Sandstone Press

A note on our forthcoming covers

Posted by RLD on 16th February 2012

We put two notes on our Facebook recently about progress with our covers and thought blogspot visitors might enjoy them. Here they are run together with just two things to add. We are now in the final stages with Jammy Dodger and should have that in Forthcoming very soon.

In addition, and after a good deal of brainstorming and consultation, we have decided to give Beyond the Last Dragon a brand new look. We have sourced a wonderful portrait of the subject and, again, should have the finished product posted soon. It should be worthy of Edwin Morgan, his biographer James McGonigal, and the Saltire Research Book of the Year they won not too long ago. This means if you want a copy of Suzanne Gyseman’s wonderful Last Dragon image, which we commissioned specially for the hardback, you’ll have to buy it soon; but hey, why not buy both!

Hi, Folks. Bob Davidson here. I will be contributing to Facebook while Eilidh is off nurturing (intensely!), or until we get a temporary replacement. By the way, I hope you saw the picture of her new baby, Molly, which I twittered out a few days ago on my own feed davidson_robert.

If you haven’t visited our Forthcoming page for a while I hope you will now. Our English-language programme for 2012 is complete and most of the covers are up. Gravemaker + Scott have designed a super new frontage for Hamish Brown’s Climbing the Corbetts. I can tell you that the photo sections are also complete, but you won’t see them before the book comes out.

Outdoor enthusiasts are in for a treat with Chris Townsend’s Grizzly Bears and Razor Clams, which is his account of the Pacific Northwest Trail from the Rockies to the Pacific just south of the Canadian/US border. ALL the design work is by Heather MacPherson of Raspberryhmac, presently working from New Zealand. Heather has also done a BIG BIG job for us on Hamish’s The Oldest Post Office in the World.

Beyond the Last Dragon is coming out in paperback, still with Suzanne Gyseman’s Last Dragon image, cover by Latte Goldstein of River Design in Edinburgh. Latte designed the cover for In the Old Chief’s Country for us from a selection of Zimbabwe images by Margaret Waller, who was in the country around the same time as author Chris McIvor.

Latte is doing our 2012 catalogue - more to come on that soon. Please do take a look. Here is a link: http://bit.ly/OvC8P

I promised (threatened!) to write a few words on our new fiction covers, mixed with the non-fiction chronologically on the Forthcoming page http://bit.ly/OvC8P Hope you like them.

On sale from next Thursday will be the paperback version of The Sea Detective, which is getting out in pretty fair numbers across the UK on Day One. Heather MacPherson of Raspberryhmac modified her own subtle (and successful) hardback design.

Rebecca Pickard of Zebedee, who designed the Jessie Lamb cover, has now given us The Sister, working pretty closely with the author. You’ll see we have a warm appreciation on the cover from Man Booker winner Hilary Mantel. It’s a classic sort of cover, I’d say, appropriate for the content, a first person narrative from Alice James, sister of Henry James. We are putting this title forward for this year’s Man Booker.

Latte Goldstein of River Design in Edinburgh http://bit.ly/bYYQ1J has developed an atmospheric Fenland image from the camera of David Savory into a really inviting paperback cover. See more of David’s work at http://www.fenland-photography.co.uk Looking at this cover I feel really want to visit the Fens, where I have never been much as I love England’s byways.

Guilherme Condeixa created The Jaguar for us. We sweated quite a bit on this one, through umpteen drafts. We are all agreed though, including the author (Jeff) in Southern California, that Guilherme has caught the right atmosphere of sweating jungle menace. I’ve been warned that this area of crime is very competitive but this is a great book from a great, truly professional author with lots of form. Crime lovers are going to love this one and we hope we can do more, all lovingly sprayed from Jeff’s ever ready Kalashnikov. No web site for Guilherme yet, but here is that of T Jefferson Parker http://bit.ly/yTFwd1

Again, Latte Goldstein has designed the cover for Alison Fell’s new novel, complete with enigmatic title, ‘the element -inth in Greek’. Best just refer to it as ‘the element’. Alison has put down some great work in the past but this surpasses everything that has gone before. Located mostly in Greece it combines a crime story that is also a love story (but, of course!) with the story of Alice Kober, the woman who deciphered the Minoan script discovered at the turn of the 19/20th Centuries without getting the credit. That went to a man, and you see how Alison’s great themes are taking shape - don’t you? We love Latte’s work on this and have asked him to adapt it for the cover of our new catalogue.

We bought in the cover for David Adams Richards’ Incidents in the Life of Markus Paul from the original publisher, Random House Canada, feeling it introduced the story about as well as possible. That crane hook and those falling beams -might someone be below them? I’m afraid so, and what follows makes the story. It carries a quote from the great Canadian author Alastair MacLeod, author of Island. David’s book is going to make an impact on this side of the great water and we hope that it will be the first of many published by Sandstone Press.

We also bought in the cover for Me and Mr Booker from its original publisher Text, in Australia. It carries a quote from Isla Dewar which runs, ‘A beautifully paced book about love and growing up. Not the inevitable moving into adulthood growing up, but the growing up we all have to do, and keep on doing all our lives. I loved this book’. We are really grateful to Isla for taking the time and trouble to read Cory’s wonderful book and for providing this appreciation with which, incidentally, I heartily concur.

Graham Thew, a new designer to us, located in Dublinhttp://bit.ly/xdwcuh is working on Jammy Dodger just now and we are so impressed by the early drafts we have asked him to look at Zoe Venditozzi’s first novel as well. Latte is designing Janice Brown’s Hartsend and we have approached a new designer to do John Larkin’s comedy for us, when the final, true, real title is decided. More to follow on these covers just as soon as we get them together.

I hope all this is interesting to you. Working with the designers on getting the covers right is one of the joys of my job, if you will also allow it to be a principal cause of nervous breakdown. Coffee now! I must have coffee.