I had been a Conscientious Objector during the Vietnam War, working at Chicago Wesleyan Memorial Hospital, 1968-1970. The novel reflects some of my own experiences there.

When the manuscript was finished after five months of writing, I sent Chapter 13 to Veronica Geng, fiction editor at The New Yorker, at Larry’s suggestion. At the same time, I sent the full manuscript to Pat Mulcahy at Vintage Contemporaries, the series that had created such a sensation with Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City. This was done on the advice of Maxine Chernoff, whose book of short stories, Bop, was in the process of being reprinted by the series after receiving a rave review by Francine Prose in the New York Times Book Review.

Two weeks later, Geng accepted the story for publication, and I was paid a dollar a word ($5,290). On that news, Vintage accepted the novel the following day. A paperback original, it was in print for eight years.

This development changed my profile for a while, because I was known as a poet. After writing a book-length poem, The Novel:  A Poem (New Directions, 1990), I wrote a second novel, December. It was a sustained, comical meditation by a scholar and “close thinker” on his family life at Christmas time. Farrar, Straus Senior Editor John Glusman wanted to publish it. However, he was not supported by the other editors, and the manuscript was returned. I was eager to return to poetry, so I put the drafts of December into a drawer and moved on.

I had no impact on the design of the book’s cover, but I liked its clarity and force very much when the book appeared. The eye-catching detail is of a hospital bed floating against a dark blue sky, above a road that splits into three: the fictional Malta, Indiana, on the left; Chicago straight ahead; and Saigon on the right. The story, of course, is set in Chicago. On the bed, completely covered by a U.S. flag, is a dead body.

The book’s type elements, on both the front and back covers, are vivid and impossible to misread. They include the story’s opening sentences:  “You can call me Holder.  It’s one of your basic names, like Gold, Paper, and Anxious. Most of us belong to the Church of Peace, which is German Protestant—Midwestern and Rural. We refuse to kill anyone with a gun, or with anything else other than good intentions.”

—Paul Hoover, author

From Rockaway was originally published in hardcover by Knopf then quickly thereafter  in paperback by Vintage Contemporaries.

At first the cover surprised me. There is only one mention of a tornado in the book, and it does not occur in Rockaway. But pretty quickly I loved how the well the image captured a sense of menace and uncertainty lurking on a perfect beach day.

Vintage Contemporaries was the beginning of the literary paperback. It was exciting to be part of something new and even more so to be alongside some of my idols like Raymond Carver, Denis Johnson, and Richard Ford.

That said, the book is now out of print, so…

—Jill Eisenstadt, author

The hardcover editions of both Days Between Stations and Rubicon Beach were published by an imprint of Simon & Schuster called Poseidon, which didn’t have its own paperback line. Another editor who had read Days Between Stations when it was first circulating had since moved over to Vintage and still had interest in the book. It was pretty serendipitous, a lot of circumstances aligning.

It was a very hip line, with all the good and bad associations that go with that, and I didn’t think of myself as a particularly hip writer. The keynote Vintage title, of course, was Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City, which preceded Days Between Stations by two or three years, and Jay helped put Vintage on the map and maybe a little bit vice-versa—in any case, it was a perfect marriage of novel and design. I think among the titles that Vintage was publishing then, my novels may have been something of an aberration—nonetheless, I assume that the upside far outweighed any downside of being on Vintage Contemporaries, and I’m sure my book got attention it wouldn’t have otherwise gotten.

Authors don’t have a lot of perspective on their own jackets. I’ve seen jackets of other authors’ books that I thought were very nice that the author in question hated. My book covers have been highly variable, in my opinion. You can tell when an artist has been inspired, and as a rule, more often than not, the simpler, the better.  I’ve tended to like the paperback covers more than the hardcovers, because I have a distinct sense that in many of those cases the artists have actually read the books, which I don’t believe is necessarily true with the hardcovers.

