Cover talk: A Weekend in Bandung

You always know things are getting serious when the book gets to the cover-designing stage. Since I do everything here myself--read, acquire, develop, line-edit, design, and layout--I get a pretty good overall image of the book. Cover design is a collaborative effort that generally goes something like this: I work up roughs for my first ideas about what might work as a cover—usually with a few variations, and a conversation with the author moves forward from there.

For A Weekend in Bandung, I was lucky that the author, Jathar Salij, is also an accomplished painter willing to allow one of his paintings to be manipulated for representation on the cover. There ended up being much back and forth about what this cover might be, but it eventually came out as a photo collage using two images. One is the author's painting City of Greed:

. . . which the author describes this way:

 . . . an attempt at visually presenting, at least in part, the human problems that come with material progress.

The title refers to the imperviousness of those at the top vis-a-vis the dire needs of humanity at the lower levels of a developing Southeast Asian society. The twisting and turning corporate towers are overwhelmingly on the prowl to take over more of the world, and push the common man and woman back into invisibility. Every day, when I lived in Indonesia, I was confronted with the many for whom life offered little more than their persistent lack of a decent meal.

. . . all of which fits in perfectly with the stories in this amazing collection. You could read article after article about poverty in Southeast Asia that tell the same story about the wealth of the few and desperation of the many, about "progress" and its discontents. Or you could read this collection to give you a sense of all that, but with a personal connection to it through vivid characterization and rich sensory description.

But there's another prominent theme throughout: The Girl. The guy who wants the elusive girl, the girl who wants the elusive guy, the love that remains the most elusive of all, but always the interesting female character in the middle of things. I knew I had something when I came across this image (source: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Girl_and_Stalls.jpg):

. . . which is a scene from a food stand in Malaysia, where many of these stories are set. The most important part of the image, for me, was the girl in the foreground, who in this candid shot projects more character with her stance than many professional models do in profile or from the front. The dress, the balanced shift, the tilt of the head--it would be difficult to set up a photo shoot that worked as well as this. Many thanks to Daniel Cubillas for contributing this photo to Wikimedia Commons.

The final cover? It looks like this:

. . . where the photographed girl who looks like she stepped out of one of these stories stares into the eyes of the woman in the painting whose pregnancy and impoverishment represents the social conditions addressed throughout this collection. I can't imagine a different cover for this book, but I had gone through several ideas prior to this solution, which I will write about later.