Canada Reads: Book Club

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Book designer Alan Jones takes us through his journey with the cover of The Book of Negroes

Wednesday, November 26, 2008 | 12:00 PM ET

Designing this cover was a very straightforward and pleasant experience. And that’s mostly due to the fact that Lawrence Hill was so easy to work with. He was very particular on points of historical accuracy and the physical representation of the heroine, Aminata, but deferential on points of design. Really, it was an ideal working situation.

It was suggested at the outset that Aminata, the novel’s heroine, should be the focus of the design. I’m never terribly keen to hear that a specific person should appear on a cover. I think an author, having given life to a character, has a very real picture of that person in his mind — one that can differ in a lot of ways from what a reader sees. So the difficulty for the designer is to find an image that matches that picture closely enough. What often follows is a soul-destroying search for the “perfect” photo during which everything is rejected because the ear lobes hang a bit too low, or the eyelashes are too long or the hair is the wrong degree of curliness. Usually, this process ends with that classic book cover compromise we all know and love: a photo with the head cut off.

By pure luck, it didn’t happen that way. I was actually doing a search on a stock photo website for another project entirely when I just stumbled across this amazing face staring out of the screen.

Immediately I thought, “There’s Larry’s cover.” She’s beautiful but not outlandishly so. In fact, the plainness of the image is what makes it work.

She has no hairstyle, no jewelry, no clothing — very little to conflict with that image the author might have of his character.

Moreover, there’s real strength, power and defiance in her expression — especially in her eyes — that seemed perfect from what I had been told of Aminata.

So I ran the image past Larry and his editor, and luckily they thought it was great . . . with just a couple of minor alterations: her lips seemed a little too glossy and well maintained for a woman who had been through life’s wringer, so I dulled them down a bit in Photoshop.

Also, Aminata had a small crescent scar on each of her cheekbones — marks of beauty in her tribe — so we needed to add those as well. It took a few tries to get them right, as Larry was quite specific about their shape and exactly where they should sit on her face.

Once we had the image of Aminata, I started to put together some preliminary layouts. I felt the image was so arresting (at this point I may well have been in love with the woman) that I chose to use the photo on its own.

I really liked these, but then I always think my first designs are the best ones. The feedback, however, was that the cover needed to be more lush and colourful and “epic-historical.” Fair enough. In fact, looking back at these stark early versions I see that the strong and defiant Aminata had become downright threatening. Imagine her there on the bookstore shelf screaming “DON’T TOUCH ME!” Not a great sales package.

Initially, to bring in some colour and layering, I thought about adding a landscape of some kind. But the story takes place across several far-flung locations and I wasn’t sure I wanted to pin it down to just one. I also thought a recognizable landscape might make the book look too much like history or biography rather than fiction. So I chose instead to add some feature of the actual historical document, the Book of Negroes. During his research, Larry was in touch with the National Archives in the U.K., where the document is kept, and so we had them scan a few pages for us. These, combined with an image of some battered antique paper, became the “page” that lies over Aminata’s face on the finished cover.

I presented a few different design options with the torn page in various positions, but most people preferred it down the left side as it appears on the final cover. I think it works. The photo of Aminata retains its dramatic impact while being softened just enough, and the design nicely suggests a life torn in some way, while placing Aminata both within and free of the confines that people would impose on her.

And that’s that. Like I said, this was an easy one. Larry was great, and if Canada Reads were awarded for good karma alone, he’d be a shoo-in.