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| Sources: All stock images |
My cover design for Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White, a stellar example of late-19th century sensation fiction remembered today as one of the first novels in what we know as the mystery genre. I wanted to evoke the doublings and dualities that pervade the novel as well as the detection, the attempt to align apparently unresolvable facts, that drive its narrative. The scrap of Victorian whitework in the magnifying glasses is from a white garment of the period but is overlaid by a transparent glass lens that gives it a bit of dimension and a slight muddiness suitable to a novel about purity and the lack thereof. The background uses a single image of ground weed four times. I chose that particular photo because it suggested to me the turf of an old graveyard, a memorable setting in the novel, and was happily surprised by the intricacy of the patterning it produced when it was deployed in mirrored pairs. Feeling that the delicate patterning of the weed and whitework needed the balance of something simple and rather contemporary, I chose Cheddar Gothic Sans, which "reads" legibly against the detailed background, for the type.