I loved those Vintage Contemporaries covers, particularly after really not loving the hardcover jackets. It’s hard to distill a novel down to a emblematic image, and the kind of novels I write don’t make it easier, but these were as perfect as if the artist had extracted the images from my own brain, especially the first one. That Days Between Stations illustration got picked up by many of the foreign editions, and also has been published with other pieces that have nothing to do with the book (which I assume was the artist’s choice and prerogative).

As to whether I had any input in the designs, I want to say yes but I don’t trust my memory on this. Again, it may be a testament to the artist’s interpretations that they were so apt it just feels as though I must have thought of them first.

—Steve Erickson, author

My entire experience with Vintage Contemporaries spoiled me. Bright Lights, Big City had electrified the once staid world of book publishing, and my first novel was about to become a part of the same family.

It’s a difficult novel to encapsulate in a cover but  Lorraine Louie and artist Rick Lovell delighted me. There is so much information in the image, such a strong, surreal portrait of a nerd. The WWII fighter plane crashing into the window is an image from the book, and the looming image of Dorothy in the window seems right out of the fevered imagination of my teenaged protagonist.

I don’t remember much revising at all. Even the text on the computer screen—”Hey, don’t sweat it, Earle.”—came from Rick, not from my book. He and Lorraine added more to my book than any other designer since.

—Trey Ellis, author

I did those covers for Vintage many years ago so it’s hard to recollect specific instances, and I don’t remember ever meeting Lorraine Louie. My contact, as I recall, was Judy Loeser, who was the art director.

I knew Judy through a mutual friend—Jeff Rund—who was a collector of illustrations living in New York. He came to visit me when I lived in the South of England and bought several paintings from me. When I visited him in New York, he took me to meet Judy at Random House, and that started a relationship that led to some very interesting commissions for me.

The covers tended to have a narrative content, and Judy was open to interesting ideas with very unintrusive typography—almost unheard of for me at that time producing mass-market paperback covers for the UK market.

According to my database, which is incomplete, I did seven Vintage Contemporaries covers.

They were all a pleasure to do, being given a great deal of artistic freedom to introduce a more subtle narrative into the image rather than the high impact stuff demanded by the UK publishing world at that time, and also a nice departure from the science fiction that I am most recognised for.

The only cover that I was slightly disappointed with was Ellen Foster, for which I had a nice idea which was rejected in favour of a different solution.

The story was about the thoughts of a young girl as she watched her grandmother dying in bed. The covers of the bed reminded her of the waves in the sea. The final cover worked well, I thought, but I didn’t think that the idea was as strong. The notion of death being like a sand sculpture slowly dissolving struck me as a rather poetic way of describing the event, which after all was what the story was about. It’s not my job to decide these things!

—Chris Moore, artist

I was the editor of the series for eighteen months in 1986/87. My tenure was short because it was a time of great upheaval in Random House at large. After working for five bosses in eighteen months, I had had enough.

Still, I was proud of the books I brought to this prestigious and beautifully packaged series: novels by Mona Simpson and Kaye Gibbons; a Vintage original in the form of Roddy Doyle’s The Commitments, later a fine movie; short stories from the South, The All-Girl Football Team by Lewis Nordan.

Working with Lorraine Louie was one of the highlights of a difficult assignment: I found many colleagues eager to cash in on the high profile Gary Fisketjon had established for the series. Lorraine didn’t play office politics. She was warm, professional, and resourceful.

The covers for Kaye Gibbons’ novel Ellen Foster show the progression of Lorraine’s design. I bought the reprint rights to this tale told by a whip-smart eleven-year-old orphan from Algonquin of Chapel Hill, whose cover featured a photo of an unmade bed with an old-fashioned metal headboard.

The first Vintage edition, issued in 1988, showcased the author’s name at the top in a bold purple box the color of the Easter vestments priests wore at the Catholic Church I attended as a kid. The cover illustration by Chris Moore featured an equally bold blue background with a four poster bed surrealistically floating in water of a similar hue. The blue sky above the bed glistened with gold stars; an arresting image of the way the world might look to a disoriented child. It was so bold in its colors and images that it might have been the cover of a children’s book, or a movie poster.

