I was delighted this weekend to come across Jacket Mechanical, the blog of Peter Mendelsund, a book designer at Knopf and their family of imprints. I've been an admirer of his work ever since I started paying attention not only to book covers, which I've been doing forever, but to the designers too, which I really only started doing when we ran our somewhat contentious Best Book Cover of 2009 competition at Amazon and Omnivoracious. Mendelsund was the only designer with three (very different) covers nominated, and he gave us a thoughtful interview about his nontraditional background (he was a concert pianist who had never even thought much about book design before he started doing it himself) and his theories and designs, especially the immediately iconic covers he did for Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy. (Side note: the thicket of blond hair on the cover of The Girl Who Played with Fire? His daughter Violet's, snapped on a visit to the office.)
I was led to the blog for his discussion of the design elements (largely invisible to Amazon customers) of Glen Duncan's upcoming The Last Werewolf, which I remember being struck by in my last Random House list presentation. (And also see his recent interview with the NYer's Book Bench about his design for Knopf's new post-Larsson blockbuster, The Snowman.) But I was quickly drawn instead to a recent (I think--there are no posting dates in his minimalist blog design) post about his redesign of the flagship Kafka line at Schocken, the imprint that's now part of Knopf and that did so much to introduce Kafka to American readers in the mid-20th century. (I remember one side thrill of going into the Knopf offices this time last year--equal to meeting Nora Ephron and Sonny Mehta there--was going into a conference room and seeing a shelf lined with the Schocken Kafkas.)
The redesigns are elegant and striking, and I love the use of color and the way he's adapted Kafka's sprightly handwriting for the book's titles and even for the new Schocken logo. But here's my quibble: the central design element of the series is eyes: solo, paired, and in groups. I agree that eyes are almost freakishly evocative, and Mendelsund has done wonders with them before, e.g. for Laurie Sheck's A Monster's Notes, but they don't evoke my idea of Kafka. I say this from my gut memory of a lifetime of reading him, and so I might be missing contrary examples from his writing, but to me Kafka is much more about bodies than eyes. I think of his characters less as subjects of Orwell-style panopticon observation than as blind moles wrestling with each other in the dark, or, as in "The Burrow," digging alone underground. Even in "In the Penal Colony," the horrible writing of the machine is done not on the prisoner's body, but in it: it's not designed to be read, but felt. And it seems worth noting that in Kafka's own doodles, which have been used as cover elements before, the bodies usually don't have eyes at all: they express by posture rather than vision.
Everyone has their own Kafka, but to my mind making the eye the central image for his work ropes him into a Big Brother tradition that he's related to but not a part of. The horror for a Kafka figure is often not that everything he does is seen, but rather that nothing is (but is somehow known nevertheless).
P.S. It's a little tricky linking to the new editions on Amazon, since they appear to be using the same ISBNs as the previous ones. Some Schocken paperbacks (e.g. The Trial) still have the old cover as of this writing, and some (e.g. The Complete Stories) have the new one, and I'm not sure which one you'd get from the warehouse if you ordered. In his post Mendelsund says they are coming out in June and July, so if you want one yourself, you might instead want to check with your friendly neighborhood bookshop :).
P.P.S. Mendelsund also posts a great memo from Hannah Arendt (working as an editor at Schocken at the time) to Salman Schocken, about how hard it is to get any of the male publishers to work with her (shades of The Castle!). That correspondence sounds worthy of its own post some day.
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