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Excerpted from I Must Be Dreaming by Roz Chast. Copyright © 2o23. Available via Bloomsbury.

The simplest way to make a globe is to construct a sphere and paint it. The earliest globes would have been made of wood or metal, with the celestial or terrestrial map painted directly on by hand. Later, in the sixteenth century, hollow globes were made of thin sheets of metal which were then hand-painted. Mapping doesn’t lend itself to painting and lettering by hand, and cartography was in its infancy, so early painted globes were necessarily very inaccurate.

Later makers pasted blank gores onto the sphere to create a more forgiving canvas for the hand-painted map and lettering. These are called manuscript globes. The invention of the printing press meant that maps could be printed as gores. A silversmith or skilled engraver would etch a reverse map on copper plates before printing using a process known as intaglio, from the Italian word for ‘carving.’ In intaglio printing the etched plate is coated with ink, then wiped to leave ink only in the incised depressions, before being run through an etching press, in which dampened paper picks up the ink to create the printed image. Copper is a soft metal, so the plates lose their clarity relatively quickly; smaller print runs were therefore common. The effect, though, is very satisfying, with an intense character to the image. The globemaker then pasted the printed gores onto the globe and finally the painter would add color.

It was at this point that the globemaking craft became assimilated with the printing and publishing industry. Globes were after all now printed just like books, and since this time each edition has been referred to as a ‘publication.’ And as in book publishing, copying the map from a rival’s globe is plagiarism.

The golden age of the printed and then hand-painted globe coincided with the age of European expansion, reaching its peak at the beginning of the seventeenth century. In this period, as astronomical, geographical and cartographical knowledge developed apace, globemakers too were inspired to experiment and refine their art. In turn, the proliferation of printing presses made it possible over time to produce more globes at a less than exorbitant cost so they became more affordable to a greater number of people.

Nevertheless, the acquisition or commission of a globe was still the preserve of the aristocracy and the affluent merchant class. Because of the delicate and time-consuming nature of the work, a budding globemaker probably would have required considerable financial backing. Globes therefore were prized symbols of status and prestige.

Studying these venerable antique globes, it was striking to see how little the methods of manufacture had changed from the mid-sixteenth century until the twentieth century, albeit there is always a mystery about the exact construction and methods because so much is hidden under the surface – it was only in the last century that the rot set in. I knew that I had high aspirations but did not want to simply reproduce some sort of cheap faux-antique facsimile. Instead, my ambition was to produce a handmade globe that felt classic yet at the same time unusual, relevant and contemporary.

Bellerby Globes. shot by Tom Bunning for part of his ‘Crafted’ Series.

I come from a line of keen artists. My grandmother and my mother both loved painting with watercolors; my grandmother even taught it for many decades until well into her nineties. I have several of their paintings, although they are stored in my attic because, sadly, I just don’t share their enthusiasm for this medium; I don’t like the imprecision of the application, although more likely I don’t care for watercolors because I have never been very good at painting with them. However, in collaboration with the crispness of the cartography on a globe, watercolors acquire another dimension, allowing you to build up a rich color patina over many layers without obscuring the text. It really is a perfect match.

Watercolors were no doubt used on the finest old globes for this reason; indeed, I would go so far as to say they could have been invented for globemaking had they not been conceived centuries earlier than the first painted globe. Globemakers must surely always have planned to paint their globes with watercolors; they knew their creation would have pride of place in the purchaser’s house, so beauty was paramount. We might love the look of these old globes now, but when they were made, they were positively revered. Meanwhile Chiara Perano, a friend of Jade’s obsessed with astrology and mythology, had been designing a celestial globe, mapping the stars and drawing all eighty-eight constellations by hand. She also decided that my original basic cartouche was not suitable for her celestial globe, and she quickly came up with a much better design.

In the early years of Bellerby & Co., my approach to publicity and marketing was a little scattergun. Finding the correct person to contact at publications for editorial content was far from straightforward. I just fired off the odd email here and there, and occasionally the employee handling the info@ or press@ account would pass it on to the editorial team. Sometimes this miraculously resulted in some publicity for Bellerby & Co. globes, such as a tiny feature in House and Garden magazine.

Just as Chiara was finishing the first Bellerby & Co. celestial globe, the Perano Celestial model, David Balfour, the property expert on Martin Scorsese’s Oscar-winning movie Hugo, saw the House and Garden piece and commissioned me to make four globes for a scene in the film, one of which was to be a celestial globe in two pieces; they were going to film the scene in a clockmaker’s studio, so our globes fitted the bill.

The deadline for the Hugo globes was ridiculously tight – filming was due to start in June 2010, and I had to build in extra time for their in-house approval. And I was still learning many of the processes and practicing only on 50-centimeter globes; the commission was for a 40-centimeter celestial globe and three much smaller terrestrials. I worked into the night for weeks for next to nothing – I was just excited to be asked.

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Excerpted from The Globemakers: The Curious Story of an Ancient Craft by Peter Bellerby. Copyright (c) 2023 Bloomsbury Publishing. Used by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.

I’d been in practice as a conservator of art and architecture for about twenty-five years when I had my first big, bona fide failure. Before then I’d made only minor errors that could be easily fixed and disclosed—as our profession requires us to do—with little fanfare or consequence. My irreparable blunder came in 2009, when the world was in economic freefall and there was little work to be had.

I had just moved back to Los Angeles after a fellowship year at the American Academy in Rome when I was called in by an architect to address the emergency removal of an exotic early-twentieth-century wall covering on a historic Craftsman residence. Called Anaglypta, a name amalgamated from the Greek words for “raised” and “cameo,” the embossed wood pulp paneling was so rare that I had never even heard of it before. Neither had any of my local colleagues.

One thing about conservators is that we love encountering unusual materials. For me, who has a particular affinity for twentieth-century proprietary inventions, like Bakelite, Linoleum, and Formica, this Anaglypta project was a dream come true, especially since I was starting a new solo practice after three decades of partnering with others.

All of my previous partnerships had ended bitterly. My father had had similar repeated problems with work associates, a fact that both he attributed to the fact that “people are greedy and backstabbing.” My mother, who was prone to raging at the two of us, privately said to me, “Your father’s problem is his ego. He thinks that just because he was born rich, he’s better than everyone.”

My father’s family had been well-off middle class in pre-revolutionary Cuba. My paternal grandfather Alberto, a 1920s immigrant to Cuba from Romania, had owned a dry-goods store and two apartment buildings. Because my grandfather refused to believe that the United States would allow Communism to exist ninety miles from its shores, the family lost everything when we left for Miami, and I grew up in a house where there were constant worries and fights about money.

When I left home to go to college, I vowed to live life differently. I would avoid the scorching arguments, never hit my child or have serial blowups with friends and family. However, apart from hitting my child, which I studiously avoided, the reverse was true: I fought often with my first husband and we wound up divorcing. My partnerships, the first in Philadelphia and then two others in Los Angeles, turned out to be so contentious that I ended up in court with one of them and had not spoken to the two others in years.

I chalked up the demise of my Philadelphia partnership to both of us being young and inexperienced, but I was certain that my Los Angeles associates, neither of whom had either the training or experience I’d had when we started off together, had been simply greedy and overreaching. Nonetheless, despite the fact that I was one of the most well-trained and experienced architectural conservators in Los Angeles, no one wanted to work with me, even people I had trained and mentored in the past.

The Anaglypta removal was a rush job to accommodate a change in plans during a kitchen renovation. The architect who called me in to do it said that demolition was to start the following week—a preposterous schedule for such an undertaking. But this was a juicy project, and the fact that it was being offered to me, and not my backstabbing former partners, even though I’d been away for an entire year, seemed to be proof of my superior abilities. Besides, I was also told that once the material had been removed from the wall, I would have plenty of time to clean and prepare it for reattachment.

I arrived in Altadena in the foothills of the San Gabriel mountains on a hot, dry, and windy morning. Though I had never been to this particular place before, the tree-lined street of Craftsman houses swept me with nostalgia: those gabled roofs, wide porches and lawns flanked by oaks and redwoods was a vision straight out of my childhood drawings.

When I was a newly arrived Cuban immigrant living in Miami Beach with totally distraught parents who struggled to make ends meet and come to terms with their losses, I filled notebooks with what I imagined to be real American neighborhoods of pine trees, rosebushes, and pitched roof houses like the ones I stood before. Moms that smiled and never screamed or used a belt, or told their only, lonely child that they wish she had never been born. Serial abandonment throughout her childhood had made my mother volatile and violent. Marrying my father had provided her a modicum of safety, but losing everything when we left Cuba shattered her peace of mind.

With its abundance of darkly polished woods and Batchelder tile fireplaces, the 1910 Craftsman house conveyed domestic comfort and an era of history when artistry mattered. The Anaglypta was in great condition, firmly bonded to the dining room’s walls. Crouching with a magnifying loupe over my eyes, and probing the edges of the embossing with a scalpel, I realized that I was going to have to put at least some brakes on the removal.

“We’re going to have to face the material with Japanese tissue so it doesn’t fall apart during removal,” I said. What I really should have told the architect was that he was proposing an impossible schedule. But I didn’t. The last thing I wanted was for them to call in one of my competitors, especially the two who I felt had betrayed me.

The following week, I arrived at the site to apply the facing, hoping this would buy me time to figure out the rest. What I found, instead, was that the contractor had taken it upon himself to start removing the panels. Alarmed, I dropped my tool kit and rushed over to lend a hand. To my astonishment, the panels came off in one piece, with little damage.

Calamity only began the following week, when I began flipping the panels in order to remove the plaster bits that remained stuck to the backing. The pulp began to splinter like bits of Roman glass. I should have stopped right then and there, but I was too swept up in the process, especially my own need to succeed. I asked the contractor to bring the panels to my studio. There, alone, I continued pressing at the problem, using different tools, to no avail. The panels kept falling apart.

At night, I awoke in terror at my own hubris. Why did I take on something that I knew could not work? Why did I not walk away when I saw that things were not being done correctly? Abject and certain I’d be sued, I finally admitted that I could not finish the project. The architect was furious. “But it wasn’t my fault!” I cried. “It was the contractor. He started the process.” Though the blame did begin with others, I should have known better. Conservators are trained to keep damage from happening and stop it when it does. My ego didn’t let me do that.

I fell into a tailspin, questioning my professionalism, my need to always succeed and best my competitors. Though my new solo practice grew exponentially, I felt alone and friendless, unsure of my fitness for the work itself, which is supposed to be approached judiciously and humbly, in service of materials and not the other way around. But that failure was exactly what I needed to set on a path of repair that went beyond the boundaries of conservation.

