Lanny by Max Porter (Faber)

Lanny is the second book by Max Porter, published in March 2019 by Faber & Faber. The cover of the author’s debut, Grief is the Thing with Feathers, used Albertus. For the dust jacket for Lanny, Jonathan Pelham worked with a recent typeface that shares some characteristics with Berthold Wolpe’s classic. It’s Infini, designed by Sandrine Nugue in 2015. The lapidary letterforms look like they were scratched into the oppressively black surface of two irregularly shaped printing blocks – which occupy most of the cover, leaving only a narrow pass.

Pelham aimed “to situate the book somewhere between modernist reduction and folkloric totem”, and to convey the book’s “earthy, mystic weirdness” in his jacket design. For the paperback edition, Lanny “needed an element that was equally meaningful” as the crow on the cover of Porter’s debut. This element was found in a fallen leaf from plane tree. “The hand lettering [for the promotional quotes] is based on the shapes of Sandrine Nugue’s typeface Infini, the main typeface used across all editions, but here it is intentionally much more sloppy”. Read more about the design process in Katie Hall’s post on the Faber blog.