Poets & Writers Theater

In this video from Adam Savage’s Tested, the host visits the American Bookbinders Museum in San Francisco and speaks with executive director Anita Engles about the history of book cover designs and proves that maybe you can judge a book by its cover.

In this Penguin Random House video, book designer Vi-An Nguyen narrates the progression of her cover options for The Prophets, Robert Jones Jr.’s debut novel about two enslaved young men on a Deep South plantation who find refuge in each other.

Simon & Schuster president and CEO Jonathan Karp offers a behind-the-scenes look at how book cover art is selected through the lens of Julia May Jonas’s debut novel, Vladimir, forthcoming from Avid Reader Press in February.

In this video, Ian McEwan visits the Adel Rootstein Display Mannequins workshop where the staff works on the mannequin featured on the book cover for his novel Machines Like Me (Nan A. Talese, 2019). The cover depicts the robot character, Adam, who is involved in a love triangle with a human couple in an alternate 1980s London.

“It’s going to be the first thing someone lays their eyes on before they read it.” Jaya Miceli, art director at Scribner, discusses her love of books covers and how the jacket designs were created for several popular novels, such as Rachel Lyon’s Self-Portrait With Boy and Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied Sing.

This clip presents one element in the making of the cover of Katie Kitamura’s debut novel, The Longshot (Free Press, 2009), which features a photo of the tattooed knuckles of the author’s brother, whose background in mixed martial arts was an inspiration for the subject of the novel. Kitamura’s latest novel, A Separation, is out now by Riverhead Books.