Cormac McCarthy book covers

Still in pursuit of a Cormac McCarthy obsession I picked up a copy of the (American) Vintage International paperback of Blood Meridian this week, almost solely for the cover. As it turns out it’s also an easier book to read than the UK edition, less tightly bound although the body text in both looks as though it was printed from photocopied galley proofs. The cover design is by Susan Mitchell, with photography by Craig Arness, and forms part of a small series among the Vintage reprint editions. Mitchell resists the understandable temptation to put red on the cover, saving that for McCarthy’s tale of a murderer, Child of God.

Vintage reprints (1992–1993).

Picador editions from the 1980s.

The set of UK paperbacks put out by Picador in the 1980s sported very vague painted illustrations by George Sharp. Blood Meridian here comes across as a generic Western, which it most certainly is not, while the illustration for Suttree is particularly lazy with its generic riverscape that looks nothing like the Knoxville river featured in the book.

Following the publication of All the Pretty Horses in 1992, McCarthy’s novels were reissued with new uniform jackets based on designs for American editions by Chip Kidd. There’s a parallel here with the Vintage covers in their use of ominously empty, tinted photographs but it’s the Vintage books that have the edge for me, with their black surrounds and combination of hand-done titling with vaguely antique typography. The lone rider oppressed by bands of darkness on the Vintage cover of Blood Meridian communicates far more about that story than Simon Marsden‘s photograph of Monument Valley.

Picador reprint (1990).

Random House first American edition (1985).

It’s a shame that McCarthy’s masterpiece looked so shoddy in its first edition. This design overdoes the red while the type seems more suited to a bestselling romance than an apocalyptic exploration of violence and madness in the Old West. Things are slightly redeemed by the cover painting, The Phantom Cart by Salvador Dalí. McCarthy’s story certainly approaches Surrealism in some of its more lyrical flights, and the Spanish village here can easily stand for the similar villages along the border of Texas and Mexico where much of the novel takes place.

The Phantom Cart by Salvador Dalí (1933).

No Country for Old Men (2005), The Road (2006). Both Picador.

And so to his latest works which in their UK editions manage to be functional but completely bland, looking like the products of design-by-committee. No designer is credited for The Road and its cover photograph is a stock shot from Getty Images. It also features that most egregious of publishers’ tricks, metallic foil on the title type (showing grey in the example above), used in the belief that “the magpie reflex” makes people pick up anything shiny or reflective. That it also makes novels appear cheap and tacky never seems to cross the minds of marketing people. None of this matters in the end; McCarthy is still one of the greatest living writers and maybe one day these new designs will seem quaint the way they reflect the period in which they were created. In the meantime we can wait for a Susan Mitchell of the future to dress them more appropriately.

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