FSG’s Brand Alterations: Knotty But Nice

Apart from the metamorphing borzois of Knopf, most publishers’ brands are consistent from one book to the next, so when FSG let Margaret Cusack embroider a variation on its three fishes for Beth Kohl‘s Embryo Culture: Making Babies in the Twenty-First Century, it’s worth noticing. Especially since those three squiggles don’t even look like fishes anymore…and, as publicity manager Kathy Daneman informs me, that seminal change is deliberate, in keeping with Cusack’s overall cover design, which combines embroidery with the paraphenalia of modern fertility medicine. Daneman adds that while FSG has recolored the fish in the past, and even rendered them in thread for one title, this is the first time they’ve ever been swapped out for something else altogether.