Two years later, in the spring of 1990, a new edition of Ellen Foster appeared, in a new design for the Vintage Contemporaries series overall. Gone were the boldly colored boxes on a grid with author, title, and illustration in a row from top to bottom. The boxes were now colored in subtle shades of sage, beige, and white: the illustration for Kaye’s beloved novel was now the same period-looking platinum print by David Hyman that had adorned the original Algonquin cover.

Though the author’s name was still on top, the illustration went beneath it. At the bottom was the title, just above Walker Percy’s quote calling Kaye’s heroine a Southern Holden Caulfield. Of course the VC logo, a gold ball floating on a blue oblong dissected by two red lines, remained the same, though all of the typefaces had gone from a blocky, all-caps sans serif to a much more delicate one that swirled and curled. Ellen Foster was spelled out in mauve.

The new cover was meant to appeal to a more sophisticated readership, one that would gravitate to a subtler approach. In truth, I liked them both.

I salute Lorraine Louie and regret her passing. She was a total pro.

—Patricia Mulcahy, editor

I thought my first novel was a story of a woman trying to learn to love her life. When my great editor at Vintage, Pat Mulcahy, called to talk to me about it, she said I was sort of missing the point. “Her daughter disappeared. Anne’s daughter, Sarah, is the heart of the novel. You’ve written a psychological mystery.”  I told her I expected most readers would figure out Sarah’s fate in the first fifty pages.

Pat was genuinely smart and funny, but she didn’t consider our editorial conversations debates. She said I was wrong.

A few weeks later, she sent the manuscript to Susan Kenney, whose novels included the superb In Another Country. Susan wanted to endorse the book, but she called Pat after about 100 pages and said she couldn’t keep reading unless Pat told her what had happened to Sarah. The mystery of Sarah’s fate was too much tension for her. Pat repeated all of this to me, just in case I was wondering which of us has been right from the start.

And then the first pass of the cover arrived, with Lorraine’s design and Rick Lovell’s unsettlingly ghoulish pastel graphic-Gothic portrait of a half-seen blonde girl. Pat sent me a copy of the proposed cover with a note that read, “What do you think?”

I don’t love admitting that I was wrong. Let’s just say, after dozens of reviews by dozens of opinionated people who’d read my novel, the design was unchanged. Everybody thought the Vintage Contemporaries art team had, as usual, got it just right.

And they had.

—Michael Downing, author

The Last Election was my first novel, written when I was 25, and I was a bit of a kid really. Just to be published at home in England was a blast; to get picked up in New York and published in the States as well was more than I could have imagined ever happening. I suppose the opportunity to go and get myself thrown out of American night clubs instead of London ones seemed a tremendous leap forward at the time.

I did love the cover, though. It took the book as a thriller, which was how at heart I meant it to be. It was the best jacket anyone came up with for that book, I’m sure.

More important, I loved the look of the imprint as a whole. It had a real Family-Of-Distinction sort of cachet about it, and for a no-name tyro like me to be part of it was a proper privilege, like someone telling me I was an actual grown-up writer. I wasn’t, but I wanted to be, and it did make me feel that way.

I was certainly in some excellent company—Richard Russo, Raymond Carver, Don DeLillo, Richard Ford—way better writers than me. It gave me a lot of confidence. Vintage Contemporaries felt like a bunch of people who had something to say about the shape and drift of the modern world that might really be worth listening to, and the sharp, laid-back elegance of the collective house style—sassy without ever getting dated—really helped create that feeling.  An accurate feeling, too—it was just very good publishing.

I tip my hat to Gary Fisketjon and all who were involved, and thank them very much indeed for including me.

