Paul Buckley on Designing Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey
Paul Buckley is the Senior VP Executive Creative Director at Penguin Random House. Here he explains the design process behind the wonderfully atmospheric cover for Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey.
This concept came to me in a cover packaging meeting. The book's editor, Margaux Weisman, was explaining the fantastic story of how this pigeon, Cher Ami, helped in the war effort; it's bravery and doggedness to get to the other side with the messages it would carry. Often in one of these meetings, something will come to me, and I'll pitch an idea without reading anything. If I'm off the mark, I'll be shot down, no pun intended. If the concept is accepted, I'll still read the book to make sure and correct the refining details.
Another example of this happening was when editor John Siciliano was explaining Mrs. Dalloway, and I knew I wanted her on the roof, getting ready for the evening, while the rest of the book's characters walked on by below. To pull off these sorts of collaborations, it takes editors who can follow what you are seeing and have the confidence to take that leap with you. I also have to be able to use the right language, and a ton of useless hand gestures, to bring them along with me. Then I have to explain it to the artist working on the cover, so they can hopefully execute the vision I just sold. Much searching and then landing on the wonderful Romy Blumel who got it right away and made it all come to life better than I could have imagined.
Design & art direction: Paul Buckley, Illustration: Romy Blumel
The design process is different in every book. For fiction, and some non-fiction, I will read the book in its entirety. Any artist I'm working with, I ask the same. In most instances where I'm working with an artist, I do not pitch an idea. I want to know how they would come to a vision. But if something comes to me out of the blue that I think could be powerful, I won't just ignore it either. Ideas tend to arrive in moments of stress or extreme concentration and listening, as in when an editor is talking to me, or a cover is due. Or in moments of quietude, such as falling asleep or driving the car long distances. The middle ground where I'm just going through my day to day routines are not as fertile for me. I need to be in a receiving state for visuals to come to me.
For Kathleen Rooney's novel, I had to direct and design two very different covers. Yet, both iterations have the same concept — hero bird overhead, war below. When I pitched the idea, I pitched Cher Ami taking up a large portion of the cover's real estate and us looking down with her at the war landscape-view below.
Now to find the right artist. After two long nights of plowing through my bookmarked illustrator websites, Neil Gower emerged. Within the Penguin Classics line, I've worked with Neil before on historical topics and am a huge fan of how he can deftly work certain mediums and styles of the era to achieve a very authentic feel. He had quite a few hero-sized bird images with just the perspective I was looking for, so it seemed as though everything was falling into place. A few weeks after our original discussion, I brought his samples into the art meeting and got everyone on board.
We went through a few variations on color and a few different type treatments, and eventually landed on a cover that Margauex and our publishers felt we should send to Kathleen. Voila, approved!
And then, the dreaded UNAPPROVAL. The sales team was not impressed. They requested something slicker, more commercial. This could have been achieved sticking to the painterly route we had already been travelling down, but for many reasons, it seemed a complete 180 in visual tone was the smart way to go, and we went photographic on the next, and final iterations. Sales was fine with the general idea, but after discovering the need for the package to be more commercial and through conversations with the publishers and Margaux, Cher Ami had to be smaller to allow room for the type to do more of the heavy lifting.
Once again, after a few nights of searching through bookmarked websites, I landed on the work of Larry Rostant, whose work I had seen, but whom I had yet to work with. Larry was opposite from Neil in that the latter had examples of what I envisioned. I could not locate in a collaged-photographic form exactly what I wanted, but I felt strongly that Larry could do it.
If you were to look at Larry's Instagram or website, you'll not see anything like our Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey cover. His work is largely figurative and more mass-market and genre-driven, than regular adult trade. Larry's impressive skills and perfectionist-craftsmanship would get us there. It took one or two corrections, but the result was beautiful.
Final cover
Design & art direction: Paul Buckley, Illustration: Larry Rostant
Sometimes a book cover can be beautifully solved in two days, and sometimes it is a long journey as it was here.
You can find Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey on Amazon.
Caroline Kurdej is a Graduate Student at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. Last spring, Kurdej worked as an intern for Dzanc Books, and currently provides writing services to iMiller Public Relations. You can find her work online at carolinekurdej.journoportfolio.com.