Now ten years later, I still wince when I think of those Anaglypta panels. But I also know that that failure forced me to confront my arrogance. As I began peeling back the layers of my personality, I began to see all of us who fail, destroy, and damage despite our best intentions—my parents, whom I had blamed, my partners, whom I’d loathed—through the eyes of a conservator—in other words, someone who understands that we are all damaged in one way or another, and seeking the source of our vulnerability is a prelude to redemption.

This personal exploration led me to write a memoir titled Dwell Time: A Memoir of Art, Exile, and Repair. In it, I come to terms with my own failures while blending my family story, the history of my beleaguered birthplace, and the tenets of the conservator’s practice. The personal work is far from over. Just like with the materials of art and architecture, the tender fragments of the human heart need ongoing maintenance for a long time.

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Dwell Time: A Memoir of Art, Exile, and Repair by Rosa Lowinger is available via Row House Publishing.

In 2005, the Bolshoi Ballet paid a visit to New York. The company had a new young director no one in New York had heard of: Alexei Ratmansky. He was only thirty-seven and, though a product of the Bolshoi’s school, had never been a member of the company. Instead, he had had a respectable but not illustrious career dancing in Ukraine and Canada and Denmark. As it often does when on tour, the Moscow company, which is known for its extroverted and athletic style, presented a couple of old chestnuts, Don Quixote and Spartacus, as well as a nineteenth-century spectacle ballet, The Pharaoh’s Daughter. But the thing everyone was talking about was Ratmansky’s The Bright Stream, a farce set in the 1930s on a collective farm somewhere on the Russian steppes. It seemed like an odd choice to bring back what in Soviet times was known as a “tractor ballet,” extolling the virtues of communal life and productivity, accompanied by an energetic, cheerful—perhaps too cheerful—score by Dmitri Shostakovich.

What was this ballet? It should have been terrible: anachronistic, ridiculous, stylistically retrograde. And yet it was exactly the opposite: funny and silly and sad, filled with touching details that laid bare our flawed human nature. It included a hilarious (and ironic) parade of giant vegetables, a grand entertainment performed by the gathered farmworkers, a boisterous dance for an accordionist who imagines himself to be a sort of Rudolph Valentino, performances en travesti, a man in a dog suit riding a bicycle. And in the middle of all this, a romantic situation worthy of Beaumarchais, treated with the tenderness of Mozart. I knew I’d never seen anything like it. I was intrigued.

I was also surprised. My eyes, like those of many American ballet lovers, had been trained in the cool, elegant modernism of George Balanchine. Like painting and music before it, ballet’s great advance in the twentieth century had been its move away from overt narrative and toward abstraction. Who wrote symphonies about the triumph of the spirit anymore? Who made story ballets? All you needed for a great work, Balanchine and others had taught us, was bodies moving through space to music (the drama was inherent in those bodies and the way they, and the choreography, responded to and expressed something deeply embedded in the music). Choreography, if it was good, was enough. In the late twentieth century, some choreographers had gone even further, deconstructing ballet’s technique and conventions (forget hierarchy, forget courtly manners, forget illusion). Dancers, they showed us, were just people, albeit people who could do extraordinary things. The question was, Where would ballet go from there? Was there anywhere left to go?

The Bright Stream, then, was a radical departure. It was everything a sophisticated ballet was not supposed to be: it had a tuneful score, clearly drawn characters, and a story rooted in a specific time and place. It used pantomime, something one simply didn’t see outside of the classical nineteenth-century ballets, and even there, the consensus was, a little went a long way. Mime! Everyone thought it was dead. Here the characters seemed perfectly happy to converse as well as dance. In this onstage world, contrary to Balanchine’s famous dictum about there being no mothers-in-law in ballet, there could be mothers-in-law, and cousins, and tractor drivers, and dogs on bicycles. And you felt you knew precisely who everyone was. And it was funny!

Sitting there watching it all, I felt two emotions at once: glee at the liveliness of what was unfolding before me and curiosity about the artist who had created it, someone who knew the tragic history of collectivization yet could poke fun at the idea of propaganda ballet, embracing its kitsch Soviet formula and yet making something stylish and clever and touching out of it. The ballet exuded irony, a very postmodern quality, but also—and this was the interesting part—warmth. Despite yourself, you cared about the characters.

This was because Ratmansky’s characters were not empty caricatures. They were people. It came through clearly in the characterizations of the Bolshoi dancers. In Don Quixote and Spartacus, performed that same week, they had been emphatic and ham-handed, like actors shouting at the top of their lungs, but here they were nuanced, specific, expressive, and really funny, more like characters in a French farce than figures in a grand spectacle. It was clear that great care had been taken in the development and honing of every role. Even better, you could feel the distinct personality of each dancer shining through the mask of his or her character.

Add to this the musicality of the choreography. It was as if every idea Shostakovich had developed in the music had found its equivalent in the steps Ratmansky devised for the dancers. Sometimes Ratmansky’s musicality was lighthearted, as in a scene in which a girl milked a cow—the udders were a dancer’s fingers—in time to the music; sometimes his way of interpreting the music created its own images. A whirring in the strings and woodwinds became an undulating movement for the arms, like the moving parts in a machine. But in every case the steps helped the viewer to hear the music better, to catch its jokes and see its layers of subtext. I wasn’t the only one who felt this way, it turned out. At the end of the intermission, as Ratmansky was returning to his seat, the choreographer Mark Morris stopped him in the aisle. “Baby, you’re the top of the town,” he told the startled Ratmansky.

I left the theater elated and full of questions. Who was this choreographer? What else had he done? The worlds of Russian and American ballet were far enough apart that his name was known only to a few ballet specialists in New York. But before the year was out, it had been announced that Ratmansky would make his first work for New York City Ballet the following season.

By 2008, three years later, Ratmansky had decided to leave Moscow for New York. I had my first interview with him the following year, when he joined American Ballet Theatre (ABT) as artist in residence, a position he holds until the end of 2023. In that conversation I was struck by his reticence and his resistance to overanalysis, paired with a kind of gentleness expressed through impeccable manners. For someone who had directed one of the largest, oldest, and most fractious companies in the world, he seemed to have surprisingly little ego.

The other thing that shone through was his unquestioning devotion to the art of ballet. At the time, a new history of ballet, by Jennifer Homans, had just come out, with an epilogue suggesting that it was a dying art. “You know, even if she is right,” Ratmansky said of Homans, “I don’t care. I do what I love.” He didn’t seem to worry too much about what other people thought. He had utter conviction in the art itself.

In 2019, a year before the Covid-19 pandemic struck, Ratmansky celebrated his tenth anniversary with American Ballet Theatre. In those ten years he had created almost fifty ballets for companies around the world. He has now endured a pandemic. He becomes restless when he’s not working. His former boss at ABT, Kevin McKenzie, told me once that he thought Ratmansky was a “creation junkie.” I think he may be right. I asked him once how he felt after finishing a ballet. “You feel very light because you’re so empty,” he answered. Was it a good feeling? I asked. “Yes, as long as it doesn’t go on for too long. Two or three weeks is perfect.” The pandemic forced him to stop for almost a year. It was a strange sensation for him, almost like not existing. Then came Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the place where he grew up and where his family still lives. His sense of self was deeply shaken. He kept working.

In 2017 I stood in Ratmansky’s living room in a nondescript high-rise on the east side of Manhattan as he and his wife, Tatiana, showed me some steps from a ballet he was working on. It was August. He was wearing flip-flops and shorts; she was in a light summer dress. The room wasn’t particularly large, so sometimes, as they moved, they ended up in the kitchen. He would catch her after a turn, and she would go through the motions of flitting away from him with a few quick jumps. (She was one of the first people he choreographed for and is still his most trusted adviser and frequent choreographic assistant.) They were relaxed, laughing, and I realized what an extraordinary thing I was seeing. Ballet is not something formal or abstract to Ratmansky—it is his natural habitat, the language in which he feels most conversant, his home, the air he breathes.

It’s unusual to be around a person so at ease with what he does, whose training and temperament and intellectual curiosity appear to be in complete harmony. This was what I intuited when I saw The Bright Stream, and what I felt even more palpably that first time we spoke. This impression has only intensified with every conversation that has followed, every rehearsal I’ve watched, every ballet of his I’ve seen. Everything besides creation is secondary.

The desire to understand that singular drive made me want to write this book, which is based on years of watching Ratmansky’s ballets onstage, of sitting in studios while he works with dancers during the creation process, and on interviews with him and with people who have known and worked with him throughout his life. I interviewed his parents and his sister, Masha, in Kyiv, schoolmates from his Bolshoi school days, dancers and ballet masters who worked with him at the National Ballet of Ukraine, and colleagues from the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, the Royal Danish Ballet, the Bolshoi, the Mariinsky, American Ballet Theatre, New York City Ballet, and many other companies. I watched countless videos from his private collection of recordings. But most important, over the course of four years I had the pleasure of spending many hours speaking with Ratmansky himself, as well as with his partner in crime and art (and wife), Tatiana. Those conversations have infinitely enriched my impressions and understanding of his work, as well as of the person behind them.

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Excerpted from The Boy from Kyiv: Alexei Ratmansky’s Life in Ballet by Marina Harss. Copyright © 2023. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, an imprint of Macmillan, Inc. All rights reserved. 

In 2009 I started making poems in dialogue with the visual art and writing of Agnes Martin. I was at the beginning of what my friend the writer Miranda Mellis called “a healing crisis,” the most acute physical symptoms of which would last for five years.

In the foreground of this healing crisis were chronic illness and pain, exacerbated by economics. I’d lost a full-time teaching job to the Great Recession and had become fully adjunct; I had a previous medical condition, so I couldn’t buy health insurance; I found public health care first hard to access and then completely inadequate. In that context, my illness was undiagnosable, and the last doctor I could afford to see told me It’s all in your head.

The physical suffering was real, and yet in the background of this healing crisis was something psychological and nonverbal, hard to pinpoint. It manifested in my attachments to others, many of which became laden with an unspoken grievance: I could not get the care I needed.

*

So I turned to Agnes. Why? A friend, the poet Jean Valentine, had sometime in the early aughts praised her book Writings, which had been circulating among poets the way Gnostic gospels must have once circulated among Christian heretics. Rumors of Writings came with the aura of secret wisdom. Copies were hard to find.

I came across the talk “The Untroubled Mind” in an anthology of artists’ writings and felt at once that the aura was justified – here was a form of wisdom literature written by an artist for other artists. Dictated to and transcribed by her friend the artist Ann Wilson in 1972, it even moved like a poem on the page. In almost all of her writings, Agnes cultivates a persona part mentor and part guru. The voice is at once didactic and oracular, practical and metaphysical. There is a distinct and total verticality that puts the reader in their place: at her feet.

