Tree Abraham on Designing Giles Paley-Phillips' One Hundred and Fifty-Two Days
Tree Abraham is a book designer, illustrator, writer, & maker of things. Here she takes us through her process for designing One Hundred and Fifty-Two Days by Giles Paley-Phillips.
As a reader, the verse novel is one of my favorites. Stanzaic and terse, syncopated and euphonic, a narrative told in verse entrances the reader with every line and silence; hence why I was thrilled when Unbound’s creative director Isobel Kieran briefed me Giles Paley-Phillips’ first adult book One Hundred and Fifty-Two Days. Written in a stream-of-consciousness free verse, the novel minutely follows a teenage boy’s vulnerability during his mother’s stint in the hospital.
I had worked with Unbound before on Narcissism for Beginners by Martine McDonagh, and loved the quality of their books with endpapers and embossed cases. I also appreciated their thoughtful feedback and devotion to the author’s voice. Often working with smaller publishers means a condensed and streamlined design process, with fewer rounds and more concise direction from the design department from the outset. Kieran’s mood board offered a prescriptive starting point with blue and white disintegrating imagery emphasizing a sense of entropy, loneliness, and the painfully slow passage of time. These themes flood Paley-Phillips’ writing. This is one passage I kept returning to when grasping at visuals:
“I see the ocean in all its magnificence.
Waves curling and hitting the shore.
I imagine walking out
…into the sea
before stepping inside the horizon.
Leaving it all behind.”
The brief came just as I was experimenting with indigo dye at home (which I would not advise). I was using litmus paper strips to balance the indigo vat and was beguiled by how even when only the edge lapped the liquid, blue would suffuse up the strip. It reminded me of the boy’s depression seeping up from the darkness in his parents’ lives.
I tried a cover resembling a cyanotype test strip with gradations of blue depending on time exposed to sunlight. This reflected the book’s exploration of the intensity of sadness, how long and deep one stays in the dark or light and how they are ultimately part of the same spectrum.
For the boy, time seemed to move cyclically, in and out of infinite spirals to get lost in. I painted a pattern that is divided into 60 rays to convey the hypnotic space felt with every second that the boy counts on the clock, him inescapably at the center.
Ultimately the publisher was most enthused by the third route. There is a line in the book that goes “I feel my heart beat in time with every single one of her steps.” The cover depicts a boy engulfed in water at a horizon with lines of his mother’s heartbeat meeting waves that calm and crash just as life’s oscillations in nature reflect those rhythms within us.
We tried several variations of the boy interacting with the water before settling on a final where he blurs amorphous. One hundred and fifty-two days of grief can feel heavy when suspended in each 1,313,2800 seconds of it. But staring off into the distance rather than being completely overtaken by the wet immensity, I think the cover conveys Paley-Phillips’ aspiring solace.
Final cover
Editor, artworker and lifelong bibliophile.