Book Design Failed Chanel Miller. And That’s a Justice Issue.

“When I listened to her, I understood: You have to hold out to see how your life unfolds, because it is most likely beyond what you can imagine. It is not a question of if you will survive this, but what beautiful things await you when you do. I had to believe her, because she was living proof. Then she said, Good and bad things come from the universe holding hands. Wait for the good to come.”

― Chanel Miller, “Know My Name: A Memoir”

A book cover impacts whether or not we pick it up to read; whether we buy it and put it in our homes; whether we revisit it a few years from now; whether or not it makes it into class syllabi and policy discussions. A book cover that does not accurately set expectations for the experience it contains is a failed book cover.

“Know My Name” is a book of reclamation, taking her life back from both rape and the justice system and owning her true name: Chanel Miller.  .A book with the immediacy of “Know My Name” deserved a cover that indicated its power. But with the original book cover, it’s too easy to continue not knowing Chanel Miller’s name.

Did the first edition cover invite us into the phoenix-fire of Chanel Miller’s voice? It did not. And its failure to do so suggests a larger market relationship with women’s voices.

When Miller’s story first became known, her name as “Emily Doe”, the anonymous victim of a rape at Stanford. It was pre #MeToo. The perpetrator went to jail for three months. Her victim statement was read 18 million times. 

The book did have some visibility on publication in September 2019, largely due to the coverage Miller received through CBS’s 60 Minutes interview the same week. But unlike other books of similar energy and audience (for example: “Untamed” by Glennon Doyle), “Know My Name” quickly disappeared from the NYT bestseller list. Take its position on the NYT bestseller list. It debuted at #5 the week of October 13, 2019. The second week it dropped to #10. The third week it was #14. The fourth week it was gone.

In contrast to “Untamed”--a book with explosive color and glitter with a bold font, a book that said “You haven’t read something like me before”--the cover to “Know My Name” felt familiar and even repetitive when viewed on bookstore shelves. And this is because it was repetitive.

The cover font appeared on a wide array of books available at the same time. It appeared on the cover of Robert Pinsky’s Collected Works. It appeared on the cover of  Pulitzer prize winning, Iowa-workshop-teaching Marilynne Robinson’s two recent essay collections “The Givenness of Things” and “What Are We Doing Here?”. It appeared on the cancer memoir  “My Bright Abyss” by Christian Wiman, Poetry Magazine’s editor-in-chief. It appeared on fiction (historical, literary) and art criticism and poetry. What these authors have in common? They are all white, past midcareer, and all academics.

The font is called “Lydian”, a “new papyrus” for the intellectualism with an artsy vibe. It is so widespread that Vox published a piece on it in January 2019. The article by Kaitlyn Tiffany covered the font’s history and it’s academic-inclined vibes in publishing. While designed in the 1930s, Lydian’s use has skyrocketed in the past decade and has become a stand-in for “artsy” or “poignant” content in books.  As Tiffany summarizes, “Lydian has represented a slight, simple wedding of darkness and fun, of the instant and the painstaking, the mass-produced and the extremely valuable.”

In short: inappropriate for a groundbreaking memoir about female embodiment, the justice system, and rape culture.

The mistake seems to have begun with the choice in designers. Jason Ramirez designed the cover and Nayon Cho designed the cover art.  Both designers have notable portfolios but nothing with the cultural relevance of “Know My Name.” Ramirez’s online portfolio shows multiple uses of the Lydian font to the point that it dominates his style. Might I say, he has a “type”? (pun 100% intentional). Cho does not have a website for her work but she is noted as the senior designer for Random House Publishing and credited in this Vanity Fair article for the rise of floral book covers. She has a distinctly “feminine” style.

One argument in defense of the cover is that it does not sensationalize Miller’s pain, an easy trap in a story about rape in America. Miller’s name and the title of the book are shown in identical font sizes, meaning they are of equal importance for the cover.

And the cover art does offer a resonant metaphor for the meaning-making that Miller engaged in. “Kintsugi” (or kinsukuroi) is the Japanese art of repairing ceramics with gold. The original is gone but something beautiful is made out of the remaining pieces. But this metaphor falls apart. Chanel Miller is very explicit about her Chinese Heritage and its importance to her. Once this is known, it becomes challenging to assume that the designer understood the profound differences in cultures and identity, especially when it is used to promote and declare the name of a Chinese-American author.

In the same way that our justice systems need reform to account for justice for rape survivors, so our design should evolve to account for the power of the written word when it belongs to someone like Chanel Miller. We need the publishing industry to step it up and honor women’s voices with design that amplifies their power and artistry, not blend in with the white definitions of intellectual legitimacy.