ABOUT ME

I spent my pocket money on a paperback copy of Henry Treece's Viking's Dawn when I was eleven years old. That was the beginning of it, though I didn't know it at the time. Since then I have been, at various points, a reader, a seller, a collector — and finally, a protector. The background that brought me here includes a short stint in the military, an attempt at commission and gallery work in graphite and pencil portraiture, a thorough schooling in carpentry, joinery and cabinetmaking and a lifelong addiction to history. None of it felt like a plan while it was happening. All of it turned out to be necessary.

The thing that connects all of it — the thing that was always there — is the dust jacket. I don't mean that as a professional statement. I mean it as a fact about how memory works. A great jacket operates the way smell operates. It doesn't remind you of a book. It puts you back inside the moment you first encountered it — the shelf it was on, the room you were in, the person you were then. Every time I make a case for The Shining I see it again on a shelf in my father's workshop, my mother refusing to have it anywhere in the house after what Kubrick's film did to her. The book is inside the case. The memory is inside the book. The jacket is the thing that opens the door to all of it.

That's why I've never been able to accept the idea that jacket art is somehow a lesser form. It occupies the same position relative to fine art that song lyrics occupy relative to poetry — the poor cousin, foot in the door, not quite legitimate. I've always thought that was wrong, and I've always thought the Bob Dylan Nobel argument proved it. Peter Benchley's Jaws jacket is as culturally embedded as almost anything hanging in a gallery from the same era. The artists who made those covers were doing something real. The constraint — that it had to sell a book, that it had to work from a distance on a crowded shelf — didn't diminish the work. In the best cases it pushed it somewhere a gallery commission never would have gone.

My favourite remains The Stand in the original 1978 Doubleday issue. John Cayea's two cavorting medieval grotesques are deceptively simple — and yet there is something in the colour and the movement of those figures that produces genuine unease before you have read a single word. I've heard many theories about what they represent. My own view is that the piece was painted deliberately in the tradition of Hieronymus Bosch — not as imitation but as inheritance. Good against evil, light interacting with dark. The eternal contest that never truly begins and never truly ends because it isn't a contest at all. It is simply the nature of things. The circle. The condition of being alive. Bosch understood that five centuries ago and painted it onto panels commissioned by the Church to teach fear. Cayea put it on a paperback in 1978 and taught the same lesson to a generation of readers who had no idea they were receiving it. That is not a lesser achievement.

It is also, as it happens, the first appearance of the spiked Cortez lettering that carried Stephen King's name across decades of covers — and this is the thing that has never been properly acknowledged. That lettering wasn't a design choice. It was a declaration. King was building a brand before the publishing industry had a word for what a brand was, before most authors in the same position were thinking in those terms at all. That font did on a bookshelf what a logo does on a storefront. It announced itself from a distance. It made every subsequent book that carried it feel like part of something larger than itself. He understood, earlier than almost anyone, that a reader doesn't just buy a book. They buy a relationship with a voice. The Cortez lettering was the face of that voice. First seen on The Stand. Never bettered.

Close behind it is The Gunslinger in the Grant first edition — Michael Wheelan's artwork, the colours, the scene, the title lettering that captures exactly what lies ahead. A stunning way to open the Dark Tower series, followed throughout by equally remarkable work from Phil Hale, Dave McKean and Bernie Wrightson. Each of them understood what the book they were dressing actually was.

I also have a lasting affection for the early science fiction covers. Making cases for early Heinlein or Asimov is like stepping into a time capsule every single time. Recent favourites among the complete series cases include Chris Paolini's Inheritance Cycle and George R. R. Martin's Game of Thrones in the UK first printing. And one I won't forget is a giant custom case for Carl Jung's Red Book — nearly two feet tall and five inches wide. There is no such thing as a routine commission.

Every project I take on is working toward the same thing. Somewhere down the track — a few hundred years from now, in some anonymous collection or rare book room — I want these volumes to still be there. I want someone to open a case I made and find the book inside exactly as it was left by the person who first loved it. That is what I am building toward every time I close the lid and send a finished piece out into the world.

I'm currently working with a longtime customer on a complete set of slipcases for the full Pulitzer Prize Fiction canon — an ongoing project full of period jacket art and fragments of obscure publishing history that I find genuinely inexhaustible. Princeton University Library's Rare Book Room will also be receiving some of my cases. I've shipped to most of mainland Europe, Canada, the UK and Australia, and every one of those packages leaving the workshop still feels like something worth doing.

A genuine thank you to David from Betts Books, and to two of my oldest customers, Richard and Mike — for the measurements, the patience, and the goodwill.

Joshua Edwards.