Creating a successful book cover or binding design presents different challenges for each edition. When faced with a monumental book like Diarmaid MacCulloch’s A History of Christianity, the question was how to represent such a vast stretch of time, over a vast area of the globe. From editor to picture researcher to art director, the team here explain how they solved this particular tricky task.
We asked American palaeontologist Steve Brusatte to ensure that the illustrations for Folio’s edition were as accurate as they could be while still reflecting the world of Crichton's Jurassic Park. Here, Steve talks us through this process.
This time last year I was enormously fortunate to go to the house of Helen Oxenbury, one of my favourite children’s authors and illustrators, and the widow of John Burningham.
“With most book covers, you're trying to convey a concept rather than a person, but this was the opposite,” says illustrator Peter Strain.
When we realised that Cicely Mary Barker’s charming Flower Fairy stories were no longer available anywhere in the single volumes they were originally presented in, we couldn’t resist giving the collection the full Folio experience.
Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami’s magical realist books have sold millions of copies worldwide and earned him a reputation as one of the greatest contemporary authors. We were very excited indeed to be publishing his work, and Kafka on the Shore is the perfect introduction to a unique and addictive style. But how would we decipher this story of unsolved riddles in an illustrated edition?
Unicorns have not always been associated with glitter and sparkles. In fact, the beast held great religious significance in Western art before it was ever associated with youthfulness and innocence. Non-fiction publisher Mandy Kirkby traces the history of the unicorn, as told in John Cherry’s Mythical Beasts.
When Art Director Sheri Gee approached Rose Strang to illustrate The Living Mountain, the artist was thrilled. However, in order to carry out the commission, she would need to visit the mountains and there was the small issue of a national lockdown to overcome.
