You may recall that we love finding out why a book cover changes between the ARC and the published edition, so when we met playwright Victor Lodato at the launch party for his debut novel, Mathilda Savitch, a few weeks ago, we came prepared to ask him about the switch Farrar Straus Giroux made with his dust jacket.
“I met with the art department at FSG, and they were very open to my ideas,” Lodato said of the cover selection process. “I mentioned a number of things, but I said that I really like silhouettes, and I mentioned that I thought something that looked like a strange storybook for children would really work.” The art department came up with the illustration at left (which is still being used on certain European editions, hence the “Roman” tagline in the middle). “Both my editor, Courtney Hodell, and I thought this was a great cover,” he recalled, “but maybe it just needed to be… sexier in some ways. It was a little cold. So they wanted to play with some other ideas.”
Lodato spent two days looking through art books at Strand Books until he came across a copy of Travelers, a collection of photographs of snow globe sculptures created by Walter Martin and Paloma Muñoz. He brought the book to Hodell, and says she was as enthusiastic about the images as he was; FSG finally settled on “Traveler 48 at Night” for the final cover image.
Lodato explained that he still liked both covers, that they were both relevant to the novel’s story of a young girl’s journey into the underworld to find answers to her questions about her older sister’s death. “I like the playful interpretation of this child going on a frightening adventure,” he says of the original, “but this one…” He moved on to the final cover. “The novel’s about a child alone in an emotionally frozen landscape, and she’s trying to figure out lots of things, from where her sister went to death in general. And this just seemed very resonant to that.” (New Yorkers can judge for themselves when Lodato reads from Mathilda Savitch at KGB Bar this Sunday [Oct. 25] at 7 p.m.)
We’re hard-pressed to pick either one as “better” than the other, too—but what do you think?