You Shall Know Our Velocity!

Here’s a Gluekit cover sketch for Dave Eggers’s novel, You Shall Know Our Velocity!

It’s a departure from the other book covers we were sketching out early last year, but we felt this book deserved something a little different and a little less constricted. So we went for it! For those who don’t know the plot, this novel is about a mad and grieving quest by two friends to distribute a whole lot of money according to a half-baked but thoroughly complex plan after the death of a close friend. It’s a sad, weird book that trades in emotion and oddness. It’s a book that’s also about the best-laid plans going awry, and a general unsticking of the characters in the reality they occupy. There’s a rapidity and unraveling rhythm to the plot, which inspired both the smudging of Eggers byline, and the haphazard use of taped-up type. One sequence of scenes in particular has stayed with us: the friends, in Africa, desperately trying to rid themselves of money, attempt to tape money to animals, people, and passing objects. It’s all inspiration…

Gluekit’s loving bright yellow these days!

Reimagined Book Covers: 002

While Gluekit was dreaming the other night, a lot of orange and black and white figures crept into our room and inserted themselves into our nightmares. The result were two new Gluekit Editions for recent novels that we’ve consumed– voraciously in one case; rather slowly and in slow chews in the other.

We can’t say Sean Wilsey’s Oh, The Glory of It All was exactly what we wanted it to be. Skateboarding descriptions aside, this book groveled a bit too hard and too deeply in the poor little rich boy vein for us to enjoy. Memoirs are like that, though. We tried to tease out a bit of the messy overbearing emotion on our cover. The blobby mommy-concept cometh!

Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude pulled together a lot of different strands in a much more satisfying way. Gluekit, as will become apparent, has a thing for coming-of-age stories, teenage angst, and colorful narratives that look at ethnicity, race, and identity. [Don't say we're totally superficial!] This novel plunged into graffiti culture too, and dealt with the ever-changing culture of NYC’s burroughs. Our cover tried to get at the gritty urban landscape that dominated much of the book, highlight the graffiti edge, and use one of our favorite patterns. Click, click– and the tiles fell into place.

Gluekit loves it when a book (or a plan) comes together!

Reimagined Book Covers: 001

Gluekit loves to read.

Inspired by Penguin Book covers and the recent publication Penguin by Design (Phil Baines, 2007), we recently decided to take our reading habits one step further, and reimagine the books we’ve read aloud together with Penguin-esque cover designs (talk about collapsing our interests!). It’s a neat way to encapsulate our visual reaction to the storylines and we’re happy to start sharing them here.

We’ve selected two of Jonathan Safran Foer’s novels to kick off everything off. Mr. Foer is one of our favorite novelists, so it’s only fitting that his works kick off Set #1.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close also tops our mutual lists of favorite books. Oscar, the child hero of this post 9/11 novel, captured our hearts and has never really let go. His fearless optimism and precociousness still spark our nostalgia when we’re shopping for pens or thinking of why no one has invented coffee ice cubes.

This week, Gluekit was also fortunate to hear Mr. Foer read some of his most recent work. A very young writer with a very big talent, Mr. F afterwards revealed he likes to write at his public library, a structured environment he finds conducive to letting himself bleed out his words.