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Martyr! is a novel by Iranian-American writer Kaveh Akbar that combines modern situations with traditional imagery. For the jacket, prolific cover designer Linda Huang did what she does so well: pick a striking and relevant typeface and let it do a lot of the work.

License: All Rights Reserved.

Left: Salem, as advertised in the Inland Printer, Vol. 28, No. 2 (November, 1901). Right: Daria Cohen’s reinterpretation, Zangezi (2018), with additional weights, italics, and condensed (2021).

Her choice was Zangezi Condensed, a fresh, fashion-forward take on Salem, in which Daria Cohen took a turn-of-the-century dazzler, narrowed it, and increased its stroke contrast, giving it even more spike and sparkle than it already had. The idiosyncratic type is the perfect companion to the contemporary use of antique illustration. Huang also deftly delivers the commercial necessities – a blurb and “a novel” – in an inconspicuous way.

Huang on the design:

Despite its heavy themes, I found Akbar’s novel to be insanely funny,” Huang told Literary Hub. “I cackled many times while reading the manuscript. More than anything, I wanted to evoke this unique tragi-comedic tone on the cover. One of the central, recurring images is this Iranian ‘Angel of Death’ warrior. I experimented with scale and ultimately found the warrior in miniature to be most striking, with ‘a novel’ set in a deadpan speech bubble. I was also lucky to stumble upon the perfect decorative typeface to activate all that negative space. To me, humor is one of the most alluring qualities in a book (and really, in life) so it was an absolute treat to work on Akbar’s novel.

Source: www.penguinrandomhouse.com License: All Rights Reserved.

The version of the cover seen in bookstores today.

Martyr! quickly became a New York Times best seller – soon enough for the cover to get an extra speech balloon celebrating that fact. You can also see an improvement on the letterspacing in “Akbar”.

A Digression and Suggestion

Photo: Stephen Coles. License: All Rights Reserved.

Once you get to the end of a book, “a note on the type” is a great way to learn about the creation of the letterforms you’ve been staring at for hours.

Photo: Stephen Coles. License: All Rights Reserved.

Back jacket flaps usually include an author bio and designer credit. This is good. Could they include a bit more?

The interior of this book, designed by Betty Lew, includes “A Note on the Type”, a lovely hundred-year-old publishing tradition which not only credits the text face (in this case, Dante), but tells a bit of its story. Why not have a typeface credit on the jacket flap, too? Sure, you’re reading a lot more Dante than Zangezi when you read this book, but it’s the cover that often sells the book. Also, the type used on book covers is more likely to be something newer that the interior text, and thus more likely to be made by living designers. Isn’t it time we give them a nod?

From Lit Hub’s “The 75 Best Book Covers Of 2018 According To Book Cover Designers”:

Linda Huang’s repackaging for The War of the Worlds (as well as The Invisible Man) is so fresh, yet it feels nostalgic. The use of just black and white, and the retro font, keeps the design strong and bold. —Emily Mahon

The font in question is Persiflage, one of the 52 typefaces released in 2016 by The Pyte Foundry. In his review for Typographica, Frank Grießhammer describes it as a “very heavy marshmallow sans” and says he enjoys “the play of rounded versus straight corners.” I wonder what kind of “retro” Mahon had in mind. Persiflage reminds me of 1970s faces like Alpha or Too Much (the latter especially because of the thin middle bar in E). Chances are that type designer Ellmer Stefan referenced sources that are much older, though—maybe something like this variant of Caslon Rounded from c. 1841 which also mixes rounded and straight corners. His TPF Henry series is a more direct interpretation of Caslon’s early rounded sans serif.

Published by Pantheon Books / Random House.