Elixirium

Why, it’s The Apothecary by Maile Meloy - now published in German by Coppenrath and given the perhaps more intriguing title Elixirium. Viel Spaß beim Lesen! (or something like that)

The Twistrose Key’s Winter Jacket

Looking through an old notebook, I see that I made my first sketches for the jacket of Tone Almhjell’s The Twistrose Key on February 4, 2012 - a good 20 months before the novel was published. At first, the jacket was to be winter-themed, with a snowy landscape surrounded by a border printed in blue, silver, and black, and evocative of late 19th Century publishers’ bindings.

Part of what excited me about the blue and silver border was that it harkened back to the packaging of a childhood favorite: Drake’s Yodels, which used to come individually - and magically - wrapped in blue and silver foil. (Years and years ago I dug this wrapper fragment out from under the backseat of my parents’ 1965 Dodge Dart and I’ve saved it as a precious relic ever since.)

Anyway, I started sketching, incorporating as many chilly elements as possible, and playing around with hand-lettered type.

Eventually, I introduced a “key” motif into my sketches - but either I’d misread the manuscript or didn’t yet have an accurate description of the twistrose key itself. According to the text:

It was large, as large as the length of [Lin’s] hand, and blackened, as if someone had tried to burn it. Its head was fashioned as a petal, and the stem was that of a rose, with three tiny, but sharp thorns. Across the petal, there was a name engraved: “Twistrose”.

Next, I placed snowflakes within the (erroneous) bows of the keys - and animals (a fox, a vole, an owl, and a wolf) began to emerge in the four corners.

After filling up many scribbly pages with blue and black ballpoint pen, I did a tighter pencil rendition of the jacket. As you can see, I abandoned the key motif entirely - and went with a lock motif instead (but that didn’t last very long, either).

A variant color version followed - now with display type provided by designer Kristin Smith at Puffin, who spearheaded the project. I think, too, I had more descriptions from the manuscript to guide me by then.

Not long after all this, however, the snow-laden plan melted away to something more silhouetted and starry and less “season specific.”

Later still, the silver foil was replaced with gold, the mountains grew back, “The Wanderer” (the Northern-lights-looking smudge in the sky) went away, and so on. But maybe I can recycle my wintry ideas and pay homage to Yodels on the cover of some future book.

Lost Jackets: The Peculiar

The jacket shown here was, in essence, an “audition” for Stefan Bachmann’s The Peculiar (Greenwillow Books, 2012). The publishers weren’t sure what approach would best suit the debut novel, so they asked a few illustrators to execute a bunch of different ideas.

If I remember rightly, for one of my three sketches I was asked to go in a deliberately Apothecary-like direction, i.e. moody, atmospheric, and featuring a bird (in this case a mechanical brass sparrow, instead of an American Robin) and the London skyline (Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament, not the Tower of London and Tower Bridge).

I always liked the result, but it may have been too dark for their purposes, and ultimately they went with something more lighthearted.

Lost Jackets: Wonder Light

Sometimes I can’t say goodbye to sketches that get superseded by other ideas. Here’s such an example, made for the jacket of Wonder Light by R. R. Russell. The final, published jacket looks nothing like this early composition, but I'm still fond of it, even though it doesn’t really capture the mood - and mist - of the novel. It looks more like a cover for “Wild West”-themed sheet music or “Leathercraft for Kids” from the 1950s. Maybe one day I can find a more appropriate home for this kind of approach.

NYC for NYU

I did this booklet cover for New York University a while back. It’s, as usual, in ink and acrylic on paper and I was deliberately trying to mimic a pictorial style that I recalled from childhood: maybe the artwork on boxes for German-made tin toys...? Something like that.

Here Come(s) THE APPRENTICES!

The Apprentices, Maile Meloy’s sequel to The Apothecary is now available!

In addition to the full-color jacket, I made about 38 black and white illustrations for the inside - only eight of which were printed in the ARCs, by the way, because I was still working on them through the end of January! So to see them all you’ll have to grab the handsome, hefty hardcover edition from...

IndieBound
Amazon
Barnes and Noble

And Books of Wonder - the frabjous children’s bookshop in New York City - has stacks and stacks of copies of both The Apprentices and The Apothecary SIGNED by Maile and me. (In fact, those copies were the first I ever laid eyes and hands on this past Friday.)

And Penguin just issued this....

MEDIA ALERT 

The Apprentices by Maile Meloy was included in the Los Angeles Times Summer Reading preview issue on June 2nd!

Bookpage featured an interview with Maile in their June issue! 

Amazon selected The Apprentices as a June Book of the Month! 

Maile’s two-week national tour for The Apprentices (to take place in early October) will be announced shortly. 

Praise for The Apprentices: 

“…readers will be glad to reconnect with these well-drawn characters and be grateful that Meloy leaves room for a third installment.” –Publishers Weekly, starred review 

“This sober and well-constructed adventure accurately conveys the geopolitical instability of the era and is leavened with just enough magic, chaste romance and humor to appeal to middle-grade readers through teens.” –Kirkus Reviews

The Apothecary is now in paperback

The Apothecary by Maile Meloy - with a whole bunch of my illustrations - is now out in paperback. It’s a pretty thing, I think, and it appeals to my magpie sensibilities.

Eagle-eyed readers (and even skylark-eyed, robin-eyed, and swallow-eyed ones) will notice that I tweaked the original jacket painting. Actually, it was more of a small-scale demolition job wherein I tore down the Tower of London and the Tower Bridge, erected a new stretch of old-fashioned buildings and sprinkled some children on top of them. On second thought: maybe I just turned the bottle a bit so as to get a fresh vista, taking care not to jostle the bird in the process. At any rate, I like this version better.

And it’s nice to share some pictorial real estate with Garth Williams, whose drawing was adapted for that shiny sticker in the corner. Did I mention the book won (well, tied in the middle reader category) The E. B. White Read-Aloud Award from the American Booksellers Association?

So by all means go get a copy at...
Indiebound
Books-A-Million
Amazon
Barnes and Noble

Trompe L’Oeil Gevalt

WANTED! Another fake jacket from the olden days, this time for the very real Howard Zinn classic, A People's History of the United States.
The type treatment is Charles Nix’s, the vague attempt at trompe l’oeil painting is mine. Later I salvaged the piece by adding a mouse clinging to the lower edge of the poster, but I can’t find the critter now.

May It Please the Court: The First Amendment

A jacket for May It Please the Court: The First Amendment: Live Recordings and Transcripts of the Oral Arguments Made Before the Supreme Court in Sixteen Key First Amendment Cases.

This box set was published by The New Press in 1997. As I recall, Charles Nix, who had designed the first volume - May It Please the Court: The Most Significant Oral Arguments Made Before the Supreme Court Since 1955- used the only known photo of the court in session, so we had to come up with an apt image ourselves. My resultant painting of the scales of justice, below, was not a particularly novel idea. It came at a time when I was tentatively trying to emulate the wonderful still-lifes of Walter Murch, but I could have/should have been more painterly about it.

Enemy Women for the New York Times

Sometimes my first ideas are stronger than those that go into print. This might be a case in point: my New York Times Book Review cover highlighting John Vernon’s review of Paulette Jiles’ Enemy Women: A Novel.

The book is set during the Civil War and centers on an 18-year-old woman from the Missouri Ozarks, who is arrested on suspicion of being a Confederate spy and is thrown into a St. Louis prison. There, the prison commandant (a Union major) interrogates - but soon falls in love with - his captive, and ultimately helps her escape.

But how to illustrate that, or, rather, how to illustrate a review that has no physical descriptions of the characters, etc.? (Book Review illustrators are - or were - only provided the text of the review, not the book itself.)

Above is an early, more “realized” sketch: no facial features, but, I hoped, their hands and clothing and setting would hint enough at what the book was about. And here is a page of pencil notes for it - as well as another concept: a crazy-quilt map of Missouri that, I realized, would be better to stitch together with real bits of cloth, rather than to paint (something I wasn’t equipped to risk trying).

My “hand holding” design was turned down, though. So I ran out and got the novel and searched for descriptions of the two main characters. I wound up settling on an “ambrotype” idea, with a “magic realism” slant, with the major desperately - maybe too desperately - reaching out toward his love. For the major’s pose - and in the interest of time - I adapted one of my favorite Sidney Paget pictures of Sherlock Holmes, illustrating one of my favorite lines in one of my favorite stories, “The Adventure of the Reigate Squire“ (or “Squires” or “Puzzle”): “You’ve done it now, Watson,” said he, coolly. “A pretty mess you've made of the carpet.”