Not everyone would want to sit there, but desperate as I was at the time, I bowed down and studied “The Untroubled Mind,” which promised that art held the possibility of “more perfection than is possible in this world.” Then I lucked across a battered copy of Writings and it became a sacred text I took with me everywhere.

*

I wrote my first book in dialogue with Agnes, The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven, from 2009-2014, a time when there wasn’t that much public information about Agnes herself – a dearth she created in part so that critical discourse would focus on her work. She did not then have the same high profile and near-ubiquity she enjoys now.

So, like other queer artists before me – Douglas Crimp and Jill Johnston among them – I sought her out. Because she died in 2004, I never made a pilgrimage to New Mexico. Instead I read her Writings, art criticism about her, reviews of her work, and the books that were then just beginning to come out. I looked at reproductions of her paintings and drawings in monographs I borrowed from the library, and when I could, I sought out the real things in museums. I visited nearby archives that held documents, papers, and correspondence related to her exhibitions.

Given the relative lack of biographical information about her, the Agnes I wrote about in The Empty Form was especially susceptible to projection, and because in Writings she presents herself as a metaphysical-aesthetic disciplinarian, she was bound to arouse mixed feelings. “Just follow what Plato has to say,” she advises. Plato, who kicked poets out of the Republic! By 2015, when The Empty Form came out, the Agnes I perceived in Writings just pissed me off.

*

Why does one artist fall in love with another’s art? At first, my attachment to Agnes’s aesthetics felt a little random. Though “The Untroubled Mind” became something like a sutra for me, much of it rubbed me the wrong way. “I don’t believe in the eclectic,” she writes, “this is a return to classicism.” It’s hard for me to reconstruct the mindset I had at the time, the one in which dissing my own eclecticism in favor of her classicism (it’s hard for me not to hear “classism”) seemed like a good idea. Except that, according to Agnes, “the detached and impersonal” offer a way out of personal suffering, an escape from the chaos of what she called “the involved life.”

Because of the promise implicit in lines like “This painting I like because you can get in there in rest,” I repressed my misgivings. And besides, I never felt ambivalent about the drawings and paintings of hers I loved most. I fell especially hard for the art she made in the 1960s when she lived and worked on Coenties Slip, the early grids that were her hard-won breakthrough as an artist. The paintings and drawings I like best from those years retain more obvious imperfections, more evidence of the process of their making, than her later work, and yet in the atmospheric abstraction of their optical effects they do reach toward a perfection not of this world.

“Painting is not about ideas or personal emotion,” she says, “When I was painting in New York I was not so clear about that.” Thus the construction, materials, and colors are, yes, more dramatic than the horizontal lines and pastel colors she would come to favor later in New Mexico. Still, it took me a while to figure out that the Agnes who made grids in New York was not the Agnes who dictated to Ann Wilson “The Untroubled Mind,” which dates from after her one of own healing crises, the one that in 1967 prompted her to give away her art supplies and leave the city for good.

*

Agnes wouldn’t paint again for nearly seven years, and when she returned to the work she had a clarified formal vocabulary to match her metaphysical one. By 2015 I would hold a grievance against this later Agnes, but it took me until then to work my way from distant adoration to loving intimacy to active ambivalence. The Empty Form records these shifts in the way the poems name her: in the book’s first section she’s Agnes Martin; in the second section, she’s Agnes; in the third, she becomes the teacher Agnes. By the third section’s end, I part ways with her.

It’s what she would have wanted. Don’t be fond of me, she writes in an archived letter, Let’s not be friends. Let’s be companions of the open road. Though her grids gave the poems of The Empty Form a formal vocabulary that allowed them to perform with tact and restraint the uncertainty, contingency, and precarity of chronic illness and pain, her famous phrase about turning her back to the world never sat well with me. Illness and its resulting disability were social and political situations made worse by capitalism and ableism: immersed in material conditions I shared with others, I struggled with pure abstraction as an ideal and the ultimate goal.

Perfection not of this world began to feel like a failure to reckon adequately with this world, which she dismisses simply as “chaos.” “If you don’t like the chaos you’re a classicist,” she quips, “if you like it you’re a romanticist.” Though I’ve always enjoyed the wit of that tidy aphorism, I resisted it on several levels. Liking felt beside the point; the world is simply a given. The real question is: what are you going to do with it? “The object is freedom,” Agnes says, “freedom from ideas and responsibility.”

Towards the end of writing the book I realized that “The Untroubled Mind” was full of ideas about renouncing ideas. And though Agnes turned her back to the world, she was nonetheless still in it, as were all those pricey paintings hanging in wealthy institutions. These paradoxes made me laugh and my laughter changed my relation to her. We were definitely not friends. Our open roads led in different directions.

*

In 2021, the Philadelphia Museum of Art commissioned me to write about Jasper Johns in honor of his massive Mind/Mirror double retrospective. Though he and his paintings proved to be provocative objects in their own right, I found I couldn’t write about them without Agnes and her grids as equal counterpoints, especially once I learned that Johns lived mere blocks from her in lower Manhattan. I also found I couldn’t write about their art without writing about the five years of acute physical illness and, obliquely, two more recent years of psychic crisis.

But the Agnes I write about in Poem Bitten by a Man is a different figure than the Agnes in The Empty Form, though of course they are based on the same historical figure. When I published The Empty Form in 2015, I didn’t think my conversation with Agnes could or would continue, but that year was the beginning of a small, steady stream of books about her, starting with Nancy Princenthal’s biography. That book, along with a monograph edited by her dealer, the Pace founder and gallerist Arne Glimcher, shifted my relation to her.

I didn’t know until then that she had a psychiatric diagnosis of schizophrenia, and that she had been hospitalized during what Western medicine calls psychotic episodes. Agnes preferred to talk about herself in different terms—as hearing voices and having visions—and, as I understand it, her entire artistic practice was guided by what she characterized as visionary experience. In fact, her entire adult life was shaped by voices, visions, and the states that sometimes accompanied them. It was after she was hospitalized for what doctors called a “psychotic break” that she left Coenties Slip and abandoned her art in 1967.

*

One aspect of Agnes that I carried from The Empty Form into Poem Bitten by a Man I first saw in Mary Lance’s documentary, a film that, like Agnes’s late paintings, studiously eschews drama. This one riveting scene especially sticks out. Facing the camera, sitting in a wooden chair in her studio, Agnes offers Lance an astonishing monologue – we don’t know what question prompted it – in which she says

I can remember back very easily
I can remember the minute I was born
I think everybody’s born in exactly the same condition
I thought I was quite a small figure with a little sword
and I was very happy
I thought I was going to cut my way through life
with this little sword
victory after victory
I was sure I was going to do it
I think everybody is born 100% ego
and after that it’s just adjustment
(chuckling)
well I adjusted as soon as they carried me into my mother
about twenty minutes later
half of my victories fell to the ground
(chuckling)
my mother had the victories
I’ll tell you she was a terrific disciplinarian
and I imitate her

Into my notebook I transcribed that monologue in the style Ann Wilson used for the “The Untroubled Mind.” I noted in particular how heavy its content felt and how lightly its delivery held it. The relation Agnes describes between herself and her mother resonated with me – both the sense of intrinsic power (ego) and the severe curtailment of that power by one’s mother. In the startling phrases of her monologue I sensed a story more complex than the ordinary ego formation fostered by attachment.

*

In 2009, I turned toward Agnes because I needed something from her as an artist and thinker. I hoped that by following her advice in “The Untroubled Mind” I could endure a healing crisis by accessing a mind untroubled by chronic illness, pain, and economic precarity.

In my own attempt at classicism, I pared down my lines and arranged them in patterns on the grid intrinsic to the typeset page. Most of those poems offer multiple ways for the reader to read them and enter into relation to semantic meaning. The grid allowed me to stop overdetermining the reader’s experience, and in doing so, the poems hover on the lip of abstraction before the reading mind pulls them toward representation. Something about this pause – the one before meaning gets made – felt like a painting in which to find rest.

In 2021, I returned to Agnes because I had come through crisis to identify with her as a queer artist of the 20th century, a person who lived with sexual and psychological difference and figured out ways to keep going. In writing Poem Bitten by a Man, I came to understand my own lifelong practice of making as a recursive form of mending, the act of repairing my relation to a world that has never held back its hatred of me.

I won’t recount here specific experiences of such hatred. The point is: inside me, they persist, wordless, embodied, and abstract. Somatic events, synesthetic experiences that resist translation, these agonies are sensoria of texture, weight, and color.

*

One appeal of collage is its intrinsic aggression: cutting comes before pasting. In writing Poem Bitten by a Man I came to think of each cut as a bite, each pasted phrase a loving form of repair. So though I use collage to try to capture traces of the somatic states the agonies produce, I also use collage to pay homage to the visual art and writing that have caught me, time and time again, when I feel myself falling into crisis.

I can’t say that for Agnes the practice of painting served a similar purpose, but in writing Poem I came to my own understanding of her later work. I no longer felt disappointed by those pastels and horizontal lines. All along she was listening to the voices only she could hear. The truest companions of the open road she chose to travel alone, they gave her visions she could use.

When in 2009 I began writing in dialogue with Agnes, it never occurred to me that her grids might be her own form of mending, the grid the shape it took to repair her relation to the world. Instead, I saw her through the persona of “The Untroubled Mind,” the way, I think, she wanted to be seen by the public: a person of certainty, wisdom, and authority.

In 2021, I began writing in dialogue with a different Agnes, one who struggled with herself and changed over time as she developed her way of being in the world while making art about a space beyond it. Given her birth year of 1912 and the Cold War era in which her career first took shape, I could now understand why she did not want to be seen as a woman artist, let alone a lesbian, let alone a lesbian who first receives her paintings as visions accompanied by voices. And I could also understand why, given her art’s ultimate goal, she eschewed both the social and being social.   By 2021 I had disambiguated myself from her and her disciplinary ways, which allowed her to be an Agnes, and allowed me to be a Brian, situated in different historical and personal contexts and driven by different imperatives.

*

“You can’t get away from what you have to do,” she says in “The Untroubled Mind,” and what I have to do as an artist is not what an Agnes had to do. And yet in 2021 I was drawn back to her life, her philosophy, and her grids. This time, it had nothing to do with the urgent wish to free myself from suffering. It had everything to do with saying of suffering, to use a phrase from Jasper Johns’s sketchbooks: “It is what it does. What can you do with it?”

