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click here to see the photos and captions for this article With his complex and sometimes enigmatic designs--and near total control over the product--Michael Ian Kaye is quietly changing the future of book publishing. "Twiggy!" Everyone at Little, Brown's weekly jacket meeting greets the original waif with approval. Her image, cropped below the bridge of the nose, adorns the mock-up cover of what the publishing house hopes will be a spring best-seller on the order of last year's Making Faces by makeup artist Kevyn Aucoin. The new book is called The Mane Thing and it's by Kevin Mancuso, hairstylist to the stars (Cindy Crawford wrote the foreword). Twiggy's mod bangs have won the cover slot over an array of feathered Charlie's Angels candidates. But there's a problem with the type. "Get me a copy of Making Faces," barks Little, Brown publisher Sarah Crichton. "Oh, that's going to be hard," says an art department assistant. "They just fly out of here." "Maybe type is not his thing?" wonders editor Jennifer Josephy about the freelance designer responsible for the mock-up. "That's good," quips graphic designer Michael Ian Kaye. Kaye doesn't have to worry about making a nice impression. His covers do it for him. His department won nine of the American Institute of Graphic Arts' 50 Books/50 Covers awards this year, and his staff was unfazed. His designers all say that he's an excellent teacher--and that he works them very hard. Kaye has had a galvanizing effect at Little, Brown. Crichton, who's been in charge for over two years, has pushed the house into literary fiction with a pop sensibility. Kaye's covers have given the books attitude. "There's a W.T.H. factor with Michael's designs," says Chip Kidd, the Knopf designer known for lending (discreet) flash to the works of literary lions. "As in, 'What the hell is going on here?' It makes you want to open the book and find out what's inside. It's not something that just hits you over the head." Kaye brought Kevyn Aucoin into the office to write the words "Making Faces" over and over again for his cover. "We took his handwriting, scanned it in, and pieced the letters together," Kaye recalls. "I guess I could say I made up Kevyn Aucoin!" Crichton, Josephy, and marketing director Carl Lennertz all laugh. Then they fire off a string of suggestions for Kaye to pass on to The Mane Thing's designer. After that, jackets for upcoming paperback editions fly by: a primitivist treatment for novelist Lisa St. Aubin de Teran's memoir about a really bad marriage, The Hacienda; a cartoony approach to David Bowman's second novel, Bunny Modern; and a cover for Steven Gaines' book about real estate in the Hamptons, Philistines at the Hedgerow, that is strongly reminiscent of the one for Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (a big jacket quote from Jay McInerney says the same about the text). "If I were the author, I would have a hard time if the words Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil were larger than the subtitle of my book," says Kaye. "He just wants to sell books," responds Crichton. Kaye's position in publishing is unique. At most houses, design and advertising are separate departments. But as creative director at Little, Brown, Kaye has control over a book's design and its advertising--the total look of the product from galleys to display table. In 1996, Crichton hired Kaye away from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, where he was art director. She was reportedly so impressed with his work that she offered him this unusual deal after only one lunch. "I would go to bookstores all over New York," she says. "Again and again my favorite jackets were by Michael Ian Kaye. He was clearly the best in the business." Little, Brown's new ads in Publishers Weekly aren't the typical collection of blown-up jacket art and rapturous quotes; one is simply a calendar of what the house has out for October, with photographs of three or four jackets and straightforward descriptions. The ads are targeted at bookstore owners, though Kaye says, "I like to think that what I'm really doing [with my jackets] is appealing to the salesclerks, the people who unpack the boxes and put the books on the shelves." They are the ones who can position a book facing out, rather than spine in, for crucial inches. Crichton has a before-and-after presentation she does for the owners. She drops a copy of an old best-seller by Michael Connelly on her coffee table disdainfully. Done under Kaye's predecessor, Steve Snider, it's royal blue, with huge letters and a tiny photo of police tape. But she almost doesn't want to put down the new Michael Connelly, caressing the design features of Blood Work, with its manly rivets and embossed black heart. The next in the series has the same bold black type, but it resembles a playing card, an ace of hearts, through which a bullet has just blown. "You've got the gambling motif, but it doesn't look wussy, and it definitely doesn't look generic," she says. Crichton runs a finger across the title type of Harper's Bazaar editor Liz Tilberis' memoir about battling cancer, No Time to Die, which fades subtly from navy to light blue. It's as minimal as Kaye's work gets, just an elegant portrait of the author and slim lettering. "Liz wasn't sure about the cover," Crichton says, "but