The Dutch House

BOOKS AND COVERS

‘Never judge a book by its cover’ is one of those snappy bits of wisdom dispensed by grandparents and school teachers to encourage children not to base their opinions on superficial information – sweaters, sneakers, skin color. It’s good advice for making friends, but where books are concerned, it’s utter nonsense. As the co-owner of Parnassus Books in Nashville, Tennessee, I’m here to tell you, covers are precisely how we judge. You may know the author’s name or like the title, but in most cases it’s the arrangement of words, the size and shape of the font, the picture or absence of picture, that draws you in. Or doesn’t. There are a lot of books out there, and we need a little information before we pick one up and read the flap copy. It is the job of the book cover to call to us the way the roses call to bees.

When I sold my first novel, The Patron Saint of Liars, I was 27 years old. I knew as much about covers as I did about cars, which is to say I could identify what appealed without any understanding of how things worked. My publisher hired an artist named Thomas Woodruff who had painted the cover for Anne Tyler’s Breathing Lessons. The hope was that if he painted one for me, then Anne Tyler readers would become Ann Patchett readers. I suppose they were onto something as almost thirty years later people still tell me my books remind them of Tyler’s. For The Patron Saint of Liars, Thomas Woodruff sent in a painting of a field at sunset with a house in the distance and a night sky full of stars. In the foreground was a votive candle, a small flame twinkling in a glass cup. It was a beautiful painting.

But instead of saying thank you, I said I didn’t like the candle. The symbolism seemed too easy – light a candle against the darkness – and too Catholic, even though the novel was nothing if not Catholic. The art director went back to the painter to say the young novelist did not like the candle, and so the painter snuffed the candle out and replaced it with a dandelion whose seeds were blowing loose and floating up into the stars. When I saw the second incarnation of the jacket, I realized the candle had been a really good idea.

This took place before the digital age. That dandelion was not photo-shopped in. It was painted over the place where the candle had been. This time I kept my mouth shut. The book was published in 1992, the year that brought us The Secret History by Donna Tartt, All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy, and Bastard Out of Carolina by Dorothy Alison, three books with startling and ultimately iconic covers that used photography and crisp design to get the readers’ attention. The fact that all three of those books were brilliant only served to reinforce the point: original oil painting was out, archival photographs were in.

My second novel was called Taft. The title was bad and the cover was worse. Like every other book that came out in 1994, mine had a photograph on the cover, but this photograph was muddled and confusing. It was full of bar stools and featured, in a distance, a young white woman, even though the book was about a black man. There was nothing about it I liked. After a great deal of back and forth with my publisher, I pointed out that I had right of refusal written into my contract. When I reminded them that I could refuse this cover, they reminded me that they could print 2,000 copies and fail to distribute them. I was learning things about publishing all the time.

I switched publishers for my third novel, The Magician’s Assistant, and I loved the cover they came up with, a photograph of a 1960s model turned on her side so that she appeared to be floating in midair. I also loved the cover they came up with for the paperback – a giant rabbit sitting in an armchair. The general rule of thumb is that if the book is a big seller, the cover doesn’t change when it goes to paperback, and if the book hasn’t been such a hit, they’ll try something new. I liked the publisher of my third book, but by the time I had written my fourth book, everyone I knew who had worked there had either left or been fired. I left too.

When it was time to publish my fourth novel, something remarkable happened. My new editor sent me a whole stack of possible covers, called mock-ups, glued onto heavy black cardboard. Bel Canto, a novel by Ann Patchett it said in bright red, in navy blue, in the shape of an open mouth, on a line of music, on piano keys, in camouflage. I propped my choices up on window sills. I asked friends to give their opinions. The truth is I liked them all. The strong colors and simple graphics made my novel look like a work of serious literature. Any one of them could have been the cover of a John Updike novel (Updike, who designed many of his own covers, was my personal gold standard for good taste.) This new publisher did an equally good job on the paperback. The book sold well, won prizes and was taken seriously, just as the cover had promised it would be.

Bel Canto was published in more than thirty countries and none of them asked me what I wanted on the cover. Over time, boxes of books from China and Romania and Argentina started showing up at my house. The Swedish cover had a picture of a mansion flanked by palm trees, the windows lit with burning crucifixes. The Dutch cover showed a woman in a ball gown holding a violin, even though no one in the book played the violin. The Slovenian cover featured an incredibly cheerful looking blonde in a plunging red dress who may have been on her way to a disco. The Russian cover looked like a James Bond novel – a man in a tux with a gun, a sports car, and a busty babe in high heels. In many countries the emphasis was on a woman’s gorgeous hair, while other countries featured musical notes or guerilla fighters or, in a few cases, both. Sometimes I could convince myself that the publishers must know their audience better than I did, other times it was too much of a stretch. Foreign covers, I decided, were like translations, the quality was simply out of my control.

When I did speak up about a cover I didn’t like in another country, things didn’t get better. My fifth book, Truth & Beauty, featured a photograph of two girls sunbathing. One was pretty and wearing sunglasses while the other had an open book covering her face. Since this was a memoir about my best friend Lucy who had cancer of the jaw as a child and had suffered through countless surgeries, I didn’t like this at all. We weren’t those girls, and covering up one face was coy. I objected strongly. When the final copy of the book arrived, I saw the publisher had solved the problem by cutting off the girls’ heads. Now it was two headless girls lying on a beach towel, their necks stopping just at the jacket’s upper edge. It didn’t make me feel better.