In 2021 I was able to be curious about suffering as a material with plastic possibilities like those of paint. This curiosity signaled a freer relation to crisis, and enabled me to see how Agnes’s aesthetic philosophy was informed by having what others would call a “troubled mind.” I felt more capable of holding her relentless edicts as steps in the path an Agnes took toward “independence and solitude,” “freedom from suffering,” and “the purification of reality.”

The life circumstances in which they were produced don’t reduce her incredible paintings and drawings to symptoms in the same way that the philosophy behind them doesn’t overdetermine their effect on viewers. “The response depends on the condition of the observer,” she writes in “Response to Art.” Of course, she was completely right.

__________________________________

Brian Teare’s collection Poem Bitten By A Man is available from Nighboat Books.

I think artist Richard Wentworth pre-empted the idea of Instagram through his brilliant series of photographs titled Making Do and Getting By (1974 – present). A hugely influential body of work, his images document a surfeit, ‘ a creativity beyond functionality, a transformative repair.’ He has changed the way we look at the world, and stylistically a large number of diverting Instagram images owe a great deal to him, even those made by Instagrammers who don’t know his work.

Richard writes: Put simply, I think my pictures are unremarkable, except in the way that they talk to each other and remind us that humans read the world every time they look. We sense ‘intention’ and causality in everything we see, the basis for the awful announcements on the Tube for ‘reporting anything unusual.’

I have posted over a thousand images on Instagram. A stream of consciousness that helps hone my eye, alerting me to potential wherever I am. It helps generate new ideas for future artworks. It allows me to rail against social injustice, express political views, and visually indulge: the platform provides a fair bit of cat pilates, found abstracts, backs and undersides of objects, and miscellaneous stuff. I might be a late adopter, but I have made up for lost time, and have had the pleasure of meeting many of my followers in person along the way.

—Cornelia Parker, “A Brush With Instagram” 2023

*

The publication of a book is a strange occasion for the author – a mix of disengagement and nervous anticipation. What happens in the long aftermath is another matter. Receiving copies of the Urdu translation, by Fey Seen Ejaz, of A New World from the Sahitya Akademi has given me joy, especially as I wasn’t expecting them.
—Amit Chaudhuri

I went over to see Edna O’Brien tonight.
—Andrew O’Hagan

Weather’s changing.
—Cornelia Parker

The A in Humanity is a bird.
—Kamila Shamsie

Completely love this. Everything you need to know about the Raj in one page from an 1890s anthology of useful Hindustani phrases. Hard to choose a favourite but either The cook is drunk again, The bullet just passed over my head or Why did you allow the goat to come into my house?
—William Dalrymple

_______________________

From Seeing Things: The Small Wonders of the World According to Writers, Artists and Others. Edited by Julian Rothenstein. Used with permission from the publisher, Redstone Press.

By the start of 1935 Leonora, still aged seventeen, was by the standards of the day a well-travelled young woman. She had tasted life in Florence and Paris and visited other cities and countries in Europe including Rome, the South of France, and Switzerland. In The Hearing Trumpet she pays tribute to Maurie’s role in all of this—”thanks to my mother I did see most of Europe during my youth”—and describes some of the highlights, including Monte Carlo (‘Mother found her home in the casino’) and Sicily, where a waiter sold them a painting by Fra Angelico “which did not turn out to be authentic and was therefore not as cheap as we thought.”

And while the family had always been based in Lancashire, Leonora had also lived in Essex and Berkshire, at her convent boarding schools. London, though, was a city she was less familiar with, and that was about to change. Harold and Maurie, disappointed at their daughter’s inability to fit in at any of the schools to which they had sent her, had decided to up the tempo on getting her married off and settled down. Given her consistent refusal to conform in a variety of settings, it seems extraordinary that they still hoped she might comply with this; but hope they did, and plans were made for her to have a season as a debutante in the capital. It was an experience that would be filled with garden parties, balls, expensive outfits, an overload of other people of privilege and—crucially—opportunities to become acquainted (but not too well acquainted) with desirable young men interested in finding themselves a wife.

If it’s hard to imagine—and it is—why Leonora allowed herself to be recruited into the ranks of debutantes, it’s worth remembering that from her point of view, “coming out” meant the chance to taste London. The family took an apartment in town and the rigmarole kicked off in March that year with a presentation at Buckingham Palace. Maurie accompanied her, and the entire occasion meant a great deal more to her than it did to Leonora. “Ever since she left Ireland at the age of eighteen Mother had lived a constant round of dizzy pleasure,” Leonora writes in The Hearing Trumpet. “Cricket matches, shooting parties, jumble sales, shopping in Regent Street, bridge parties and face massage at Madame Pomeroy’s, an unfashionable beauty parlour just off Piccadilly Circus.”

A Times report of the presentation gives a flavor of all that it entailed: “Victorian frocks for debutantes and long classical gowns for older women were worn at their Majesties’ First Court of the season last night. Frilled tulle and net and taffeta or cire made most of the dresses for the young girls, the bodies sloping off the shoulders and finished with tiny puff sleeves or epaulettes. In striking contrast were the older ladies’ slim-fitting, severe gowns of lamé and tissue in rich colours, cut with short trains to the skirts. Embroidery was an important feature of all the dresses; heavy incrustations of sequins, pearls or diamanté weighted the hems of many skirts and trains, and the design of most lace frocks was outlined with dainty beading.” Queen Mary wore “a gown of opalescent paillettes embroidered with crystal and diamante”; the Duchess of York wore a gown of gold and white with a lace train. Some paragraphs later, we are told that Mrs Harold Carrington wore “a gown of rose and silver lamé” with a train of the same material lined with rose romaine, and a diamond tiara. Miss Leonora Carrington wore “a gown of citron satin embroidered with the reversed side of the material. A train to match. A petit-point dentelle fan.” Both dresses were by the designer Victor Stiebel of Bruton Street, Mayfair.

Leonora referred to the debutante season as “a cattle market,” and it’s clear that it epitomized everything she had come to loathe about the society in which she found herself: snobbery, fixed expectations, lack of spontaneity, sexism. As Maurie became more and more excited by the prospect of an ‘advantageous’ marriage that would change her daughter’s life—perhaps even opening doors into the world of old-money aristocrats for herself and Harold—Leonora was becoming more and more appalled by how limited her horizons would be if she were to buy into that world. The truth was, the Carringtons were arrivistes: they had plenty of money, and Harold was one of the most successful businessmen in northern England, but both he and Maurie came from humble stock. His background was working class—his grandfather had been a stationmaster—and she came from rural Ireland. The whirl of the London season was a window on a world Maurie had long hoped to inhabit, and which at last seemed within reach. But it all rested on her daughter’s marriage; and she had only one daughter.

Harold Carrington was less fixated on Leonora’s marriage prospects than Maurie but he shared his wife’s sentiment. He might have been a pioneer in the textile industry, but he was a conventional thinker when it came to social mores. Leonora said he “lived tied to rationality and did not know how to understand me. When I would say to him how much I was bored in the house, he would say: ‘Breed fox terriers,’ as if breeding dogs would have been of my interest; or ‘Learn to cook,’ when I was not even interested to know if to fry an egg I had to put in the pan the egg first or the oil! He was a man without pretensions. Perhaps it would have made him happy if only I would have married a wealthy man and become a dignified society lady.”

In an interview many years later, she remembered—with a sense of irony, and still shocked at the sexism—how it had felt to be a debutante. The royal garden party, she said, was “tea in a tent at Buckingham Palace, and you go around with a teacup. You have a different dress for that, very expensive. Then you go to Ascot, the races, and you’re in the royal enclosure. And, if you please, in those days, if you were a woman, you were not allowed to bet. You weren’t even allowed to the paddock, where they show the horses. So I took a book. I mean, what would you do? It was Huxley’s Eyeless in Gaza, which I read all the way through.”

Many years after she was a deb, Leonora still remembered “the tiara—biting into my skull” But her “season” provided rich material; not, on this occasion, for a painting, but for a short story written a couple of years later. “The Debutante” is a glorious mixture of fact and fiction, the actual and the imagined, events real and events surreal. Leonora describes how, as a debutante, she often visited the zoo: “I went so often that I knew the animals better than I knew the girls of my own age. Indeed it was in order to get away from people that I found myself at the zoo every day.”

The animal she came to know best, she writes, was a hyena, who was very intelligent. “I taught her French and she, in return, taught me her language.” When Leonora’s mother organizes a ball in her honour (“I’ve always detested balls, especially when they are given in my honour”), Leonora complains about it to the hyena, who replies that she would love to go. Why doesn’t she go in her place, Leonora suggests—and after a quick murder, which means the hyena can disguise herself with the face of a sacrificed maid (“a brief cry, and it was over”—she would never have done it, Leonora assures us, if she hadn’t hated the idea of the ball so much), the camouflaged creature takes her place at the sumptuous event, leaving Leonora to sit alone in her room reading Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift.

In life as in her story, Leonora rejected the debutante experience. But it had given her, as she had hoped it would, an introduction to life in London and to the expanding art scene it had on offer. Indeed, the following year, 1936, would see a pivotal event in the story of surrealism in Britain: the first International Surrealist Exhibition, held at the New Burlington Galleries from 11 June to 4 July. This show brought to London the work of artists including Giorgio de Chirico, Salvador Dalí, Marcel Duchamp, Leonor Fini, Paul Klee, René Magritte, Joan Miró and Meret Oppenheim. Pablo Picasso, Francis Picabia and of course Max Ernst were also in the line-up. British artists represented included Roland Penrose, Eileen Agar and Edward Burra; and there was (according to art historian Herbert Read, one of the exhibition’s organizers) much to be excited about in terms of the British contribution to the movement. In his introduction to the catalogue, Read wrote: “A nation which has produced two such superrealists as William Blake and Lewis Carroll is to the manner born. Because our art and literature is the most romantic in the world, it is likely to become the most superrealistic. The English contribution to this Exhibition is comparatively tentative, but our poets and painters have scarcely become conscious of this international movement. Now that it has been revealed in all its range and irrationality, they may recover, shall we say, the courage of their instincts.”

