The CanalLee Rourke
Nairobi HeatMukoma Wa Ngugi
There’s a great post over on the TLS blog about the latest trends in book covers. Gone are the headless women of yesteryear; in recent seasons, David Horspool tells us, there have been three predominant trends: Horspool questions design decisions that make it virtually impossible…
Sometimes when you set out to design a new book, you get lucky and nail it on your first try. Other times, it takes a long process to reach a successful solution. It was a pleasure to work on Leigh Stein’s excellent debut novel The…
Starting a new series design is always a fun challenge—each book in the series needs to stand on its own, but the set should add up to more than the sum of its parts. An engaging design can help a series get displays in bookstores,…
Among the pleasures of designing the wide variety of books we publish at Melville House, perhaps the best is getting to immerse myself in so many different cultures. Whether it’s young lovers in Tokyo or the highest reaches of the Russian government, with every title…
Not long after I came onboard as art director here at Melville House, our publisher Dennis came to me with an idea for a new series. Conceived in order to champion books from around the world that have been overlooked, underappreciated, looked askance at, or…
As my colleague Jason mentioned earlier this week, here at Melville House we couldn’t be more excited about the launch of Banana Yoshimoto‘s incredible new novel, The Lake. Among book designers I’m lucky, since I get to do work for so many exceptional authors, but I…
This week at Melville House, we’re busy launching Is Journalism Worth Dying For?, which collects many of the final essays Anna Politkovskaya wrote before her murder in 2006. But although the book is appearing on store shelves now, the production process began nearly eight months…
