Melissa Four on Designing Emily St John Mandel's The Glass Hotel
Melissa Four is a book cover designer and illustrator who has worked on a wide range of books for adults and children. Her illustrations have also featured in magazines, album covers and skateboard decks. Here she talks us through her process for designing Emily St John Mandel’s latest novel, The Glass Hotel.
I was already a big fan of Emily St John Mandel so it felt like a such a privilege to be an early reader of The Glass Hotel. It’s such a brilliant perk of the job to get to design covers for books I am really excited about (though daunting too of course).
The main theme of the book is multiple lives intertwined – a huge Ponzi scheme tears apart hundreds of lives, but it’s the individual stories that really draw you in. It’s about love, guilt and greed and the need to survive, and is a book populated by ghosts – these people are haunted by the different lives they might have lived, and by those they wish they’d not lost. (I’m using the words of the editor - Sophie Jonathan – here, as she’s far more eloquent than me!)
The novel starts on a container ship in a storm, and the key location (the Glass Hotel) is on a remote island in British Columbia, so vast stretches of water and a cold green/blue palette felt important. I started with the idea of the relentless and destructive power of waves and looked at stills from videos but that felt a bit over-complicated and wasn’t representing the book. I tried some photographic and illustrative depictions of British Columbia, but wanted to say more than just location, so tried using water reflecting and refracting the title to represent the fracturing that happens in the story. There’s an important scene where a character writes a threat with acid on a huge glass window so that’s what inspired the drippy lettering top right.
I also tried some more conceptual covers – the house of cards falling and the bubble bursting, which didn’t feel quite right, and then finally looked at the isolated container ship. The lettering bottom right was inspired by the ‘one made of many’ nature of the Ponzi scheme, the many interwoven threads of the story, and more basically – things falling apart.
It was quite time consuming to create the letters, I used dotted lines in illustrator to start with (I think using the font Circular as a guide) and then pulled them apart - far too much at first! I love design that has required a certain amount of making or labor – it’s something I really value, so although the hand-madeness is kind of hidden in this cover, I am happy it is there!
In our covers meeting, people were drawn to that disintegrating lettering but also the beautiful images of British Columbia, so we agreed I’d develop a visual using those two ingredients. There were also some requests to refer to past covers for the author which sparked the idea of using the tree and the bird silhouettes along the bottom.
Final cover
The photograph I used is from Stocksy, by Jesse Morrow.
As far as I know, and can remember, the approval process was very smooth. I then had the opportunity to create three different end papers, and sprayed edges too, which was a real treat. I’m especially happy with how the sprayed edges came out.
Editor, artworker and lifelong bibliophile.