Read’s optimism for the future of British surrealism was, it would turn out, misplaced; the 1936 exhibition was the movement’s last, as well as its first major hurrah on its territory. But for Leonora it brought what would turn out to be a crucial introduction to the work of the German surrealist Max Ernst. “I fell in love with Max’s paintings before I fell in love with Max,” she told me in 2006. And her first sight of his work was contained within Read’s book Surrealism, published to mark the 1936 exhibition. Her copy was given to her, she remembered, by the unlikeliest of people: her mother, Maurie. The work that particularly appealed to Leonora was Two Children Are Threatened by a Nightingale (1924), a mixed-media piece that Ernst later said was the product of a “fevervision” he had experienced while sick with measles as a child. It shows a haunting image in which a tiny nightingale, barely a speck in the sky, appears to be somehow endangering the lives of two young girls. One of them brandishes a knife in the bird’s direction; the other is in the arms of a man who seems to be trying to take her to safety across a rooftop.

The painting spoke to Leonora. Indeed, in one interview she said it totally shocked her. “I thought, ah, this is familiar: I know what this about. A kind of world which would move between worlds. The world of our dreaming and imagination.”

Leonora dispensed with being a debutante as briskly as she had dispensed with being a convent schoolgirl and a finishing-school pupil; but giving up the frivolity of the season didn’t mean giving up the artistic opportunities London had to offer. Somehow she persuaded her parents (who perhaps continued to hold onto the slender hope that if they played along, she would eventually acquiesce and settle into conventional upper-class life) to allow her to enroll at the Chelsea School of Art. “I had scrambled eggs on a gas range, and I did a lot of painting. But my father had a spy there, in London, who used to see me weekly, Serge Chermayeff,” she remembered. Chermayeff was the designer, with his partner Erich Mendelsohn, of the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill, East Sussex. They probably got to know Harold Carrington because Mendelsohn was involved in the construction of the ICI Dyestuffs Laboratory at Blackley, Manchester, which Harold would have known through his work in the textile industry.

It was certainly Chermayeff who got Leonora into the Ozenfant school, as she remembered later. “(He) said, you’d better at least try and learn to draw. Go to Amédée Ozenfant.” So she left the Chelsea School, and signed up for the Ozenfant Academy of Fine Arts.

Ozenfant was a fifty-year-old French cubist painter who had recently moved to London. The name of his art school was rather grander than its humble location, which Leonora described as “a barn in west Kensington.” The venue was a mews block on Warwick Road, round the corner from Kensington High Street tube station. Leonora went along to see Ozenfant, taking some work she’d done already. He replied that she could start the following day and warned that she was about to do some real work. “Then he made me work like bloody hell. You had to know the chemistry of everything you used, including the pencil and the paper. He would give you one apple, one bit of paper, and one pencil, like a 9H, which was like drawing with a bit of steel. And you had to do a line drawing, with one line. I was drawing the apple for six months, the same apple, which had become a kind of mummy.” Like the Renaissance masters whose work Leonora had come to know during her time in Florence, Ozenfant worked alongside his small number of pupils. According to the school’s prospectus (a few sheets of printed paper), the Master, unlike in other schools, would almost always be present while his pupils worked. The philosophy was “to create for the benefit of his pupils a technical, theoretical and empirical spirit, which constituted the value of studios of the past, where the master worked in company with his novices.”

The importance to an artist of being connected to the surrounding world is also underlined in the Ozenfant manifesto. “To be an artist of one’s time it is not sufficient to declare oneself modern. An artist is capable of creating works necessary to his epoch only if he lives fully the life of his time. Too many artists isolate themselves from life, and ignore precisely that which imparts originality to their age. Living fossilized, how should their works be modern, to interest, to be useful to, to be in accord with the active men of the time?”

The document gives an outline of a typical day at the academy, which was open daily (except Saturdays) from ten a.m. until four p.m. A life model posed for students each morning between ten and one, and in the afternoons students could either continue on their study from the morning or pursue a personal piece of their own. M. Ozenfant gave a course, and correction, every morning. Fees were five guineas a month, thirteen guineas a quarter, or thirty guineas a year; pupils were welcome to join for a month, a quarter or a year, and could begin on any day.

There were, Leonora remembered later, no more than about ten students at any one time. These included, in her day, the painter, photographer and collage artist Stella Snead, whom she would later meet again in New York. But it was another fellow pupil whose presence was to have the longest-lasting impact on Leonora’s life: Ursula Blackwell, whose antecedent had been one-half of the founding duo behind the food brand Crosse and Blackwell. Ursula herself was now known by her married name, which was Goldfinger. Her husband was Ernő Goldfinger, who would in time, after a falling-out with the writer Ian Fleming, lend his name to James Bond’s adversary, the gold smuggler Auric Goldfinger.

Ursula and Ernő, who had been born in Hungary and would later design buildings including London’s Balfron Tower and Trellick Tower, lived with their two young children in a building often described as the first piece of modernist architecture in England: a tall, whitewashed block at the top of Highgate Hill in north London called Highpoint. It had been designed by the Georgian émigré Berthold Lubetkin, who was himself a resident of the block. The Goldfingers lived at Number 3 Highpoint, a three-bedroomed first-floor dwelling with concertina windows along the sitting-room wall, opening onto a narrow balcony. This room would be the setting for a small gathering that had a profound effect on Leonora’s life: in early June 1937, Ursula invited her to come to supper at the Goldfingers’ flat and meet Max Ernst. Ernst was in London for his first ever solo show in Britain, which would take place that month at the Mayor Gallery in Mayfair. Leonora’s friend Joan Powell gave her a lift to Highpoint that evening but didn’t go in, and there were just four people around the table: the Goldfingers, Max, and herself. Did she, she was asked, know in advance that Max would be coming to supper that evening? “Oh yes, yes, yes,” Leonora replied. “And I was very, very excited. I was thrilled. I mean, this was the big, I don’t know what. Ursula thought that I was a good-looking young woman, and that this would appeal to Max.” The attraction between Leonora and Max, who at the time was married to his second wife, Marie-Berthe, was instant and mutual. The couple got together “immediately, immediately. I remember we spent a day in the country, and this for me was a whole world opening. He showed me how he did what he called a ‘frottage’ [a rubbing] with a pencil and paper, grass and whatnot, leaves and such.”

Leonora could hardly have found a man more unlike the imagined one her parents had hoped she would marry. At forty-six, Max was old enough to be her father (that was no doubt part of the attraction). German-born, by now he had left his homeland out of contempt for the rise of Hitler and was living in Paris with Marie-Berthe; his former wife, Louise, and their young son were still in Germany. He was at the heart of a group of surrealist artists and writers that included Duchamp, Dalí, André Breton, Paul Éluard and Yves Tanguy. A man more than twice her age; a father; a divorced man, married to another woman; a foreigner; and an artist, with nothing like the wealth of the Carringtons. Harold and Maurie, when news reached them, were horrified, but Leonora was smitten. Max was about more than his art, more than his fatherly affections, more than his politics, so different from those at home. He was also about the future, about the fact that a door was opening for Leonora in a way she had always hoped for and believed in, but hadn’t quite known when to expect. Here, suddenly, it was: she was on a threshold, and all she had to do was embrace the thrilling uncertainty of what awaited her.

______________________________

Excerpt by Joanna Moorhead from Surreal Spaces: The Life and Art of Leonora Carrington © 2023 Thames & Hudson Ltd, London. 

Header image ©1975, 2023 Joel Sternfeld

I’m no good at explaining how I came to write so much about photography, wrote an entire book about it in fact. A series of accidents, surely. Small-town western North Carolina, in the shadow of the Great Smokies, amid the Blue Ridge Mountains. My head was stuck in books, too close to the television, plunged underwater, ducked down low in the theater seats to sneak-rewatch the movie I’d just seen. Analog childhood, lucky me. Phone on the kitchen counter, everyone can hear your business, except my dad who was born Deaf (it runs in his family, we all sign). In the days before the internet, before video chat, his phone conversations are on a TTY machine that banner across a tiny screen in green calculator-font letters, which is how we all get a head start on texting shorthand. GM. TTYL. And, when you’re done talking and ready for the other person to respond:  GA—go ahead.

Meanwhile, so much goes unphotographed. Drugstore processing. The surprise of what was seen, what escaped. Cutoff heads. Glowing red eyes. Kodak everything.

My own first camera’s a novelty, a Christmas present, the Kodak Disc, a little Viewmaster-like wheel instead of a roll of film. Discontinued before 1990 rolls around. A taunting commercial jingle’s still in my head, “I’m gonna get you with the Kodak Disc! Gonna get you and I’m not gonna miss!” A particular visual violence in the dirty little hands of a ten-year-old. You only had fifteen frames on those discs, as precious as Polaroids and as prohibitively expensive. This could have made me intentional and economic about my shutter clicks, thoughtful when it came to composition. But I just took pictures of my cat and my sister and our friends. The picture quality of those discs was so bad, everything looked automatically grainy and ancient, as if we were already fading away, like Marty McFly’s disappearing photograph in Back to the Future. Even though we were just wearing our usual hoodies and jeans, we painted red circles on our faces, rigged up a makeshift tightrope on our swingset and tiptoed across balancing umbrellas, made a circus. I don’t know why or for who.

Our town’s a pit stop on the interstate, a place on the way to others that were actually scenic; get raised here and you absorb a sense of in-betweenness, outsiderness. Wild to imagine that anyone not from around here would find it remarkable, interesting, worthy of looking. But before I was born and throughout my growing up, wholly unbeknownst to me at the time, some of the photographers and filmmakers I’d come under the sway of years later, were lurking close by.

The carved-out mountain

A still from Wanda (1970), directed by Barbara Loden. Courtesy of Janus Films.

In the early minutes of Wanda (1970), Barbara Loden, as the drifting main character, slowly, slowly crosses a coal field as vast  as a lifetime. In my eyes the field is the mined mountains I am sure she saw as a child because, years later, in the late 1980s and 90s, they haunted me too. Loden grew up in Marion, North Carolina, twenty miles up the road from me, a place I stared at from car windows, driving up the mountain to stay with best friends who’d moved away. Certain significant trailers, parking lots, porches dotted the way; a hairpin turn with a gasping view we called, with dramatic flair, The Edge. Over The Edge, naturally, a sharp cliffdrop gaped open onto a rocky mountainside and old-growth forest below. Past The Edge, back then: tourist gem mines where you could pan for pyrite and abandoned Alpine themed inns and video stores and a broad, brooding mountain whose insides, like so many around here, had been scraped out for rock and gravel and construction rubble.

That particular quarry was named after the god of fire. In my memory, the air was the color of Loden’s 16mm film, a smoky cast against the blue horizon of the mountains behind it. Loden did not film Wanda in North Carolina; she had to cut corners on her already slim-to-nothing $115,000 budget. Production took place closer to the film processing houses in New York, mostly in Pennsylvania coal mining country. Northern Appalachia is distinct from the southernmost region where I’m from, but close enough to stand in for an emotion. The smudginess of dishevelment she passes through, of the living rooms, factories, bars, diners, downtowns, discount store parking lots comes partly from the grain of the film, from the natural, documentary quality of Nicholas Proferes’s cinematography.