—Pete Davies, author

Family Resemblances had two different covers, for the hardback and paperback. I don’t remember being asked for much feedback on either one during the design stage. I was what my editor, Anne Freedgood, called “a peaceable author”; I pretty much figured it was my job to write the book and theirs to publish it, which included giving it a cover.

To me, the hardback cover feels a little simplistic. Iconic elements of the story are present—a front porch, a Buick, a gazebo, a suitcase on the porch suggesting arrival and departure, the night sky—but they are gathered together in a contrived way that says a little too plainly, “See, here’s what you’ll find inside.” It’s as if the cover artist assembled a collection of signs rather than imagining his or her way into the world of the story. The assignment was carried out, I would say, dutifully rather than from the heart.

The cover of the paperback feels like it was done by someone who not only read the book but experienced it, became temporarily part of it—a reader-artist who felt a kind of ownership of the book. If the hardback cover was a summary, the paperback cover (with one barely noticeable exception: the falling gazebo in the upper left, which comes off as too schematic) was the story itself.

In this cover it’s as if the viewer is already living inside the book, walking down the block on which the main action of the story takes place. The Buick (which here is more accurately the age of the one in the story) becomes a framing device pictorially, which is exactly what it is in the novel as well. The house, which is the heart of the story, is seen reflected in its window, and the details of the house make it clear that the artist paid close attention to the physical world of the book. I’ve always taken to heart Conrad’s maxim that the writer’s first duty is to make the reader see, but of course it’s impossible to make a reader do anything; creative reading is required as well as creative writing. To create an excellent book cover, one must have made an imaginative commitment as a reader first.

The practice of creating images for book covers speaks to something very basic in people: we appear to be wired to have loyalty to a visual image. Every nation has its flag, every university its seal, every product its logo. Religions each have their visual symbol. Our expectations of the thing itself, even our understanding of its essence, somehow attach to an image, and this is true of a book cover, for better or worse. When it’s done well, it becomes a glimpse of what John Gardner said fiction is: “the entertainment of the soul.”

—Lowry Pei, author

The hardcover of The Garden State was originally published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich (now part of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). HBJ, of course, was a venerable and esteemed literary house, but it wasn’t really perceived as being at the red-hot center of publishing in the late 1980s. So when editor Robin Desser of Vintage made a preempt offer for the paperback rights, I was very pleasantly surprised.

Vintage Contemporaries had the reputation of being culturally of-the-moment, so I thought that being a Vintage author might give me street cred. I’m not sure that it really did—or that it made getting a reservation at the Union Square Café any easier—but I do feel that the Vintage imprimatur may have lifted my profile a little.

I never published another book with Vintage, so any sense of myself as a “Vintage Contemporaries author” was short-lived. I did meet a few other VC authors when Vintage brought several of us to Washington, D.C. to meet booksellers at Book Expo America (or whatever it was called then). I didn’t really get to know the other authors, though, and didn’t feel any particular artistic kinship with any of them, except maybe Richard Russo. I shared a cab with him and his wife and remember thinking that he was just a regular guy like me, writing as honestly and unpretentiously as he could about modern life.

But then there was another author—a well-known name whose reputation seemed to be based on a remarkably small opus—who made a stink at the front desk of our hotel when he didn’t like the room he’d been assigned. I remember marveling at the healthy sense of entitlement and self-worth. I’ve never been very good at the whole prima donna-writer-thing. At the time, I was just amazed and grateful that a publisher was actually paying my hotel bill.

I had no input into the design, so I was a little surprised when I first saw it. This was (I think) one of the first Vintage Contemporaries I had seen with a front illustration that bled to all four edges of the book. But it was still recognizable as a VC book, so I was satisfied.

My feelings about the illustration itself were mostly positive. I loved the color palette, and I thought the designer had really captured the rueful, searching, slightly absurdist tone of the stories. I did worry at the time that the obviously immature figure on the cover might make it look too much like a young man’s first book. But the fact is, it was a young man’s first book, so I’ve since changed my mind about that aspect of the design.