at the book party she came up to me and said, 'It works.'" Kaye's most political move to date is the jacket design for a series of gay fiction anthologies. The first has packets of pansy seeds; the second, a black-and-white picture of a faggot (the wood kind); the third, four queens from a deck of playing cards. "Everyone wanted those soft sepia photographs of a young man at a typewriter," Kaye says. "Only a gay art director could have gotten away with [what I did]." From rivets to pansy seeds, these varied designs share a style that's hard to categorize. Kaye has a restrained sense of typography (which he developed as a designer of book interiors at Penguin) and a painterly sense of color. No florid handwriting, no fancy unreadable Gothic, nothing loud. "There's an air that I think is consistent," he says. "In a bookstore, where books are next to each other, that air provides a resting place for the eye. If I give the consumer that little break, he or she is going to spend more time taking in what I'm giving." Crichton adds, "Subliminally, the consumer recognizes the careful design. Books need to be beautiful things. The book is something people want to own. They want to touch it and hold it." Kaye's fiefdom is three floors below Crichton's eleventh-floor corner office in the Time & Life Building. He designed the all-white, all-glass space himself. The only accents of color are the computer screens, the designers' clothes, the furniture, and the books propped on every horizontal surface. Kaye's hair is wild and curly, and he's wearing a chartreuse shirt, a favorite, unconventional cover shade. "It's great," he says with a lilt, swiveling in a Herman Miller Aeron chair, surveying the area. "It's all open, so we share ideas and food and fashion tips." (Recently, Kaye finished another interiors project--with a partner, Patrick Downey, he bought and renovated an old soda shop in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, called The Victory, which now serves custom-blended sodas, pastries, and coffee. The work brought back childhood memories: "When most boys were drawing battle scenes, I would design my dream house looking at my mother's Better Homes and Gardens.") Other book designers agree that freedom of the kind Kaye has been given at Little, Brown is everything. Good designers can slave in obscurity for an entire career, sabotaged by editors and marketers who want gold foil stamps or big red lettering. Knopf president Sonny Mehta may have realized the importance of good design in the Eighties, but the freedom he gave Chip Kidd--which led to Kidd's unusual star status in the field and a wave of oh-so-tasteful literary covers--is still anomalous. Kaye might be another star, but his style probably won't be as easy to imitate. "When I see Kaye's jackets, I often don't know they're his," says graphic design critic and New York Times art director Steven Heller. "Each one is like a mini-movie with its own distinct personality. There's a lot of content with minimal means." Pentagram's Michael Bierut admires Kaye's soft sell. "He's able to make a big book look big without making it look crass," Bierut says. "The books are as engaging as possible without appearing to pander." Jen Banbury's Like a Hole in the Head, which was pitched as a "slacker noir," was expected to sell the usual 7,000 to 10,000 copies for a first novel. Instead, the book, which came out last spring, has just gone back for its sixth printing. It's an inexact science, but Crichton is hearing from booksellers that Kaye's neon cover, with a punched-out bullet hole, is screaming "read me" to youth; the design was one of the nine Little, Brown books honored by the AIGA. "It's a book about a missing book--a Jack London novel that's stolen," Kaye says. "Before I did that jacket I had to locate the first edition of the London, which was actually quite difficult." He laughs. "I liked the idea of making a cover out of an old jacket. I just laid new type over the old." He's somewhat dismissive of the design for the Warner Books paperback: "It has a woman's eye in one corner, a gun in another corner, a book in a third. Duh." "Michael's jackets create a desire to investigate," says Sandor Szatmari, the Little, Brown sales representative who sells to Barnes & Noble and Waldenbooks. Szatmari won't say whether the megastores are ordering more copies than in the past, but "at least they order [the number] we would like." What Kaye has down is a package that pleases all concerned: the writer's words are taken seriously, the sales reps have an attractive product to push, the store gets eye-catching tables, the reader's intelligence is flattered. And no one ever has to tell Kaye to make the type bigger or the author's name bolder, or pink, or to try any other down-market gimmick. Because he's been there from the beginning, absorbing the editorial stance before he shows any ideas, he nails the concept. "I go to the early meetings and find out we're going to be printing x number of copies, or 'Oh, this is young and hip,' or 'This is definitely for women between the ages of blah and blah.' Or this author's last book did really, really well." Kaye laughs at his own enthusiasm for the figures. "But of course, it's never spelled out so explicitly," he says. "I take all the information, put it into my blender, and turn it into the cocktail of my choice." |
