The Slip by Miriam Webster
The Slip by Miriam Webster is the first book to published by Aniko Press. The ten stories in this collection are dark, feral and completely unforgettable, full of strange encounters and big feelings. The vision for the design brief was to capture the author’s eye for the absurd and the surreal.
As with all the fiction covers I work on, I start by reading and taking notes of themes, key phrases and visual cues. These stories are great fun – weird, funny, dark, surprising – emotional and complex. In one story, the protagonist dreams of animals:
Black dogs and other beasts that stalked behind you on the back roads. Horses whinnying and bucking in the wind, synchronised and weirdly fluid, changing ways like schools of silver fish … A nanny goat with two grey kids in tow, offering them her teats …
The dream is a premonition – there’s an escaped goat who has ‘chewed through her rope and fucked off up the hill somewhere’.
I interpret this as a symbol for freedom (perhaps incorrectly, but I’m prepared to run with it). I like freedom, I’m not sure I like goats but goats are pretty weird – they’re esoteric, surreal creatures (occult even!) – which seems a good fit for the collection. The power of the goat is calling.
After much trial and error, I eventually found the goat that might save my life. Tongue out – not too cute, not too ugly, just oddly charming enough, it’s chewing away in the high country. Being free, being chill, being weird. Being goat. Seems a nice vintage too, should contrast well with some garishly bright text – aiming for the sweet spot where the archaic (story telling; old as the hills) and the modern (the text often plays with form, while poking fun at its own metatextuality) meet. You know that spot, right? It’s a good place.
For the cover’s display type, I wanted something big and bold but with a certain softness and warmth – enter the rock-solid humanist sans serif with a hint of contemporary typographic finesse, P22 Underground. And okay, my handwriting sucks but I want something with a human hand behind it, so I turn to another literary surrealist – help me out, Franz? – the subtitle of ‘Stories’ is set in FF Mister K (a font based on Kafka’s handwriting).
The interior is primarily typeset in Garamond Premier and Underground (with a few wingdings and emojis for good measure). One story, ‘New Directions’ (which contains the titular story – ‘The Slip’ – in a metatextual way) required a very detailed setting; conveying multiple voices: author, confidant, publisher, analyst, patient – and an eel(!) – with the voices often switching between one another mid-sentence (very slippery indeed).
Providing sufficient visual difference between each voice, while keeping an elegant and cohesive overall, was quite a challenge. The story utilises varying degrees of indentation, all-caps, small-caps, italics, reverse slant, underline – and detailed spacing (the eel is getting high, getting loose, mind and text fragmenting). The result is best experienced in print, of course. On that note, do go buy the book, it’s very, very fun.