Loden deviated from her own script, let the open ending happen on its own, as an inevitable consequence of the way the film unfolds. “I don’t see how anybody can predetermine how their movie is going to turn out, or why anybody would want to, because it’s a creative thing that is changing every day, and you’re changing every day while you work on it,” Loden told the American Film Institute in 1971. “You start to make a movie, and when you finish it you’ll be a different person.”

The shuffled deck

Mountain Dream Tarot, 1970, courtesy of Bea Nettles

When we made it over The Edge and passed Wanda’s quarry-coalfield, we were only halfway up the mountain to the house where two of our best friends moved, a tinier, remote town, a little closer to what people picture when they mispronounce Appalachia. On the way you pass the turnoff to the Penland School of Craft, started by women weavers in the 1920s, a vintage lodge in the fog. You could almost picture Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain half lung club convalescing on its porches. As far as the rest of the county went, Penland was pretty much hidden away, doing its own thing. My friends and I up the road, we wished for other futures, casting our own divinations in the form of ruled notebook paper folded into MASH fortunes.

Little did we know then that Penland is also where in 1970, prompted by a dream, the artist Bea Nettles began making the first photographic tarot deck. For what became Mountain Dream Tarot, she photographed her friends and fellow artists and eventually her family in the roles of major and minor arcana, and arranged in numbers. Longhaired, mustached, folk art spirits and witches, ladies of the canyon dresses, defeated men who look as if they’re about to head out on “the lam,” a spectral child atop a donkey, they are of their time and timeless, They carry sticks as wands, and alpine mist in the frame. Plucking the stars from the sky, Nettles turns them into pentacles, scatters them in the water where a woman bends down to drink.

The town witch 

Doesn’t everywhere have one? Once, she sails into the corner store where my grade school self is about to blow the last of my pocket money on Sweet Tarts. In my memory she’s buying long, lean witch cigarettes—Virginia Slims or Capris—but all I can truly recall is how everyone swivels to look at her: clad head to toe in black like Elvira or Priscilla Presley, from the upswept dyed hair to the thick curtains of faux lashes, the silvery shadow dabbed all the way up to the shoreline of her painted-on brows, to the lowcut dress and pointy. The town witch briefly attempted her own country music career in Nashville: no hit records, but for a while she dated a man who claimed to’ve been a bus driver for Elvis.

A half dozen times a week we ride right past her house, less than a mile from ours, a little stone bungalow named Gray Shadows, its engraved wooden sign hung by a chain over the yellow door, and back then, a yellow AMC that my sister and I both coveted parked out front. We never go in. The town witch would simply be a Boo Radley figure to us, that is, if she weren’t always showing up in the local paper. An actual headline: “Local woman claims clown doll isn’t creepy.” (The doll, the story goes on to say, was pinned to the front door of Gray Shadows.)

The town witch runs for mayor, vowing to outlaw public toplessness for men unless women are allowed to go topless too. Fair! She claims, at one point: “I think I invented streaking.” Her actual claim to fame is that she’s the first woman in modern U.S. history to be tried for witchcraft in connection to an alleged murder—eyebrows raised after she accurately predicted another woman’s death to the date in a seance. (The town witch was acquitted, but the story is notorious enough that in 1976 Esquire sends a reporter to do a feature. For the spectral, shadowy impressionistic portraits of her, they send Duane Michals, whose photographs are already refreshingly unserious worlds of their own, little dances into the afterlife, unafraid to try to depict the things we’re told do not exist.)

Today the town witch is supposedly 90, a haze surrounding her precise birthdate. “I’m a good person till people bothers me,” the witch told a filmmaker recently, another former local who makes an extended YouTube video about our town. Her accent is wild—like mountain ladies who might’ve befriended my grandma, like she’s channeling someone from her seance table. “Listen to your conscious,” the town witch says.  “If I’m going to the store and I have a strange feeling, I don’t go inside.”

The dunes

©1975, 2023 Joel Sternfeld

To be fair, a long long drive from us—but worth the annual beach trek even back when car seats stuck to the backs of your thighs, surfing the radio the whole way. The eighties still looked an awful lot like 1975, as if the pictures Joel Sternfeld made that summer had actually frozen Nags Head, and beach towns like it, in time. If only photographs had that power—further south on the Outer Banks, in Rodanthe, giant houses are slipping away into the ocean. Perhaps they should’ve stayed small and kept their distance from the shore like the wooden bungalows Sternfeld photographed, painted plain white or stormy ocean green. Some of them, if not THE ones he photographed, are still in Nags Head, survivors amid the condos and the eight-bedroomers. Some look like little prairie farmhouses spirited away in a Kansas tornado and plunked down among these giant, horizon-swallowing dunes. Picture inside them still Sternfeld’s vividly sunburnt teenagers drinking sandy beers; all those saturated feelings. And at the end of it all, the visual planes of sky, water, beach flattened in the frame, like the memory I carry in the rearview mirror at the end of each summer visit, slowly disappearing as we ride further west, back to where I came from.

The senator

Via Poz.com

“Helms is deadlier than a virus,” read the words printed on a giant yellow condom a passle of ACT UP activists brilliantly wrapped around the Arlington, Virginia, home of blight-on-North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms. Helms’s fight to ban Robert Mapplethorpe only helped me to see his work sooner, connect the dots between the photographer’s portrait of Patti Smith on the cover of Horses and the nudes and BDSM shots that made the senator clutch his pearls. Helms’ boundless racism bled into his homophobia, and his vicious fight aginst federal funding for HIV research and treatment.

His banning of Mapplethorpe would be my gateway to all the other brilliant photographers that Helms ensured died young: Peter Hujar, dead in 1987 at 53; William Gedney, dead in 1989 at 56; Darrel Ellis, dead at just 33 in 1992. Cookie Mueller, writer and actress, not a photographer, but star of Hujar’s photographs, of Mapplethorpe’s, of Nan Goldin’s, dead at 40 in 1989. David Wojnarowicz who in 1988 painted a pink triangle on his leather jacket and the words “If I die of aids[sic], forget burial—just drop my body on the steps of the F.D.A.” When Wojnarowicz did die of AIDS, in 1996, at only 37, his ashes were scattered on the White House lawn. Somehow Helms remained in office through the deaths of every one.

The last mall

In 2021, Stephen Shore, whose seventies photographs of American parking lots became icons in their own right, returns to the lot with a drone that he happens to, one morning just before speaking to Peter Schjeldahl in one of the critic’s last interviews, fly over the shopping mall of my youth. Valley Hills, where I had my twelve-year-old birthday party at the food court, where over the triangular orange blaze of my Sbarro slice, I aspirationally eyed the mall goths and mohawked punks circling the fountain, where I later discovered you could buy outdated copies of the Village Voice and NME, all the way in Hickory, NC. Dead malls, abandoned malls, all the rage these days—I love them too. But now mine lives forever.

To smoke until all her cigarettes were gone

Amanda and her cousin Amy. Valdese, North Carolina, 1990. From Mary Ellen Mark: The Book of Everything. © Mary Ellen Mark. Used with permission of the Mary Ellen Mark Library.

An earring dangles from just one lobe, ending in a plastic pearl. The wearer, in mascara, lip gloss or stick, and press-on nails, juts her hips, standing in the four-inch lake of a kiddie pool, blowing smoke at the camera. Holding her elbow and giving a look like she’s about to tell you just what she thinks of the people next door. Not like a rowdy nine-year-old kid in a “problem school” that Life had sent Mary Ellen Mark to cover.

The first time Mark met Amanda, she followed her home, at a distance. Amanda hopped off the school bus and promptly vanished into the woods, to sit in an old chair there, as was her habit, and smoke until all her cigarettes were gone. Most of the problems with the “problem kids” in the school were the adults, Mark understood. She was my favorite, Mark remembered long after. Amanda lived in a housing complex nicknamed Sin City, in a little town nine miles away from mine, where I and a few motley friends had begun to go spend all our money at a secondhand record store whose survival in that place felt to us as unlikely as our own.

I didn’t know Amanda, but I knew girls like her, girls who were somehow already twice their actual age, girls who got yelled at by the teachers in front of everyone, girls who you just knew were going through even worse shit at home, who you hoped, hoped, hoped would get out. Amanda did, but it took years.

A still from Blue Velvet (1986), directed by David Lynch.

By the time I see David Lynch’s Blue Velvet it’s the 90s, I’m hooked on his Twin Peaks, but I loved, perversely, intensely, knowing that Blue Velvet was filmed in another beach town we’d go to over and over. Wilmington, North Carolina playing the role of “Lumberton.” Not exactly next door but close enough to confirm that the underground was within reach. What else spoke to teenage me more than than the surreal creepiness of a human ear found in a field? Mine pricked up.

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Strange Hours: Photography, Memory, and the Lives of Artists by Rebecca Bengal is available now via Aperture. 

For thirty-five years, I was at the center of the Barbie universe as a member of Mattel’s design team. It wasn’t a career I had ever envisioned when I was younger, but from that moment in 1962 when I first read Mattel’s advertisement in Women’s Wear Daily, I saw my future, and it thrilled me.

Perhaps that’s because Barbie’s life was the polar opposite of my own: she was the ultimate California girl, while I grew up in Minneapolis, where the winters were gray and seemingly endless. Barbie could take on any profession she desired—she was an astronaut in 1965, four years before the Apollo 11 moon landing—but when I was thinking about a career in the late 1950s, the options available to women largely focused on the “expected” five: nurse, teacher, secretary, shopgirl, and seamstress. I always knew that I wanted more.

One Sunday while reading the newspaper, I spied an ad for a seminar highlighting jobs in the fashion industry. I put on my best interview clothes and my bravest face, and I didn’t tell anyone where I was going. The first speaker was a member of the Fashion Group International, Inc., who discussed the fashion design program at the Minneapolis School of Art. She put two words together that I had never heard of as a vocation: fashion designer. It was as though someone had turned on a light. Before leaving the seminar, I filled out an application—and when I returned home, I still didn’t tell anyone.

I watched the mailbox every day for weeks until an envelope with my name on it finally arrived: I had been accepted! That feeling of wanting more suddenly no longer made me feel restless; instead, it was exhilarating.

Today the Minneapolis School of Art is known as the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, and in the early 1950s, I was among just 250 students, many of whom were World War II veterans studying on the GI Bill. On most days, I was able to catch a ride with a former GI who decided to study sculpture after he had worked on the restoration of Mount Rushmore. And instead of the sweater-and-skirt combination that had practically become my high school uniform, in college I wore blue jeans most days—just like the guys.

