The Novels of Muriel Spark

Contributed by Chris Purcell

To commemorate the centenary of the birth of Scottish author Muriel Spark (1918-2006), Polygon, a Scottish imprint, is issuing a uniform edition of all 22 of her novels.

Designer Teresa Monachino chose to design the covers typographically, using two typefaces by Eric Gill, Gill Kayo and Perpetua. As she states,

The one thing that I kept in the front of my mind was that Muriel Spark was ‘the writer’s writer’. I read the 22 blurbs that accompanied each story and I knew then that the work should speak for itself. If we mustn’t judge a book by its cover then we must judge it by its words. What happens then when the words are the cover? I proposed that the book blurb should be on the jacket cover so that the design lets the stories speak for themselves; they need no further embellishment, it’s all in the writing.

To encourage readers to collect the entire set of works by ‘the writer's writer’, the designer included a kind of typewriter keyboard grid on the covers, with each book’s number in the sequence of titles highlighted, set in Gill Sans.

The sequence numbers are repeated at the bottom of each jacket spine, as well as a single, similarly highlighted single letter at the top. When all the books are assembled in order on a shelf, the highlighted letters spell out ‘THE NOVELS OF MURIEL SPARK’ — a clever ‘Easter egg’!

The texts are set in Monotype Ehrhardt.

This post was originally published at Fonts In Use

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