Moby Dick: A History in Book Jackets, and Finding a New Design for a New Age

For our InDesign project,

we chose to produce

a modern book cover

for Herman Melville's Moby Dick.

MOBY DICK: A History in Book Jackets

and

Finding a New Design for a New Age

According to The Melville Society’s web page (The Life and Works of Herman Melville, n.d.), the novel Moby Dick was also initially published as The Whale. Written by Herman Melville, an American author, it was first published on October 18, 1851 by Richard Bentley, who published it as an expurgated three-volume edition titled The Whale. On November 14, 1851, the book was published as a single volume by Harper and Brothers in the U.S. under the title and subtitle Moby-Dick; or, The Whale. The U.S. version contained 35 passages not included in the UK version.

We were able to find a photo of the book cover and title page for the Harper & Brothers’s first American edition, courtesy of Christie’s. This book is currently listed on Christie’s web site with a value estimated between $25,000 and $35,000.

The book’s title has been presented in many ways over time on the book’s cover. Sometimes there has been a hyphen between Moby and Dick, sometimes not. Other representations include:

The latest incarnations have been titled simply “Moby Dick.”

Some of the major themes in the book revolve around obsession, man vs. nature, revenge, sanity and idealism. Moby Dick has been called an epic, an adventure story, a tragedy, a rumination on obsession and also a romantic novel.

A visit to Borders and other sources revealed that book cover designs for other classic epics and adventure stories (The Swiss Family Robinson, The Odyssey, etc.) usually had graphics that covered 75-100% of the cover with large title fonts. Interestingly, 60% of the title fonts I looked at were Serif fonts. There were lots of blues and primary colors in the graphics. Typically, the titles were much larger than the authors' names.

Research based on the most recent book covers for Moby Dick indicates that the name of the book is typically larger than the author’s name. Font usage for the last decade appears evenly split between Sans Serif and Serif, but the title is typically in capital letters and prominent. Prior to 2000, the book titles are overwhelmingly in Serif font. Regardless, the book covers use a maximum of two fonts on the cover.

Usually, the font color for the title and the author’s name are the same. Depictions on the cover typically include the whale, the boat and the crew, with the whale receiving the highest billing, even compared with the title. The predominant colors for the book covers have been black and blue with blue obviously being used for the sky and sea, projecting a cold feeling. According to the Colors in Motion video, the blue can also be used to represent deepness and formality; perhaps, the color is trying to say this is not a frivolous tale to be taken lightly. The covers typically convey tension, action and a solemnity. The cover art generally captures a moment in time just before things are about to get worse.

In line with class discussions, authors Marilyn Ross and Sue Collier in The Complete Guide to Self-Publishing confirmed that a book cover should be distinctive and capture the book’s essence. The book also noted that when you look at a cover, the title should be the most important thing on the book, above any graphic. The title should pop off the background and be large enough to read from a distance. Other sources confirmed that red covers are eye-catching and good colors for adventure books.

With regard to font sizes, I was unable to find any resource that provided font sizes for book covers, which makes sense since titles can vary in length and, among other reasons, font can be dictated by the book topic. Most sources suggested the body text should be between 8 and 12-point.

Further research indicated that the spine should include the title (as big as possible), author(s), and publisher logo. The back cover will need to include a brief description of the book’s content, author’s photo and qualifications, book review/promotional quotes, and the ISBN and bar code. This source also reminded us we need to leave some white space.

Our Mock-ups

Douglas Clayton

I used a minimalist theme with my cover, purely because overdoing the cover would have been pointless. I am not a visual artist by any stretch. But I wanted to get the theme of death and despair across in the cover I designed. The floating coffins are a simple visual representation of this. I used a Franklin Gothic font for the title and the author’s name, purely because it grabs attention and it gives an idea of the theme of the book. The color scheme is based on some of the more modern color schemes, in which 2-3 colors dominate the entire book cover, rather than an entire color gradient which is typical on older covers.

The idea behind the coffins in the water came from the doomed voyage theme of the actual novel. The three coffins represent Captain Ahab, Moby Dick, and the Pequod. I decided to use this idea for a cover basically, because none of the other covers do anything similar to this. Microsoft Paint does not exactly allow magnificent artistry or easy portrayal of 3d perspective, so my original vision was somewhat muddled.

Paul McCain

Film posters being a very dominant commercial art medium, I wanted to emulate the Jaws film poster due to its iconography, and largely because the film is the predominant Moby Dick story at present. With the stark colors and minimalism, I also wanted to emulate the simplicity of film posters like Anatomy of a Murder (since I have no formal artistic background and am not about to spend my entire weekend learning how to paint like Monet), but at the same time convey the complex themes of the book. I don’t want to give any potential readers any false impressions of the book; it is not a swashbuckling adventure story, it is tragic.

