Things I Have Withheld by Kei Miller (Canongate)
Published by Canongate Books earlier this month, Things I Have Withheld is “a provocative, critical and lyrical collection of essays exploring the meaning of silence and the experience of discrimination.”
“The powerful essays include [Miller’s] own letters to the late American novelist James Baldwin and his reflections on the permanence of racism. He writes movingly.” — Independent
For the book jacket, Jon Gray (gray318) apparently pays homage to Paul Bacon’s design for Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time as published by Dial Press in 1963: Author’s name and title are set in a compressed grotesk, in a single big size, arranged in five lines with almost one word per line. Instead of Neue Aurora VIII, Jon Gray opts for its precursor, Aurora-Grotesk VIII, which is distinguished by forms with curved diagonals, here for K, M, v, W. The particular font in use is probably Bitstream’s Aurora Condensed BT. While Bacon’s jacket design is exclusively typographic and only hints at the titular fire through the use of color, Gray adds the silhouette of a walking man and enriches the shapes with a texture made from smudged paint on canvas.
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Thanks to a contribution by the Herb Lubalin Study Center, you can see Paul Bacon’s jacket design for The Fire Next Time on Fonts In Use: