Gentlemen’s Club - Designer Interview Part 2

This is Part 2 of my conversation with “Gentlemen’s Club” book designer Alex Camlin.

Read Part 1 here.

Chris Buck: Why are book covers often so bad? Even on books that are otherwise thoughtfully designed, and the content is strong, why is the cover often weak?

Alex Camlin: There are so many reasons. It differs across categories.

Maybe this will give us clarity faster: What makes a cover work?

I’ve always said that it has to have an iconic quality. It’s something that’s sort of familiar yet different enough so that you remember it. In trade publishing you’re often being asked to do exactly that. It’s the same, but different. You want to signal which part of the bookstore it belongs in.

For fiction, there’s more leeway—you can be more artistic and there’s a lot more license you can take. But even categories with creative content—photography, for example—often have implied rules of what the package might look like.

One always tries to thread the needle between something that is indicative of the subject but also memorable and it’s something that’ll stop you for a few seconds to pay some extra attention. It’s an effort to make an iconic and memorable object.

A lot of people stress readability but when you’re browsing books people aren’t really looking that way. Your eyes spend fractions of a second on each cover as you browse. It’s the ones that stop you or sort of beg some deciphering, they get a little more attention.

A lot of it is people [authors, editors] wanting to demonstrate that this is a new idea or that this idea is relevant to people who are interested in a particular subject. It’s almost like finding new ways to present a cliché. What makes a cover bad is when it’s clearly just influenced by another cover of a bestselling book, and the only goal is to achieve that same level of success.

I’ve seen a lot of books that mimic Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point (and it became the template for all his books) but like, “Who do you think you’re trying to kid?”

If another book is trying to look like new idea or a new take on something in the manner of Gladwell, it usually just ends up being noise. Unless the author is Malcom Gladwell, you’re not fooling anyone. I think this has been a reality since the nineties, or even probably the sixties: people being more sophisticated than the gatekeepers give them credit for. But if everything is speaking in in the same voice the different messages kind of get leveled. You’re not diminishing Gladwell as a writer or cutting in to his sales because, well, he’s Gladwell, but I think it’s kind of a disservice to all the other authors whose publishers have imitated his covers.  

I find it odd; I guess that the authors don’t have the power. If I did a book that mimicked the design style of a very successful book and then my book also became successful, I’d be like, “That worked!” But the chance of that happening is pretty slim, so I’d be like, ‘Well, great, now I have this book I’ve worked five years on, and it was moderately successful, and it looks like I don’t have the confidence to have my own design.”

I might as well make it something I like so that even if it doesn’t get me work it’ll have a level of satisfaction to it. You set that bar high, and then it’s self-validating. The piece itself is the value and if you approach it like that and not towards an end, there’s a belief that there’s an accumulative value to that. That if in everything you do that means the things that you control directly that you do at that level, over time it becomes part of your brand.

It’s about quality, attention to detail, and also going back to our earlier point about having type styles that reference already successful things like Punk Rock or the strip club iconography or whatever. We don’t need outside validation. What I’m producing is of value and I treat it as such inherently: in the design, in the production, in the mailing.

Even as the formatting of my promos became more and more thoughtful and elaborate, that it became part of the promo. My agent at some point would just be like “Print a fucking card with a nice picture on it.”

[Laughs.]

It became a bit of a issue because the promos were so elaborate and complex  - in terms of the media used and the actual formatting - that it set the expectations so high that it became a problem.

I worked on this book for nearly eight years and now it’s done, it’s weird because in a way my books are an extension of my promo pieces in a very literal way, and my approach to making books comes from the way I made promos.

You’re probably doing books now because the impetus to do a promo piece like that with a high degree of authorship and concept sort of lends itself to book producing.

I probably should have published some of my earlier promos as books. [Laughs.]

In doing a long project like this a lot of ideas are bantered about, was there anything that you’d hoped to do with this book that we weren’t able to incorporate?

I had introduced these column breaks and paragraph breaks in the Q&As that were, in my mind, conveying the pace of the conversation and the pauses. Where the subject changed, or where you would take the questioning in a different direction there may be a blank column and then the conversation would pick up again.

I was looking at it again this morning. Although I’m not convinced that it was right for this, there’s still something there. I look at it as a valid, because to me, it’s like bringing the text up to the level of the images. It would take a lot of work because it would have depended on you sharing your firsthand experience of all the nuances of each conversation to inform just how they’d be laid out.

You’re bringing your cover acumen to the inside - you’re looking to continue the kind of visual dynamics of a cover. In a way you’re mimicking the dynamics of the photograph by having the whole book be visual. It was an exciting idea, but it struck me as being a lot of work for the reader.

Also, it might dangerously move it into being an art book. You look at these art books and you think, “You’re not really supposed to read this text, are you?” The text seems a visual element along with the images.

Given that I’m a photographer by vocation and I’m doing this book that is sort of a photography book, but one that has just as much text as pictures, did that present any a challenge for you?

At the outset I was thinking of you as photographer and the text, no matter how much of it there was, was going to be secondary. I quickly learned how important the interviews were to you. I think that came across in your concerns over readability and your willingness to make a few passes at editing them down with consideration for who’d be reading them.

I was pleased that you were willing to either cut or add copy. You were also willing to drop or add images in support of the layout, or the physical structure and pace of the book. I think that it’s commendable because a lot of authors and editors are insistent that all this material, all this content has to be in there. “We just need to make it fit.”

That was something I tried to learn from previous books. With Uneasy, it bugs me how big it is, I wish that it was a slimmer volume. I don’t pretend to be more self-aware than other authors, I’m just learning from past publications.

For this book I recognized that I could sacrifice a few parts of an interview and be fine. The core of their stories are still in here. I tried to have a sense of the whole and not be attached to the value of each individual meetup.

Your willingness to engage on that level, I think that it paid off. Even when it comes to just pacing and making it something that people want to read.

I was kind of surprised when you wanted to go down to single pages on some of the interviews. Some of them you cut a fair amount to do that, but I think that was a good move in the end. They are thresholds in the book that kind of carry you from one maybe long-ish conversation to the next interview, but they also provide entry points. If you’re flipping through, you can sit with one page for a second and sort of contemplate the photo and that would inspire you to kind of delve into a longer interview and more photos.

To me it’s about being respectful to the visitor. This is not meant to be an anthropological archive. It’s a book that is discernible and entertaining for the reader.

Top Image: Cover try with Axel & Emily of Rochester, utilizing a belly band in the design.

Second Image: Cover try with David & Celeste of Oakland (an attempt at a conceptual studio approach to the cover). Not only was this cover not used, the photo itself was cut from the book.

Bottom Image: All 40 meetups (photos & interviews), laid out on the living room floor, to sort out the book sequencing.