus on the name that features so boldly on the centre of the cover.
The cover is really dramatic and beautiful. At the same time, I think the major selling point is Murakami’s name.