I think Vintage’s early designs did a great job of visually suggesting that all of the books shared a certain kind of contemporary sensibility—very true to the times—while also doing justice to the uniqueness of each book. I don’t think you see much of that kind of consistent look in book design today, except maybe in reissues of a particular author’s backlist.

—Gary Krist, author

[Richard Yates’s literary agent Ned] Leavitt arranged for Random House to reissue Revolutionary Road, Eleven Kinds of Loneliness, and The Easter Parade as part of their popular Vintage Contemporaries line, a deal that promised to revitalize Yates’s career somewhat. This happy prospect was diminished, however, when Yates saw the cover art, which so enraged him that he was tempted to stop the presses with legal action.

“Why has surrealism been chosen as the cover style for these novels, when I can find it on no other Vintage books?” he wrote in a memo to Leavitt.

The proposed cover for Revolutionary Road depicted a small suburban house and church within a floating glass jar, against which was propped a ladder; Yates thought this inexplicably evoked Sylvia Plath’s Bell Jar, that the ladder was a “mixed metaphor,” and that the church was “wholly inappropriate.” He demanded that the “three offending images” be removed and the house lowered to the ground.

As for the cover of The Easter Parade (two hanging dresses with folded human arms): “The picture is gruesome, to no purpose. Does it mean to suggest identical twins who have only coat-hanger hooks where their heads ought to be? I am entirely baffled and believe readers will be, too.”

With little change, though, the covers were allowed to stand.

—from A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates by Blake Bailey

My first book, House of Heroes, was accepted for publication very suddenly (before the manuscript was completed, I was barely out of graduate school)—thanks, I believe, to a confluence of favorable circumstances. A set of three of the stories won a national award, the award came with ready made blurbs from two literary star judges, the preliminary judge ended up being my editor, and in that brief moment her publishing house had some success publishing short stories. The Vintage Contemporaries paperback contract seemed to come along just as easily.

Vintage Contemporaries was a knockout series in the eighties and early nineties. Membership indicated one was vintage and new all at once. There were some wonderful members of this group, Raymond Carver and Richard Ford, Joy Williams and Richard Yates. The series had a look, it stood out, the authors’ names were spelled out in white in a band of bold color on the spine. You could collect them and put them all next to each other on your young person’s contemporary literature shelf.

Except for writing the book, which informed the illustrator, I had nothing to do with the cover. I liked the look of the series but the illustration on my cover was, ostensibly, the depiction of a scene in my story, “Anna In a Small Town.”

This “Anna” looked nothing like the Anna of my mind’s eye. The story is about a giant woman, a real one, who lived in the north woods of Wisconsin, worked at the town’s post office, played first base on her local tavern’s softball team. The giant is the narrator’s cousin, similar to one of my real cousins who is now deceased. I imagined she had bouffant hair and blue eye shadow, wore jeans and sneakers and her shiny Baldy and Mary’s Tavern nylon softball jacket.

I needed to accept that though Anna doesn’t look circa 1970’s Midwest casual, everything, psychologically, about the cover, illustrated by Vivienne Flesher, is true. Anna’s enormous presence amidst the ignoring crowd, her earnest adornment—a purse, looking miniaturized by her giant wrist—was something I had described. She has a distinct hairstyle, but the men and the other woman in the crowd resemble clothed mannequins with painted heads, differentiated only by color. The period of people’s clothing and especially Anna’s dress looks 1940s or 50s, possibly a mixture of periods—vintage, in other words.

The colors, the style, now that years have passed, transcend what might otherwise have become dated.  It looks modern, painterly, but also timeless, and I’m glad of that.

—Mary LaChapelle, author

In my contract for The Colorist, as I had with my first book, L.C. (published by Harcourt, Brace), there was a bit that stated I would be involved in decisions about cover design. With L.C., I was involved, but with The Colorist this was not the case, despite the wording in the contract.

