I love
Memorial's book cover. Dust jacket designer,
Jennifer Lew, made the right choices for the covers of
Bruce Wagner's novel. By reversing the image taken from
Katsushika Hokusai's classic painting,
Fuji of the waves (1836) -- the same painting featured on some first printings of Yukio Mishima's classic
The Sound of Waves, coincidentally
-- and then by removing the painting's colors (save black and white) you don't immediately notice that iconic windblown foam of the wave at the top of the cover seeming to undergo its ancient, mystical metamorphosis. That is until you turn the book over and see the white birds (are they doves? or could they even be ...
bats? -- look closely, I'm not kidding!) that have been ever so subtly added to Hokusai's painting descending in the foreground toward the distant summit of the sacred, snowbound mountain. The gold embossed rectangles kept the raised letters of the title, "by the author of...", and author name as well, from getting lost in the black lines of the swelling wave. Add veteran book designer
Karolina Harris's exquisite interior design of the book, and you've got a contemporary classic of book design in Bruce Wagner's sixth novel; a novel in which the author, too, took chances and ventured beyond the usual and sordid Hollywood strictures of his first five novels.
 |
"Rick Jackson rules for Robyn No 1--------
this dark memo,
Bruce
Wag
__________" |
(more autographs)
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