The Little Giant of Aberdeen County
Designer/Art Director: Anne Twomey
Photographer: Scott Nobles
Editor: Caryn Karmatz Rudy
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Typefaces: Monteverdi
Specials: Uncoated Stock (Tomahawk)
Audience: Reading Book Clubs, Female
I am a great fan and admirer of Anne Twomey's work. She is an amazing designer and a wonderful person. This week she is talking about her cover for The Little Giant of Aberdeen County. I want to thank her for taking the time to contribute to FaceOut Books.
—Charles Brock
There was already an in house buzz about The Little Giant of Aberdeen County by the time I decided to read it. This magical first novel’s descriptive writing and the contrasting themes of beauty, deformity, traditional medicine and natural healing, visually inspired me on every page. I knew I needed to set the bar high for a cover. The exploration was a true adventure with very Gratifying results.
My early design process is simple. While reading a manuscript, I doodle and take notes in a moleskin notebook. When I’m finished I step away so I can distill the mere illustrations of the story down to the images that genuinely capture the essence of the book.
The book’s main character, Truly, is in fact a medical giant and thus lives a life as a social outcast and medical specimen. A hard character to depict…but I had other ideas.
At an early cover concept meeting, an embroidered quilt was suggested, as an embroidered quilt was a family heirloom and secretly used as a book of spells left by a green witch, generations before it was discovered by Truly. I resisted the quilt; I thought it was an obvious and overused narrative illustration. I did however contemplate the embroidering of plants and herbs.
The feminine crafts of sewing and embroidery are integral parts of the book. Both are passions of mine and I collect crewel embroidery, so I was doubly inspired. I did some early designs using pieces from my collection and altering in Photoshop. Although everyone thought they were very beautiful and more interesting than a quilt, they still lacked a human quality.
The vine is the most obvious cliché of the Fairy Tale Giant, a reference I didn’t mind as the book has a dark magical fable quality. The vine also spoke to the books’ other themes of herbal healing and gardening.
I drew the title in letterforms that were vine like and considered embroidering the entire cover. This regrettably would have been most time consuming.
Foolishly, I added the mannequin hand with the seedling to humanize. Ultimately, it was rejected as some colleagues found the dismembered hand off putting.
I also researched images of female Giants and even looked at Circus Fat Ladies to see how far I could push the imagery without alienating the reader. I settled for an oversized smock.
I thought commissioning an illustration would have the edginess of “outsider art” or the folk quality and strangeness of some of Rousseau’s lesser-known portraits. The giant baby collecting herbs in the garden was nearly a perfect fit for the story.
An oversized mannequin seemed like a solution that addressed Truly’s size, was feminine, and spoke to the hand tailoring needed for Truly and her doll-like sister’s prom queen clothes. The seamstresses’ mannequin, especially a large one, is reminiscent of other archetypal female forms, like the Greek goddess’s bust or a Venus de Milo torso.
I had recently fallen in love with the vintage and narrative quality of Scott Noble’s photography. He read the book and came up with some additional ideas, but we settled on the over- sized mannequin concept.
Scott's technique for creating the giant sized mannequin involved photographing muslin over an oversize model and superimposing this on an extra large mannequin he photographed at FIT, where he teaches.
Initially, I had thought of having a vine growing around the mannequin, but I was disappointed with the vines that were available in November.
We deemed the vines gratuitous but added the embroidery on the sides.
I originally wanted to set the title in typography similar to what is printed on mannequins, but opted for something more elegant in the end.
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