Cover Design

Album Art

text printed on the vinyl:

DR. ANDREW M. HENRY SUPPORTS THE THEORY THAT 666 (THE MARK OF THE BEAST) THAT NERO WAS THE FIGURE REFERENCED IN REVELATION AS HE WAS LIKELY CONTEMPORARY TO ITS WRITING AND REPRESENTED CHRISTIAN PERSECUTION FROM ROMAN AUTHORITIES. HIS GEMATRIA IS TRIPLE 6.

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🌐 AMERICAN GRID 🌐

Symposium XVI
adapting the final printed Journal of Ideas

(Re)designing

Novels

Crocodile Soup

Gert Hardcastle is thirty-something and unlucky in love. She is also estranged from her mother. As Crocodile Soup opens, she thinks she has found "the One" — the enigmatic Eva, who serves coffee at the cafeteria in the museum where Gert works as a curator cataloging Egyptian artifacts. As Gert embarks on her hilarious and poignant pursuit of Eva, she looks back on her eccentric, childhood through a series of vivid and surreal flashbacks: her obsessive twin, Frank, with whom she communicates telepathically; her father, George, who vanished to Africa to salvage the family crocodile farm; her vain, neglectful mother, Jean; and the family ghost—a Victorian poet who haunts the attic.

In a narrative studded with relentless humor and giddy self-deprecation, Julia Darling introduces an endearing cast of characters whose shared and wayward search for love is irresistible.

Let's start with Gert: she's unlucky, works as a curator in Egyptian antiquities, and has some strange recollections—including tragic and supernatural relationships—set in the arc of a love story. The amulet is an image of Sobek, the Egyptian Crocodile god of the Faiyum who was praised for his relationship with the Osirian Triad.

Osirus is the god of the underworld and component spirit of the deceased Pharaoh, Isis (his wife)—whose tears over his murder by Set flowed and created the Nile—and Horus, the Son of Osirus, another piece of the spirit animating the Pharaoh.

Sobek aids Isis in putting Osirus' dismembered limbs back together so he could rule over the Duat (Underworld). This amulet, invoking supernatural aide, suggests the strange and maybe mystical narrative with its flashbacks, telepathy, and resident ghoul. Their crowns are British and they're scrawled on a super-matte, leathery, parchment backdrop: the perfect preamble for an adventure.
 

Getting Over It

Helen Bradshaw isn't exactly living out her dreams. She's a lowly assistant editor at GirlTime magazine, she drives an ancient Toyota, and she has a history of choosing men who fall several thousand feet below acceptable boyfriend standard. Not to mention that she shares an apartment with a scruffy , tactless roommate, her best girlfriends are a little too perfect, and the most affectionate male in her life—her cat, Fatboy—occasionally pees in her underwear draw.

Then Helen gets the telephone call she least expects: Her father has had a massive heart attack. Initially brushing off his death as merely an interruption in her already chaotic life (they were never very close, after all), Helen is surprised to find everything else starting to crumble around her. Her pushy mother is coming apart at the seams, a close friend might be heading toward tragedy, and, after the tequila incident, it looks as though Tom the vet will be sticking with Dalmatians. Turns out getting over it isn't going to be quite as easy as she thought.

A rich-black background sets the tone. The left has a sense of order in its concentric rings, but they have a crack. The rings are reminiscent of many circular loading symbols (Apple, Google, and even the Microsoft spinning hourglass); we all know that moment when things are about to load but then it stalls. The book starts in this stall.

The right has a loading bar that playfully describes her healing process with its emoji-like heart. It's sparse but iconic.

The rings or the heart and bar would be stamped on the front and printed throughout as a motif on chapter headings, as dingbats between important paragraphs, or at the transition of chapters or sections. These stamps fill in as the story unfolds, punctuated with reversals and losses in progress at impactful moments.

Quiet Chaos

On the shores of the Mediterranean, exhausted from an afternoon of surfing, Pietro Paladini is shaken out of his stupor by a distant noise. “Over there!” he cries to his brother, Carlo, sunning beside him. “Over there!”

So begins the adventure that will tear a hole in Pietro’s life. For while he and his brother struggle to save two drowning swimmers, a tragedy is unfolding down the road at his summer cottage. Instead of coming home to a hero’s welcome, Pietro is greeted by the flashing lights of an ambulance, the wide-eyed stare of his young daughter, Claudia, and the terrible news that his fiancée, Lara, is dead.

Life must go on. Or does it? Pietro, a true iconoclast, has to find his own way. When he drops Claudia off for the first day of school, he decides to wait outside for her all day, and then every day. To protect her. To protect himself. To wait for the heavy fist of grief to strike. But as the days and weeks go by, the small parking lot in front of the school becomes his refuge from the world as well as the place where family and colleagues come to relieve their own suffering—among them, the woman he rescued from the waves. And Pietro plunges deeper into the depths of his life before seeing the simple truth before his eyes.

Sandro Veronesi makes art of every detail, creating a mosaic of humor, hope,profound insight, and emotional resonance. Quiet Chaos is an unprecedented portrayal of a life set adrift by death.

Pietro's life is literally flipped upside down by a scene at the ocean, so naturally this inversion seemed fitting. The ambiguity of sky and water in that moment before understanding sets in motion the first mystery. The confusion of disorientation and then finally seeing things all topsy-turvy provides wonder and unease. The mystery of this glossy book jacket sets the scene.