The Cult of the Book Cover (part 2)- by Paul Ashton and Claire Rafferty [16.11.2010]

The re.press approach to cover design is very much governed by the kind of publisher we are, the goals of our project, and the resources at our disposal. Perhaps the most obvious feature of our cover design philosophy is that we use the images of local artists’ work on all of our covers, however, these are not images specifically designed by artists for each individual title; rather, we use preexisting art works that are subsequently paired to each book.

Before making sense of this practice, it might be worthwhile noting some key characteristics of our press:

• re.press is an academic publisher of philosophy

• our books are published under an open-access license (that is, in addition to the print form, our titles are available as free downloads)

• re.press is project oriented (that is, it is not commercial in orientation).

The significance of these factors is that the conditions and context of cover design at re.press are quite different to those one finds in trade publishing. For starters, academic books more often than not have plain covers and highly standardised template-driven design. There is usually little budget or value attributed to cover design in this sector as academic books are largely aimed at a library market. re.press finds itself in contradistinction to this position, as we see aesthetics as fundamental to the presentation of a work. And while re.press has no explicit philosophy around design, our practice of using local artists is, we think, quite revealing about re.press as a project.

Given that cover design is not a particularly high priority—at least traditionally—for academic book sales, and coupled with the fact that we give our product (in digital form) away free (reducing the marketing burden to some extent), our design practices can be understood as having a direct connection to the value we place on the book as an aesthetic object. It is our interest in philosophy and aesthetics, as opposed to commercially viability, that shapes most of our decisions. Obviously the ‘cost’ of this is that we have very limited resources. We are very lucky then that so many artists have volunteered their work for our use. We are also able to do the design work in-house, which keeps costs to a minimum. Furthermore, our books are only produced as print-on-demand or in digital form, so we do not have the high costs of large print runs to consider.

Despite the fact that we do not try to match the cover image explicitly with the book’s content or theme, this cannot be completely ignored, so we sometimes have difficulty getting it right. These limitations also mean that—… authors should stop reading now—authors are not really part of the design process and are given limited say over their covers. Mind you we have not really had too many complaints: often quite the opposite.

One exception to this approach is the cover and interior art for Justin Clemens’ and Helen Johnson’s Black River. Black River was an aesthetic-literary experiment that brought together the words of Justin with Helen’s images and culminated in a book launch and exhibition of the associated images. From the beginning the cover art and interior imagery were a fundamental part of the publishing project.

Hopefully what is clear here is that the cover, as the interface between the publisher/author and the reader, functions somewhat differently for us. Rather than the cover primarily—although not exclusively—being a communication device to an unknown reader about the content of the work, the re.press cover becomes part of the work itself. When you publish with re.press you create a singular object with two dimensions: one is a treatise presenting a philosophical argument, and the other is an argument about what philosophy, and its appropriate mode of transmission, is. The singular ‘book’ is a philosophical-aesthetic act/presentation that to some extent already has a ready-made audience. Scholars know if they want to read a work on Badiou or the critique of liberalism, so they don’t need to be ‘sold’ per se. Thus, the design of the cover (and the interior), as is the case for mainstream books, signifies that the book is part of the same world as the reader. However, unlike mainstream books, a work of philosophy does not make a case that it is appropriate for the reader, instead a true work of philosophy—to which all of our works aspire—asks the reader whether they are appropriate to it. The same is true for art.

As a further illustration of our philosophy is the blurb written by Justin Clemens that appears on our website:

re.press aims to publish the best philosophical works available, whether these emerge from well-established or from previously unknown thinkers, whether they are from the North or the South, the East or the West, whether they are Platonists or Hegelians, materialists or idealists.True thought is global, universal, transformative, shredding ideologies and opinions like the statues of old dictators.But true thought also begins locally, in images and signs that may as yet have no recognisable reference or import. re.press' head offices are located in the city of Melbourne, Australia. And Melbourne is, as the art-critic Norbert Loeffler has remarked, one of the great art-cities of the world – without anybody knowing it. Lacking the established power, media and reputation of traditional centres of world art, Melbourne forces its artists to sustain themselves otherwise. Aware of contemporary work from all over the world, local artists transmute it for their own, often-obscure purposes, into unprecedented forms. re.press seeks, like an insatiable kleptoparasite, to draw off some of this aesthetic power for its own ends, by using their images for its cover-art.

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