And so this color sketch was born - as was this poor Photoshop tweak where I raised the major’s arm and closed the ambrotype case a little:

Tthe major “breaking through the frame” idea was nixed, however. I had to keep him under glass, and the end result, below, is much more staid and, I think, less intriguing. That orange surface is supposed to be wood, but it looks like the ambrotype case is precariously balanced on it or suspended from it: looking at it now, I should have placed the case on top of a table or the like. But sometimes the better ideas come too late - or too early.

And here is the image as published....

Gravity and Grace and Dirigibles

Gravity and Grace by Simone Weil: a real book and a real author, but a fake jacket, made as a sample in collaboration with my friends Charlie and Steve when we had a short-lived design and illustration partnership. Charlie did the type treatment, Steve took the photo, and I drew and painted the pictures. Actually, I'd started the pictures in college - they were just oblong “landscapes” of green oil paint on gessoed wood slats - and a few years later I added the dirigibles in pencil.

The image shown here is “sweetened” inasmuch as it’s a digitally manipulated color xerox of a laminated Ektachrome (I think) print (a lot of color was lost along the way - and the original photo is much crisper, but I don’t know where it is now).

“Unbelievibly Crazy” Book Jacket

My jacket art for The Breaking of the American Social Compact by the recently vilified Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward and published by The New Press.

Recently, one Amazon reviewer called the book “unbelievibly crazy,” and warned, “I can't believe how some people actually believe this stuff. This is not for Americans. It's for socialists. Lord help us all!”

For me, though, it was a chance to experiment in low-tech 3D. My friend and then-business partner, Charles Nix, did the type design which I then “interpreted” in ink and acrylic by “cleverly” adding the “crack” through the “chiseled stone” letters. As with Getting Near to Baby, my black and white original (below, uncropped) was colorized in printed form.

Getting Near to Baby’s Jacket

My jacket for Audrey Couloumbis’ Newbery Honor award-winning novel, Getting Near to Baby.

I painted the original in black and white ink and acrylic and the blue sky color was added in production (I was afraid to do it in two colors myself, so I relied on G. P. Putnam’s Sons’ Art Department to get the desired hue).

My niece Nyssa unwittingly posed for Willa Jo Dean, the girl on the left. By “unwittingly” I mean that I had several dozen photos of Nyssa left over from our work on Amy Littlesugar’s Jonkonnu (see a link and some reviews on the left hand side of this page), so I adapted one or two snapshots of her for this project.

And I just discovered the Chinese edition!

Jacket for The Muffin Child

This is the jacket for Stephen Menick’s The Muffin Child (Philomel Books, 1998). The original painting is in oil over acrylic on watercolor paper and was included in the Society of Illustrators 41st Annual Exhibition.

The novel is set in a village in the Balkans in 1913, so I used my Eastern European-looking grandmother as model for the face of Tanya, the title character. Here is her passport photo (on the right) and that of her twin sister, taken in 1906 or 1907 - the same day they posed for a family portrait.

Subsequently, though, I’ve learned that my grandmother, who was born in Rudna, which was then in Hungary, but is now in Romania, was not Romanian, Hungarian, let alone Balkanian, but a Banat Swabian of French-German extraction.

The Apothecary is on the way!

The Apothecary, a new novel by best-selling author Maile Meloy, will be published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons in October.

This past fall and winter saw me painting over three dozen black and white illustrations for the interior, as well as the full color jacket art seen here. A lot of work - but a lot of fun - for a great book. Even the advance reading copies, which reproduced less than half of the pictures (and on cheap-o paper, to boot), looked good, so I can’t wait to see the the finished product.

Reserve a copy now from your local, independent bookseller. Or pre-order one from Barnes and Noble or Amazon.

My New Book - Don't Spill the Beans!

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published by Greenwillow Books

ISBN-13: 9780061724572

ISBN: 0061724572

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More filling than balloons and streamers!

More nutritious than birthday cake!

Easy-open packaging!

Heart healthy!

No calories!

Full color!

32 pages!

Zero fat!

Lemurs!

etc.!

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A * starred review * in School Library Journal!

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"The ink-and-acrylic illustrations hearken back to the Golden Books of days long gone.... Great for storytimes on secrets or as a special birthday gift." - Kirkus Reviews

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"Schoenherr's vintage-styled animal portraits are wholly endearing" - Publishers Weekly

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Buy Don't Spill the Beans!
from an independent bookseller!

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