This year’s best book cover competition was one of our most nail-biting yet. There were upsets. Longtime favorites were toppled. Instagram voters were overriding our web voters and web voters were overriding Instagram voters (who would’ve thought the two groups would have such different aesthetic preferences?). But two books rose to the finals with relative ease: Moderation by Elaine Castillo and We Computers by Hamid Ismailov, translated by Shelley Fairweather-Vega. It was hard to know which would win. Both had been toppling the competition left and right for many rounds. The final round was another battle between IG and web: Moderation won 62% of IG votes, while We Computers won 82% of web votes. So we hand-tallied the totals to find which of these two incredible covers took the lead. And the winner is….
We Computers by Hamid Ismailov, translated by Shelley Fairweather-Vega! This stunning cover was designed by Jenny Volvovski, with guidance from Yale University Press’s art director, Dustin Kilgore.
Cover designer Jenny Volvovski shared a few words with us about the making of the cover:
“We Computers is about a French poet who, in the late 1980s, builds an AI-like program that is able to analyze and generate literature after being fed ancient Persian poetry. I’d love to take full credit for the cover concept, but I had some excellent creative guidance from the book’s translator, Shelley Fairweather-Vega, and from Yale’s art director, Dustin Kilgore. The juxtaposition of the Persian poet Hafez and an early desktop computer matched both the content and tone of the book. There’s always something compelling about combining seemingly unrelated subject matter, and this cover also gave me the opportunity to pair two very unrelated visual aesthetics. The detailed 14th century miniature painting, with its muted color palette, plays against a digital isometric illustration of a bright magenta computer. I didn’t want the computer to obscure Hafez’s face, since his forlorn expression felt like a timely commentary on our relationship with artificial intelligence. We are all reluctantly stuck in computers, but we have no one but ourselves to blame.”
Translator Shelley Fairweather-Vega says: “We wanted to get readers thinking from the start about what might happen when you cross ancient poetry with hot new technology (hot pink new technology?), so there’s Hafez, pondering the question himself, right on the cover. Everywhere we’ve spoken about the novel, Ismailov and I have received questions and compliments regarding the cover, which means it’s really doing its job. It’s exhilarating to see that excitement, and the slight bewilderment that seems to go with it, continue through this contest.”
For the curious, Volvovski also shared an alternate cover for the book that didn’t make the cut: one that paired a page from a manuscript of Persian poetry with UI elements from a mid-80’s Macintosh operating system. In an alternate world, where would this have fallen on the best book covers competition? We’ll never know!
Our runner up, Moderation by Elaine Castillo, was designed by Lynn Buckley, with art by Vittorio Reggianini. You can see why this gorgeous cover made for tough competition!
In a forthcoming interview with EL editorial intern Evander Reyes, author Elaine Castillo explains a bit about the cover’s creation:
“I knew early on what I wanted. I submitted a painting to my editor and the design team and said, ‘I want this, but glitchy.’ Lynn Buckley, the cover designer, came back with this exact version plus five others that were equally amazing. It was the shortest meeting in Viking Press history—we all agreed immediately that she’d nailed it.
The painting is Admiration by Vittorio Reggianini, who belonged to a school called the ‘Satins and Silks painters.’ He depicted Regency-era romance, so if you search images from Pride and Prejudice or Regency romance, his work often comes up. But while he painted that era, he wasn’t alive for it—he was looking back and romanticizing it. Reggianini died in 1938, meaning he lived through Italy’s rise to fascism. So, here’s this extremely romanticized historical vision being painted during a period of political upheaval, war, and the rise of fascism. That tension—between a nostalgic image of history and the dark realities of the present—connects directly to the book’s themes of how history and romance are reimagined, especially in relation to the tech industry’s collusion with authoritarianism.”
Thank you all for voting, and for making this year’s competition so fun! Here’s a look back at the complete bracket, and all the excellent covers who made for strong competitors along the way:
The post Announcing the Winner of the Best Book Cover Contest appeared first on Electric Literature.
