“The bodies we have are the first things we take for granted,” David Macaulay said to a cluster of media folks gathered in a private dining room at the Landmarc, “and they’re probably the most amazing things we’ll ever have.” We’d been brought in to meet the author-illustrator months in advance of the publication of his next book with Houghton Mifflin, The Way We Work, in which he applies his genius for explaining mechanical structures to human anatomy. “It’s really for anybody with a body,” he quipped about the book, adding, “I didn’t know anything about the body when I started this book. I didn’t know where the pancreas was, for example, or what it does.” He learned, of course, but “my friends at Houghton have saked me not to go into how the digestive system works here at lunch.”
Instead, he told us (among other things) about the long quest to create just the right cover image. The smaller image above is the one that was on the cover of the blad we all received, but “that jacket had gotten more and more complicated,” he observed, “and less indicative of what was actually in the book.” So he went back to a classic Macaulay cover design for inspiration, and we all agreed that this new version (right) should prove quite eye-catching when the book arrives in October.
(Well, okay, when he came over to our table, Macaulay did in fact wax rhapsodic about the compact elegance of the small intestine’s design, but I figured that’s not quite publishing industry talk. And, anyway, he tells it a lot better than I could, so wait for the book to come out.)