The Century Schoolbook font was chosen for the author’s name due to its old aesthetic. I chose the font Bookman Old Style for the title. The font contrasted with the red-orange background looks befitting of the mid-1800s, and the white makes it readable from a distance. The font evokes the era in which the book was published, yet also retains modernity.

In the dinghy, I chose to include the multiracial crewmates of the Pequod (from left to right: Tashtego, Queequeg, Fedallah) at the opposite end of the boat, with the ghastly-toned and disheveled Ahab standing firm at the fore, to emphasize the distance between the obsessed Ahab and his wary crew, as well as conveying the themes of racism, as they are manning the oars in service of Ahab, and conveying Ahab’s obsession and slipping sanity. I darkened Ahab’s tone a bit, but chose to retain his pale flesh tones so comparison can be drawn with the whale, and so Ahab also looks deathly, as if he is ferrying the crew across the river Styx. I chose not to give the whale an eye, because the whale should look like death has taken a corporeal form, and an eye would be a distracting detail and ruin some of the mystery.

I attempted to complement the bright, eyesore-inducing red-orange I used for the cover with the blue-green of the water, and I chose these colors to make the cover more eye-catching and less boring, as the rest of the Moby Dick covers throughout the decades have been. Additionally, the red-orange, according to color theory, evokes danger, and seems to envelop the dinghy crew. To render Ahab, I simply cut, pasted and colored over George Washington from the famous painting Washington Crossing the Delaware by Emanuel Leutze, replacing his leg with Ahab’s prosthesis carved from the whale’s jaw, which I colored the same gray as the whale’s teeth, putting into practice the C.R.A.P. design principle of repetition and illustrating (though not overtly) the revenge element of the plot.

This mock-up was produced in MSPaint, but I hope to use a more advanced design program for the final product to make it look more painterly and far less pixelated.

Linda Prior

Like the others, I went with a minimalist approach, reflecting the book’s obsession or insanity theme. The profile represents Captain Ahab and, of course, the prominent whale in the white space of the brain indicates major obsession.

I chose a red background for the cover because it indicates this is a dynamic, commanding book and red is an eye-catching color. I used a combination of fonts on the title. The serif font (Charlemagne Std Bold 24-pt.) in the first letter of each word indicates formality and authority, while the sans serif font (Corbel Bold, 48 pt) repeated in the rest of the title and in the author’s name say this is a contemporary, relevant story. I intentionally made the title left justified as some of the research I’d done indicated that was the more natural way of reading. I did not want the title to span the entire cover. However, I right-justified the author’s name for balance.

I kept the colors on the cover to a minimum so it wouldn’t be too busy and repeated black in the graphic, the title and the author’s name as a way to balance the cover. Regarding alignment, I meant to have the same amount of space between the three items, but will need to adjust that in the final cover. The white, black and red also provide contrast. The cover was created with photographs and text in Adobe PhotoShop.

Semi-chronology

of Moby Dick

book covers

January 2010 Hardback

2010 paperback

October 2002 hardback

August 2008 hardback

2005

September 1998 hardback

August 2004 hardback

January 1998 hardback

September 1998 hardback

May 1994

1995 paperback

1980 paperback

1996 paperback

April 1997

May 1993

1981 paperback

May 1983 hardback

May 1989 hardback

January 1968 hardback

January 1979 hardback

1977 leather-bound hardback

December 1970

1940 hardback

1958 paperback

January 1930

Alternative Book Titles

•The Whale

•The White Whale

•Moby-Dick, or The Whale

•Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

•Moby-Dick; or, The White Whale

•Moby Dick

Resources

Major Themes

Genre Research

History

Café Press. Publishing Learning Center. Finalize Your Manuscript. Retrieved from

http://www.cafepress.com/cp/info/help/learn_book.aspx?page=learn_book_

manuscript.aspx on September 22, 2010.

Christie’s. Retrieved from http://www.christies.com/lotfinder/lot_details.aspx?

intObjectID=5280765 on September 21, 2010.

Cortes, Claudia. Retrieved from http://www.mariaclaudiacortes.com/ on September 24, 2010.

Ross, Marilyn, & Collier, Sue. (2010 )The Complete Guide to Self-Publishing. (5th ed.). Cincinnati, Ohio: F+W Media, Inc.

"Moby-Dick; or, The Whale." The Life and Works of Herman Melville. The Melville Society. n.d. Web. 25 Sept. 2010.