At the beginning of my senior year of college, a notice was posted that the application process was about to kick off for Mademoiselle magazine’s annual guest-editor contest. While Vogue was considered the epitome of high fashion, Mademoiselle focused more on the lifestyle of smart, independent young women; contributing authors included Joyce Carol Oates and Truman Capote. Meanwhile, the guest-editor program was truly prestigious, with an alumni list that included Sylvia Plath and, from my year, Joan Didion.

Entrants submitted four essays over the course of their senior year; but with more than thirty-seven thousand applicants and only twenty guest editor spaces, did I even have a chance? My first essay won a ten-dollar prize, and I allowed myself to hope. In early May, just prior to graduation, the telegram arrived: “We are delighted to tell you that you have been chosen as a 1955 Guest Editor.”

In June 1955, instead of walking across the stage to receive my diploma, I’d checked into the legendary Barbizon Hotel for Women in New York City, living and working in a city that was overwhelming, but exciting too. While walking on Fifth Avenue, I found myself always looking up—at the green mansard rooftops of the Pierre and the Plaza, or the art deco edifices of Bonwit Teller and Tiffany & Co.

Our class of twenty talented “mademoiselles” was nothing less than a dreamlike experience. We were invited everywhere: to the home of the famed cosmetics mogul Helena Rubinstein, who devoted an entire room of her penthouse apartment to Salvador Dalí paintings, and to stand at the podium in the General Assembly room at the United Nations, which had opened its headquarters on Manhattan’s East Side just a few years before. We wore our best formals while dancing with West Point cadets in the ballroom on the rooftop of the St. Regis Hotel. And everywhere we went, we were photographed as though we were debutantes or celebrities. It was about as far from Minneapolis as you could get.

Mattel

Even the work was tinged with glamor. We each had to produce an article for publication, and I asked the magazine’s fashion editor, Kay Silver, if I could interview Pauline Trigère, whose work I appreciated for its combination of innovative construction and clean, chic lines. To my utter delight, Kay granted my wish, and soon enough I was standing with Pauline Trigère in her workroom in the Garment District. It was my first look at a professional design studio, with its large tables for pattern cutting, mannequins for draping (Miss Trigère’s preferred design process), and a live-fit model on standby. I was hooked.

During our interview, Miss Trigère (as I always called her) dispensed terrific advice that I still follow: a pretty sketch is only the beginning; a good fashion designer also considers the execution of that design and how the personality of the fabric will play a role. No one element is more important than the others. She also encouraged me to, above all, be true to myself. Throughout my thirty-five years designing for Barbie, I never strayed from this philosophy.

After my month in New York, I spent a few years designing first children’s clothing, then “misses sportswear” (the designation for teenage girls then).

When I saw the ad in Women’s Wear Daily in November 1962, it didn’t mention Barbie or Mattel; rather, it was a blind ad for a fashion designer stylist, yet I read between the lines and was able to discern both the company and product. Perhaps best of all, two words jumped out at me: Los Angeles. Sunny California suddenly seemed like the perfect change from Milwaukee, and working on Barbie, already the world’s most popular toy, seemed like an irresistible idea. I sent my résumé for consideration, but didn’t receive a response.

In the meantime, thoughts of Los Angeles continued to beckon. One day, in a pure leap of faith, I decided a move to California was exactly the change I was seeking. I didn’t have a job, but even if Mattel didn’t hire me, I knew Los Angeles was a hub for fashion manufacturers.

Before I left Milwaukee, I had asked for my mail to be forwarded, but still no word from the company advertising for a fashion designer-stylist. Then one day in 1963, I was sitting at my kitchen table in Los Angeles, reading a trade paper, and I couldn’t believe my eyes: “Barbie Needs a Fashion Designer-Stylist.” The ad listed all the same requirements as the previous blind ad, but this time it was no secret: Mattel needed someone to design for Barbie. Thrilled to learn more about the position, and that it hadn’t been filled, I applied the same day.

Mattel

And soon enough, a response. Actually, make that two responses: At roughly the same time Mattel replied to my submission to the ad in the California paper, my forwarded mail from Milwaukee also arrived, and there was Mattel’s reply to the résumé I had sent after seeing the blind ad in Women’s Wear Daily. Amazingly, both letters included the same request: Could I come in for an interview on April 12 at 11:00 a.m.?

This was fate, I thought. My decision to move to Los Angeles had paid off.

On Friday, April 12, 1963, just before 11:00 a.m., I arrived for my interview at Mattel’s California headquarters. I was determined to get this job.

My interview with Jerry Fire of Mattel’s human resources department was quite brief. He had heard the story of my dueling résumé submissions, and during this process Mattel evidently had decided I was more than qualified for the job. There were just two hurdles to get past: from that same desk drawer, Jerry took out two Barbie dolls, one blond and the other brunette, both sporting the same bubble-cut hairstyle. With them, he handed me a packet of instructions. I had two weeks to create a set of test fashions; the dolls should be dressed in my finished designs, and I needed to present patterns and sketches. “And be sure to keep track of your time, because we’ll pay you for it,” Jerry added.

Back in my apartment, I put the dolls on my kitchen table and spread out the instructions. The first challenge was how different it would be to design for a doll instead of designing for a child or young woman. Barbie had been created on a onesixth scale of the female form, and while the math for creating patterns was easy enough, finding prints suitable for her smaller size could be difficult; even the smallest, most delicate flower on a child’s dress would seem gigantic on an eleven-and-a-half-inch doll. I also had to take into consideration the perception of Barbie as the quintessential California girl. Whatever I designed needed to evoke that ideal.

Completing the test fashions was merely the first hurdle. My follow-up meeting two weeks later was with the woman who already had become a bona fide legend in the history of Barbie. Charlotte Johnson had been a freelance fashion designer who also taught at what later became known as the California Institute of Arts.

Mattel

Early in 1959, Ruth Handler recruited Charlotte to work on her top secret doll project, and she ultimately played an integral role in Barbie’s look. Charlotte was inspired by the runways of Paris and New York, combining that chic aesthetic with the feeling of the California lifestyle to create the twenty-two fashions that comprised Barbie’s 1959 debut wardrobe. Charlotte knew the doll better than almost anyone—except, perhaps, Ruth Handler herself—and she was about to evaluate my designs.

My first memory of meeting her was that she was very tall and quite stylish. I felt good about my test designs, but in Charlotte’s hands, who could tell? I didn’t say a word as she turned the dolls over and over, closely examining every detail—not just the styles themselves but also the construction, the seaming, even the fabrics I had chosen. After what seemed like an eternity, Charlotte rendered her verdict: “I have no objection to hiring you,” she said, her words revealing no enthusiasm for my designs. And with that, she walked out of the room.

My first thought: What just happened? Then Jerry Fire was beside me again, escorting me to another room to take a personality and aptitude test, the final step to becoming a Mattel employee in those early years. Once that was complete, he was shaking my hand, a big smile on his face. It took me a moment to realize that I had passed both tests—Charlotte’s and Mattel’s—and had gotten the job. All of a sudden, I was smiling along with Jerry.

The rest of that day was like a dream in which I sort of floated along. I couldn’t stop grinning, because I had achieved exactly what that second ad had asked for: I was a fashion designer-stylist for Barbie.

Mattel

People talk about fate as an abstract idea, but in that moment, I fully embraced what it meant. The two advertisements I’d responded to had serendipitously asked me to come in and interview on the same day at the same time. How could that not be destiny?

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From the book DRESSING BARBIE by Carol Spencer. Copyright © 2023 by Carol Spencer. Reprinted courtesy of Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

To coincide with the reveals of the US and UK covers of Ingrid Robeyns’s Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth, US cover designer Pablo Delcan and UK cover designer Jamie Keenan had a conversation via email about their design processes, the experience of working with small versus large presses, and how they unknowingly worked with the same idea to create two different but complementary covers for the two editions of this book.

Jamie Keenan: I was hoping [the US cover] was really terrible (ha ha!)—but then I found out it’s by Pablo, so I’m assuming it’s amazing. Pablo, how did you start designing the cover and how do you start designing covers in general?

Pablo Delcan: Excited to be talking to you about this stuff, Jamie. I remember doing a mechanical for a cover you designed back in 2013; I was working at Pantheon Books, and it had this beautiful lettering on it that was foil stamped with different colors. I can’t remember the title or the author but I remember how special the book felt as an object.

How I start designing covers has changed over time. I’m now starting to have fun making them. For this book cover in particular, the subtitle did so much of the heavy lifting, it was about finding something that would speak to it or complement it visually. I just started throwing things together very quickly and roughly, mostly focusing on ideas and compositions—it’s a quantity over quality thing. That’s probably the thing that has changed most about my process over time: before, I wanted everything to be good right away, and now I just trust that it’s about finding the seed of an idea and helping it find its potential.

This process works well when there is someone at the other end of it that can take in the sketches for what they are and help find the potential to push something forward. In this case the art director was Rodrigo Corral and his team, who are brilliant, and did just that.

The piggy was the first idea that came to mind after reading the subtitle. I thought it’d be funny if the cover was a shiny bloated piggy bank. I’ll share it here:

Looks like we both found a different way of exaggerating the idea of economic swelling. What were some of the other ideas you had for it? What was your process? Also, in general, what do you think makes a good book cover?

JK: Was that Pantheon book called The Drunkard’s Walk?

I’m excited to be talking to you too and I love how it turns out our covers have the same underlying idea of taking something that represents money in a simple, everyday way and then bloating it to a ludicrous level. And my way of working is weirdly similar, too.

My favorite story is about a ceramics professor who splits his students in their final year into two groups and tells one half to produce just one piece of work (and make it amazing!) and the other half that their final mark will be based solely on the weight of their work. The first group are mostly petrified and come up with next to nothing and the second set (who are mass producing any old crap, as long as it’s heavy) happen to produce some amazing work along the way. I start by producing a lot of things, too, and even though they’re mostly useless, there’ll be a few things here and there that you can develop and bash into shape until something develops. In a slightly sick way, I enjoy that feeling of being a bit lost with a cover, but knowing that something will (hopefully) turn up.

Your point about having an understanding art director is completely right. I do worry sometimes that work that isn’t perfect is sometimes rejected out of hand, when maybe it just needs to be developed a bit more or twisted slightly, so it suddenly clicks into place.