My problems with covers hit an all-time high, or low, with my fifth novel, Run. While I had been sent eight different covers for Bel Canto, for Run I got ten, then twenty, then thirty. No one, including me, had any idea what should be on the cover. One choice I was given was a photograph of a snowy path in New York City’s Central Park (the book is set in Boston) with a trash can right in the middle of the frame. ‘Why are you sending me a cover with a trash can on it?’ I asked my new editor. She told me it wasn’t a trash can, and then, after looking at the picture again, said yes, in fact, it was. She hadn’t noticed. One of the choices that I absolutely loved was a photograph of two goldfish in a plastic bag. Since the book is about two brothers, one of whom was an ichthyologist, I thought this was perfect. I bought my editor a very expensive handbag, put the cover in the purse, and mailed it back to her. Finally! We had a winner.

‘You can’t have that one,’ she said, thanking me for the purse. ‘Everyone here hates it.’

‘Then why did you send it to me?’

‘Because you need to know we’re trying.’

The final hard won cover was a shimmering blue snowstorm. I liked it very much, but I also understood that a tremendous amount of time and energy and good will had been wasted trying to get there. That was when I realized that book covers were like birthdays: there was no point in feeling hurt that no one could figure out what would make you happy if you didn’t know what would make you happy. It was my responsibility to have some idea of what I wanted before anyone else got involved.

That was when everything changed.

I was halfway through writing my next novel when my husband came home one night and put a record on the turntable. (I love my husband, who still has records and a turntable). He was listening to An Historic Return: Horowitz at Carnegie Hall and when I saw the cover sitting there on the coffee table, the cream background, the intricate filigree around the edges, I thought to myself, that’s what this book should look like. When I turned in the manuscript of State of Wonder, I sent along a copy of the album cover. It was at least the sensibility of what I wanted, and once that was established, we had a place from which to begin the conversation.

Allan Gurganus was the best writing teacher I ever had, and throughout my life he has proven himself to be a continuing oracle of good advice. When I sold my first novel, he sent me a bouquet of tiny white roses, along with a note that said it was up to me to steer my ship. ‘It’s your name on the book,’ he said. ‘You’re responsible.’ I think about that when a typo gets by me or some fact in the final version of a book turns out to be wrong. It’s on me. Allan told me I should never hesitate to rewrite jacket copy or ask to see ad layouts, and that while every piece of the book – contracts, editing, publicity, marketing – may be another person’s job, it was my life. I would be judged in the world by my books, every part of them. It was my job to pay attention to the covers, to pay attention to all of it.

Whenever I’m asked to speak at a school, I love to take in piles of those old mock-ups mounted on black board and ask the kids which one they like best and what the different covers make them think of. As it turns out, kids have a lot of opinions on jacket art. And they like to vote.

Once I owned a bookstore, I started noticing a cover’s paper stock, what was likely to crinkle at the edges and what colors get easily scuffed (I unpack a lot of other people’s books). I know what typeface demands to be read, and what gets lost in a busy image. There is no universal list of elements that make up a good cover but I know one when I see it. We all do. The covers for my next two books, This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage and Commonwealth came together perfectly. I turned in my ideas with my finished manuscript and the art director and the editor and the sales force and I all listened to one another. I showed the sample covers to people who work at Parnassus and asked them to vote. Here’s another thing about my covers: I’m going to have to look at them for a long, long time. It gives a whole other level of incentive for getting things right.

When I finished The Dutch House, I knew exactly what I didn’t want on the cover in any country, and that was a house. I didn’t want an entire house or a part of a house – not door or window or portico or veranda. I wanted Maeve to be on the cover. For a long time I had planned to call the book Maeve and this would make my intentions clear: it was her story. I thought back to Thomas Woodruff and the beautiful oil painting on The Patron Saint of Liars. I wanted something like that. All I needed to do was find the painting of Maeve that was in the novel. I began to scour the internet for portraits of black-haired girls, and while I found many that were beautiful, the ones that were classical portrayed the girls in pinafores or bonnets: the right face and the wrong era. My editor and the art director, who agreed with the idea, began to search as well. Nothing we found came close to the portrait of the girl in my novel. I knew a painter in Nashville named Noah Saterstrom whose work I loved. Couldn’t I just see if Noah wanted to paint Maeve’s portrait?

My editor and the art director thought this could be an excellent idea, but first they wanted to put together a list of painters and decide who would be best to work with. I got off the phone and thought about this for a minute. I didn’t have to ask anyone’s permission to commission a painting. If things worked out, well, wonderful, and if they didn’t, then I would own a painting. What could be the harm in that? I wrote to Noah and asked him if he could paint a portrait of an imaginary ten year-old girl with black hair and a red coat. The painting would have been done in 1950, but it should be in the style of a portrait done in the 1920s. Oh, and the painter would have been Scottish if that was helpful. I sent him the two paragraphs in the book in which the painting was mentioned.

‘Sure,’ he said. ‘I’m on it.’

The thing to know about Noah Saterstrom is that he has three very small children and a very big career. He doesn’t have the time to mess around.

Four days later he called to say the painting was finished. When I saw it, I was looking at Maeve. I was standing in the Dutch House and looking at the portrait of Maeve.

I’ve had a lot of good covers in my life, but this was a great one, and while I’ve worked with many other people to get things right, I’ve never had a collaborator. Noah’s painting is actually part of the book, and it makes the book better. I still can’t believe the way it happened. It’s hanging in my house now. ‘Where did you get that?’ people ask. They’re stunned by it. I’m stunned by it - Maeve’s red coat, her piercing stare, the wild swallows darting behind her. I live with the art and the art informs my life.

And Noah informs my life. Through these unexpected circumstances, we’ve become good friends. He comes over once a month or so and I make him poached eggs for breakfast and we talk about art. Even he seems shocked by how well the whole thing came together, and how fast. And the novel he captured so perfectly? He still hasn’t read it yet. He hasn’t had time. He’s says he’s going to listen to the audio once it comes out because he can listen while he’s painting.

That works for me.