Preschool Germs and Medieval Law and Justice

A September Notebook

Hello, Dear Reader!

This is A Book Designer’s Notebook, a newsletter about books, design, and creative practice from the desk of Nathaniel Roy. This is my semi-regular “notebook” dispatch about what I’m reading and working on.

• LAST month, the kiddo turned 3 and started preschool. It only took one week to get a call that he had a fever and need to be sent home. Yay germs!

• NEXT month, we are preparing to welcome a new addition to our family. I don’t plan to stop newslettering, but it is more than likely going to be spotty. Might take the Mitchell Volk approach and send you some sketches.

• Later THIS month marks five years on the job at the Ann Arbor District Library. I hope to reflect on this in the newsletter this month. Some weird milestone coincidences:

  • I got married within a few weeks of starting this job in 2019.

  • My son was born a few weeks before becoming full-time in 2021.

  • My daughter will be born a few weeks after my five-year anniversary.

  • BRB, asking my therapist if I have an unhealthy attachment to my job.

• I try not to focus on subscriber count¹, but here’s a cool stat: 45% of my total subscriber count subscribed in the last 30 days. I started this thing in May. Grateful for each and every one of you reading.²

  • I really like simple stats like this. It stems from my love of watching and basketball as a kid: I know 5/6 is 83% because that’s a damn good field goal percentage.

  • I make statistics about my reading habits every year, too. To this point in the year, 61% of the books I’ve read have been Big Five publishers and 39% have been independent.

• Last week, I asked if book covers really matter. I fought the existentialism inherent in asking if what you do matters, and had a great time poking at this question inspired by The Clothing of Books by Jhumpa Lahiri. If you missed it, you can read that here:

Do Book Covers Matter?

• I’m not sure when it will be finished, but I am working on a new installment of Interview with a Book Designer. I had a great chat with Canadian designer Jazmin Welch and can’t wait to share it with you.

• Recently I made the “saucy” collage below. For some reason, the medium of collage often makes me tap into my more juvenile impulses.

  • Even when it doesn’t involve hot sauce and butts, making a quick collage is a terrific way to take a break from work and cleanse the palette between tasks or projects.

“I need this explained” —My friend Tim

• Here’s some recent work for Fordham University Press. The first cover in this grid was the chosen cover.

  • It’s always a little funny to me when I say “new,” or “recent” work, because I typically wait until the publisher has posted the cover somewhere online before sharing my work. So this book hasn’t really been new to me in months.

  • But it’s also not finished! I don’t design the full cover until the book’s interior is finalized and the publisher knows the final page count.

• I finally finished The Unreality of Memory by Elisa Gabbert, the most recent read for my book club with my mom.

  • From the publisher:

    “The Unreality of Memory collects provocative, searching essays on disaster culture, climate anxiety, and our mounting collective sense of doom. In this new collection, acclaimed poet and essayist Elisa Gabbert explores our obsessions with disasters past and future, from the sinking of the Titanic to Chernobyl, from witch hunts to the plague. These deeply researched, prophetic meditations question how the world will end—if indeed it will—and why we can’t stop fantasizing about it.

  • I did enjoy it—so if the description sounds good, I say go for it—but my mom and I both struggled to get through it. I think, for my part, my head just wasn’t in the space for to read about disaster. August had a lot going on and I found myself much happier to read about fictional space politics.

  • Next up for us is Random in Death by J.D. Robb.

  • Speaking of airport thrillers, I had this funny text exchange with my friend Matt the other day:

• “Bookish Diversions: A Cover to Judge By” by Joel J Miller.

  • A look at the new Tom Wolfe backlist design, the “productness” of books, and a good overview of how book design works featuring the words and covers of better designers than me.

Bookish Diversions: A Cover to Judge By

• “The Hidden Racism of Book Cover Design” by Tajja Isen in The Walrus.

  • Tajja Isen explores how publishing relies on familiar stereotypes in book cover design to sell books.

• Oh Hey! What Kind of Pen Do You Use? by Kate Bingaman-Burt

  • Kate Bingaman-Burt talks about one of the questions she gets the most. Check it out if you, like me, love chatting supplies.

• Receipt from the Bookshop #59 by Katie Clapham

  • Katie Clapham’s Receipt from the Bookshop is a delight and satisfies the continued hankering for bookshop diaries that Shaun Bythell’s Confessions of a Bookseller started.

That’s all for this week. As always, thanks for reading! This newsletter is a labor of love, and my love runs on coffee. So if you love what you read, consider buying me a cuppa.

Until next time,
Nathaniel

1. I fail.

2. And even the ones who got this email and don’t read it.