Book designer has all the bases covered

Chip Kidd shares the stories behind the intricate visuals for Haruki Murakami’s novels

Famed graphic and book designer Chip Kidd has been designing covers for Japanese writer Haruki Murakami’s books at Knopf for 20 years. He’s visited Japan and has been inspired in part by what he found in the jimbocho antiquarian book section of Tokyo.

“I could spend a couple of weeks there,” he told the Star in an interview, “because you see everything from traditional Japanese bookmaking, then how they were influenced in terms of design by the West . . . It’s a whole other way of visually thinking. We are left to right and they are right to left.”

Here, some more of Murakami’s book covers, with comments from Kidd on inspiration, challenges and successes. Wind / Pinball I work with a photographer and image maker named Geoff Spear and we worked on The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and we worked on Kafka on the Shore.

You know he’s sort of a magician: I say (to him), “You know I want a giant pinball and we’re going to see a reflection of this particular pinball machine in it” and so he did it and it was really great. And we go back and forth and hone it. And then I realized after it was accepted that the image of the pinball machine, of the rocket ship, is on the left and the clear, just the sheen of the chrome is on the right. But the title is Wind/Pinball. But when you look at this it’s Pinball/ Wind. Then I thought, no, this is perfect, because if you read the image right to left (as you would in Japanese) it is Wind/Pinball. Colorless The trickiest by far was Colorless. Our head of production ( at Knopf) is a guy named Andy Hughes who’s . . . just really, really brilliant at figuring out how to get these designs mass produced. But I think with Colorless . . . I had a special excitement because the book debuted at No. 1. That was a huge symbolic milestone for him, plus I’m very proud of the design. It’s strange, it’s abstract, it initially doesn’t really appear to mean anything although I was hoping that potential readers would be enamoured of it as an object first, then as you read it you figure out why the design looks the way it does. Then it makes more sense and takes on more meaning. 1Q84 The 1Q84 jacket almost didn’t happen because they couldn’t find a bindery that would be able to (handle it; the hard cover had an image with a semi-transparent jacket overleaf ).

It would have had to be done by hand as opposed to by a machine and that would have killed it for obvious reasons — we’re talking more than 100,000 books.

So Andy Hughes found a bindery who was willing to take it on as long as we would give him a quarter-inch play in either direction. Sometimes the title lined up perfectly and then sometimes it would shift to the left or to the right.

But even if it shifted then you’d get this kind of nice, white drop shadow and it wouldn’t impede the readability of it. After Dark (My trips to Japan) influenced me a lot especially in terms of just getting to understand the visual culture. There was a Murakami novel called After Dark and I was in Tokyo when I was working on that. I took a photo of a pachinko parlour . . . and it was late, it was like midnight or 1 in the morning.

So I took a picture of it and it had these funky glass doors that slid closed just as I was taking the picture. And I got angry. But it turned out that’s what we ended up using because it looked so interesting, it looked more interesting than if the doors had been open. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle It’s hard to pick (a favourite). I think that the way we were able to do WindUp Bird was really for me, because I was able to involve again my friend Geoff Spear and the cartoonist Chris Ware, and blend their work together on this giant windup bird.

And the way that works with the whole interior was for me a sort of revelation about how to design a novel starting with a deck and then going into the inside and how they work with each other. The Strange Library The brief as it were on The Strange Library was to make an extremely visual book out of what is essentially a short story and could be conceived as a short story for a younger audience.

You know I also have to say that I’m so thrilled that the Canadian publisher Random House Canada has used my designs because they didn’t have to.

They could have created their own. But (Random House) went along with just about everything that I’ve worked on . . . and I really appreciate it.

Immersing himself in Japanese society has helped Chip Kidd “understand the visual culture” and transfer that knowledge onto the printed page.