The Colorist was the story of two women, a colorist and an inker who rewrite their own version of Electra (not to be confused with the real comic, Elektra) when that comic is terminated. It was also about their  adventures in the pre-Web world of art in the age of mechanical reproduction.

At first, I was a little dismayed with the cover because Electra wasn’t as I had imagined her, but in fact, the older comic book style was exactly right. The image of the colorist wearing a mask with paint smudged on it was graphically very different, more like illustration, reminiscent of Garth Williams’s pen and ink drawing, and I liked the stylistic contrasts which seemed to obliquely hint at what was going on in the novel.

I intended to write to Lorraine about the cover design, and now wish that I had.  One of those things you take for granted because you think there will always be time, and then it turns out there isn’t.

—Susan Daitch, author

Some writers accept covers, some reject covers, and some have covers thrust upon them. My experience with the covers of my novels has been largely in the latter category. At some point between the second pass of the manuscript and the arrival of the galley, I am presented with a cover. Occasionally I like the design, but when I don’t, I’m routinely informed, “We like the image, and it’s too late to change it.” So, I’m gloomy about some of my covers, especially the early books which came out in the 70’s, when cover design was pretty routinely boring.

In 1988, after an eight-year hiatus during which my editor moved house and didn’t take me with him, I was fortunate enough to sign a three-book contract with Nan Talese, who had recently arrived at Houghton and Mifflin. My third novel, A Recent Martyr, and a collection of stories, The Consolation of Nature, were the first two books I did with Nan. The H&M dust jackets, which had a consistent design—an illustration contained in a box on a solid background with the title and my name in thin lettering firmly outside the box—were fine with me.  I didn’t complain.

I was hopeful when I learned that the paperbacks for these two books would come from Vintage, as I had admired the look of their books for many years. Also, at that time Vintage just felt like the place everybody wanted to be. I think it still is, actually. The Vintage Contemporaries series was relatively new when my books were published, and  I suspect there are now some Vintage Contemporaries titles out there by writers who could no longer be described as contemporaneous.

I didn’t see the Vintage covers until late in the game, but I liked them both a lot, so mostly what I felt was relief. Each one clearly stated the designer’s indebtedness to two artists whose paintings I’ve long admired: Edward Hopper and Henri Rousseau.

The cover for A Recent Martyr has a lot of pink and dark green in it, a fashionable combo at the time. The image, a woman seated at a diner table, a cup of coffee in front of her, gazing moodily through a very large plate glass window at the street outside, has the sad, Hopperish quality of alienation that Americans instantly recognize as “us.”

The woman appears to be gazing at the very nice quote from Margaret Atwood in dark green print towards the bottom of the window. But the composition, including the clock that reads quarter-to-five (A.M? P.M.?  The light doesn’t let on.) leads the viewer’s eye to the un-Hopperish detail that says it all—a wrought iron balcony wrapped around what appears to be a stucco building with shutters. It’s quarter-to-five, and you are in New Orleans with a woman in a low-cut summer dress drinking strong coffee and trying to figure out what to do next.

The cover for The Consolation of Nature (which was originally titled Dead Animal Stories, but I probably don’t even need to go into that), pays homage to Henri Rousseau’s painting “The Dream.”  Another woman, this time on a couch and in profile, lounges in a tropical jungle in which various animals—a dog, a cat, some bugs—are moving about ominously. The fact that they are domestic animals and not the scary snakes and lions of the painting being quoted is—like the ironwork in the Recent Martyr cover—both ironic and informative.

The animals in this collection of stories are all urban creatures, some of them quite threatening—for example, rats—and all of them, sad to say, doomed.  The human characters muddle on with their lives, often nostalgic for the Garden of Eden, which is really right there, all around them, if only they could wake from the dream that is self-consciousness and see it.

I never met Lorraine Louie. I am saddened to learn that she is no longer among us and I appreciate this opportunity to say now, in a public way: Well done.

—Valerie Martin, author