High Anxiety.

My publisher recently told me this is THE definitive book on this topic—the one book most highly recommended by mental health care professionals to their patients than any other.

MJF went on to say that it has sold over 1,000,000 copies for other publishers, and has already sold over 650,000 copies for us (hence the cover copy tag-line on the front cover of our edition). Not too shabby for an edition retailing for $12.98, which is actually a "posh" price point for us!

This is a refresher reprinting off our backlist because the older jacket started looking dated. The design mission was fairly simple to meet: clean, emphatic, authoritative without looking stale or stodgy, modern, crisp, stand-out through boldness of colors. We had to avoid imagery since the range of phobias and disorders covered within are too vast to be placed comfortably on a cover.

Stickin' it to "The Man".

Ah, what list of ours would be complete without a selection from Disinformation Books. A true counter-culture imprint, they consistently confront and question commonly held misperceptions propagated through various media outlets, one inaccurate factoid at a time.

They make the old punk-rocker in me sing. Off-key, naturally.

The Day You Were Born, Fall 2009 list.

Interesting in the sense that I was combating commonly held stereotypes regarding astrology books. There exists in the public consciousness a distrust (or lack of seriousness) in daily horoscopes, a belief I share in varying degrees as well. So, my mission was to try and create a classy, seemingly expert tone to the book. I did this by using actual natal charts as the background art, used by professional astrologers who use a complex system of birth times and planetary alignments, and then a horoscope icon wheel as the centerpiece, which is the more identifiable symbol for horoscopes.

The center wheel is glossy—we used what's called a "faux" spot lam process, which takes a gloss jacket and then, after creating a mask, hits the outlying areas with a matte varnish. It's cheaper than using real spot gloss. That's the real challenge of bargain books; how to replicate and compete with luxury hardcover editions with 1/4 of their budget.

"Working", by Studs Terkel.

Second in a series after our 1st Studs Turkel edition "The 'Good' War". For this edition, my challenge was to find an image evocative of the concept of work, without harkening to the specifics of race, class, ethnicity, or social strata, since the book covers an enormously diverse range of voices from professions of all types.

So, I chose the daily commute as a take-off point, something every worker has to contend with in one form or another. My hidden fun built-in for readers is the spine detail: I wanted a subconscious connection between the Communist worker symbol of the hammer and sickle.
























Another cool tie-in: Harvey Pekar wrote a graphic novel version of "Working", who I got to see speak recently at a Brooklyn comic book convention called King Con.