When I’m working on fiction, I feel like I have to read every single word of the manuscript before I can begin working on the cover, but with nonfiction, it’s quite often the case that the title is something to grab your attention without really telling you very much and (exactly as you say) the subtitle is what you’ve got to work with. I started this cover by trying to imagine what a calculator belonging to someone who was super rich would look like (I was thinking of adding dozens of zeros) and the extended screen came from that.

I also tried a few things to convey the idea of total overkill, like a champagne glass overflowing, but it all looked like a bad crime cover, and then I played around with the dots above every letter “i” (below). I did a stretched out piggy bank, too (which I won’t show), but for some reason it looked like an emaciated pig rather than a bloated one. (I should’ve got you to do it.) Did you have some other non-pig ideas?

I think a good book cover can be lots of things, but I like the idea that a cover should look like the author finished the book and (being as good at design as they are at writing) designed the cover too, to produce one complete object. I also like the idea that rather than a cover being purely something to grab your attention in a bookshop, you can refer to it as you’re reading and it starts to make a bit more sense and be part of the overall experience. What do you think makes a good book cover?

PD: That ceramic professor story is perfect. I used to teach a class over at the School of Visual Arts, it was a portfolio class so there was always the looming assumption that whatever they did had to be a portfolio piece. It was incredibly hard to get the students out of that mindset and to just immerse themselves in the process. I could have definitely used that story then!

For this cover I did also have a bunch of other ideas. There were a lot of piggy banks, though: one that was a gold piggy bank shattered, a kintsugi repaired piggy bank. I also had one of this emoji blown up as a balloon with text written all over it with a marker, some more straightforward type-only covers, a gold spoon bent or broken … I often try and make something that is funny, I don’t think they ever make anyone laugh really, but it’s like finding a small joke for myself through the process.

For the piggy bank cover that we decided to go with, I asked Danielle Del Plato, who is a great digital illustrator, to work with me on the final image. I love collaborating when possible.

One of the things that made no sense to me when I was working at Penguin Random House is that the interior design department and the book cover department were on the same floor but would rarely or never coordinate on the designs—to nobody’s fault, it was just structural, the way it was for a huge publisher to churn out books. Collaborating probably created unnecessary friction. It really didn’t reinforce the idea of creating something that felt, like you said, a complete object.

For me what makes for a good book cover is probably very similar to the way you put it. When the book feels whole and confident as an object, it speaks for itself, you can just tell by how it feels to hold it.

Anything that feels like it’s trying to sell me something or tell me how cool the book is becomes instant garbage in my mind.

US cover for Limitarianism by Pablo Delcan.

I like how the calculator image looks for the cover, I think it’s similar to that thing I was saying before where there is that small joke that probably made you laugh or smile while making it. I think that’s great. Or maybe you didn’t find it funny and it’s just me projecting into your process. I find that when you’re having fun or when you’re invested in the work, that energy sometimes comes through in the finished piece. There is also something I love about those type-only cover sketches you shared with me, with the growing dots on them. I think a great book cover can be as simple as that, just letting the words do most of the work and stepping back.

UK cover design by Jamie Keenan.

I was looking through your website and I realized that you have your book covers divided up into British fiction/nonfiction and American fiction/nonfiction. I’ve done some work for publishers in Spain and Argentina besides the US, but haven’t done much work for publishers in the UK. In your experience, what are the biggest differences between the two? Are the process or the expectations from the publishers different in any way?

JK: I had a loony tutor on my Foundation course (a year-long course that art students in the UK used to have to complete before they could do a degree and where you got to try out a bit of fine art, graphic design, fashion design, and product design to see what you most enjoy) and he reckoned that putting our drawings or paintings up on a wall next to each other was the easy way out. He’d stick the ones he liked best next to this lovely, old fire extinguisher in the hallway and if they could live with that, he felt you might have created something half decent.

I think that’s where I started thinking that really good graphic design (despite being two-dimensional) should somehow aim to be an object or take on a life of its own. I think most of my favorite books covers, the ones that I wish I’d done, manage to make that jump from being something nice, printed on paper, to a “thing,” and it’s interesting that you said “you can just tell by how it feels to hold it” rather than “look at it.” I have to remind myself sometimes, that book covers aren’t flat jpegs.

What you said about large publishing houses is something I’ve felt for a while. Rather than having separate departments that all feel like they’re in competition, I’ve got this (probably incredibly naive) idea that it’d be great to work in a group of four or five people (one editor, one marketing person, one designer, etc.) who would work on each book together and sit in the same part of the office, with their roles blurring into each other slightly and encouraging the idea that they are all working on making each book as good as possible, without any sense of competition or friction. Maybe being freelance and working with smaller publishers (or self-publishing authors directly) is a version of that? How much of your work is for large publishers compared to smaller companies and what difference, if any, does that make?

You’re completely right in guessing that I try to add a bit of humor to a lot of my covers—even if it’s not the laugh-out-loud kind. To me the calculator is meant to look slightly funny or odd, until you start reading the book and realize that even someone earning $100,000 a year would have to work for 10,000 years to become a billionaire and Elon Musk is worth about $246 billion, and the humor turns a bit darker. I agree with you completely that work someone has had fun putting together tends to convey that and similarly something that’s been fretted over or overworked does the opposite.

Talking of which, you do some amazing work for The New York Times and it always looks like you’ve not only enjoyed it, but that it’s come together effortlessly. But then I think that’s a sign of someone who’s really good at their job—it always makes you think, “I could easily do that,” and then you try plastering and realize it might not be true. How does your editorial work influence your book cover work and vice versa?

As for the difference between US and UK publishers, the process is identical, but I’ve always thought that US book covers are slightly more polarized. There are some properly horrible covers that you see in supermarkets that make you feel sick and some amazing work you see in Barnes & Noble that makes you feel sick (but with jealousy). There are plenty of amazing UK book covers too, but you have 330 million people to sell books to and we only have 67, so maybe UK publishers are slightly more conservative when it comes to cover design. From what you’ve seen of UK book covers, what differences do you see?

PD: That ideal setup of editors and designers working together to design books—that’s how I think really good magazines are set up to work right now. There are a handful of magazines I love working with for that particular reason. The goal of creating something in a collaborative way that spans the art department and the editorial team feels aligned.

I tried to quit the editorial work I was doing a couple of years ago. I think I burnt out and I wasn’t enjoying it as much anymore. I had done hundreds of these small and quick editorial art projects for newspapers and magazines over the past eight or so years.

But to your question about informing the book cover work: it absolutely has. I was once speaking with one of the past art directors for the New York Times op-ed page and he described these kinds of assignments with a resemblance to performance art. You’re given this time constraint, often a couple of hours, and a piece of writing, and whatever you do during that time is the thing itself. No time for overthinking or over-analyzing, it is what it is. And I think that’s something that I’ve brought, not just into book cover design but into everything I make. Just keeping things loose, interesting and immersed in the process. I’ve since come back to doing editorial work again, but much less than I used to.

You’ve done such a crazy amount of book covers, and they’re so fucking good in so many different ways. Do you ever feel like, okay, that’s enough already? There is a point where it doesn’t feel the same way to make these as it did when you were just starting. How do you keep yourself engaged making all these great book covers over the years? Asking for a friend.

As far as working with big or small publishers, I work with smaller publishers more. I’ve definitely collected a fair share of kill fees from bigger publishers. I don’t love kill fees. With smaller publishers I find the books more interesting, and the process of designing the covers is more rewarding with less pressure, and there is that alignment we’ve been talking about. What’s your experience with big or small publishers?

I get to see all the great covers coming out of the UK by following you and some of your colleagues over there, but I’ve actually never been there. When I finally get to go there I’ll make sure to report back on your question!

JK: I love that editorial style of working, where you have a certain amount of time and whatever you’ve come up with is the final thing. When it comes to book covers, I sometimes feel like there are some people who will never accept anything from the first set of roughs you send in or that the process has to be slightly tortuous before you can even get close to having work accepted, because good work can only come from it going through a process of extreme refinement—like you’re on a pilgrimage or something. Funnily enough, the cover for Limitarianism went through the first time around—Jim Stoddart, the art director at Penguin Press, is really great to work for.

I have done a few covers over the years (I reckon it must be a few thousand) but what I find really amazing is that despite always working to pretty much the same format, with just those same four or five elements (author, title, subtitle, quote and maybe an image) there are still new things to do. I’m as enthusiastic about it now as I’ve ever been and I still think book cover design is the greatest job in the world.

I’ve got a folder on my mac called “nice pics” and any image I see that I like the look of or idea I try out that I think is any good, but that gets rejected, goes in the folder. I saw something squashed on the street this morning and it made me think it could work on a book cover, so I’ll wait until the right book comes along. I imagine every book cover designer has some kind of list of ideas they want to try out (right?) and it’s great when you finally get a chance (sometimes years later) to make it happen. That list keeps me interested.

I do try to get my hands dirty with paint or bits of paper and glue as often as possible, too, and maybe being freelance and working for lots of different kinds of publishing houses, producing different kinds of books, helps me stay enthusiastic. Like everyone else, I have days when I can’t get anything accepted and feel a bit sorry for myself, but then I see someone stacking shelves in the supermarket and I remember I’ve got it pretty easy.

You don’t strike me as someone who has a problem engaging with their work. It always looks like you’ve really attacked it, which is why it’s always so witty and perfectly executed. That kind of work can’t happen if you’re just going through the motions! So how do you retain your enthusiasm?

PD: I really admire what you mentioned about seeing all the potential within the constraints of a book cover. I think that love for what you do is evident in the remarkable range of your covers.

As far as for me retaining my enthusiasm and engagement with the work: it’s almost become the opposite of what it was when I started. I’ve learned to see it and to play it as a game; I don’t feel there is anything all that serious about it. It’s just fun.

I’d love to continue this conversation in person some time at a bar or café. If you’re ever in New York it’d be great to see you!

Thanks for all the thoughtful questions—I’m thrilled to have done this with you and in all honesty I really, really love your work.

JK: I’m a massive fan of your work too, Pablo, you know that—and I’m so glad we happen to have designed a cover for the particular book and were thrown together.

I think we’ve both been through the stage of realizing that style is temporary, but ideas (hopefully) last a bit longer and are more fun to come up with.

And I think, ultimately, that your ethos of treating the whole thing as a bit of a game or fun, is exactly the right way to view it. Whatever mistakes we make, we’re not surgeons, so nobody dies.

I’d love to continue the conversation too. Come over to London and I’ll introduce you to the UK book cover mafia. And I’ll do my best to get to New York. Keep up the great work.

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Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth by Ingrid Robeyns will be published in the United States by Astra House on February 6, 2024, and in the United Kingdom by Allen Lane on February 1, 2024.