Tree Abraham on Designing the Cover of Her Own Book, Cyclettes

Tree Abraham is a book designer, illustrator, writer, and maker of things. She also loves to cycle. So much so that she’s written a book, Cyclettes, where she documents a meaningful life only discovered and sustained through a two-wheeled lifestyle. Here she tells us about what it was like to design the covers for her own book.

At the book launch for Same Same, someone (it might have been me) asked book designer turned author Peter Mendelsund about the experience of designing his own book’s cover. He said he would not do it again (Alex Merto designed the cover of his next book). The reasons he gave were unsurprising and likely inevitable for any book designer turned author in a similar situation. As I was listening to his sage advice, I knew that if ever I was given the choice, I would most definitely be designing my own book cover. Now three years later, I have.

I began writing Cyclettes in late 2019. I was taking a break from another manuscript and thought it would be fun to begin a shorter project, maybe a heavily collaged poetic chapbook about my adventures on a bicycle. Then COVID lockdown happened and I had more time to write, and then more experiences riding my bike through the empty city streets, and then the fun project became a book-length work filled with cartographic doodles, research and reflections on motion, and vignettes about wanderlust and home.

The main edition of Cyclettes is being published by Unnamed Press (whose covers are usually designed by the talented Jaya Nicely), with a separate Canadian edition with Book*Hug Press (whose covers are sometimes designed by me). Both publishers were in full support of my desire to design the cover. And because I am greedy, I wanted two different covers.

If I was only the designer and not the author, this cover brief would have seemed easy. There is an abundance of visual and metaphorical imagery within the book to inspire highly graphic directions. But because of my intimacy with said imagery, it also posed the greatest challenge. I was hyper aware of the interior aesthetic: like a xeroxed zine or old textbook with black and white diagrams and scrap photography. I believed for a cohesive experience, the cover needed to align with the illustrative and typographic style inside, without overwhelming it. I wanted the cover to feel like a shell. Additionally, most of the imagery that I would have excitedly leveraged as a designer was quickly negated because, as the author, I knew it didn’t epitomize the core problematique.

As the author and designer, I wanted Cyclettes to have the best cover of all time. First, I had to figure out what I currently felt were the best book covers. As a craftsperson, I admire many covers for their ingenuity: when the visuals defy what I thought a visual could be, unusual type design, the vanguards of a destined-to-be-trend or a never-to-be-repeated-awkwardness that makes you tilt your head and chortle. From these greats, a narrower list exists of covers that I love personally, like they are a shard chipped off my artist’s soul. To aspire to create a cover that could sit among my all-time favorites was a fool’s errand because:

1. Those covers are rare, made by designers that are not me.

2. Those covers’ visual stylings might not align with my book’s textual stylings.

3. Those covers’ visual and textual stylings might align, but be misaligned to the style of the targeted readers.

The design process was both dream and nightmare. The publishers had given me near ultimate freedom to decide on the final package, which also meant ultimate responsibility of ensuring that package would sell. I spent time procrastinating with excessive mood boards and crude pencil sketches.

For both editions, I knew a bicycle should appear on the cover to attract cycling enthusiasts, but be conveyed in a peculiar way to reach a general literary audience. The Unnamed Press edition would be a casewrap hardcover and the Book*Hug Press edition would be a paperback, which immediately differentiated my approach.

I had designed a cover as the first page of the original manuscript. The organic element sitting atop a bicycle wheel offered a curious juxtaposition that echoed the metaphorical nature of the bicycle within the narrative. There is a pivotal growth spurt in the book pertaining to an ammonite and the transition from radial to spiraling pathways; paired with the black and white photograph-photocopy combo, the cover was a pure extension of the interior message and mood. However, because I was aspiring to make the best cover of all time, I dismissed this initial attempt and struggled through other concepts, before eventually returning to it for the Canadian paperback.

When I began the design process with Unnamed, they didn’t yet have answers from the printer as to the available effects for the casewrap. Ideally, I wanted the design to be embossed on a textured stock with a limited colorway. I designed options with these effects in mind, knowing that components would need to be reworked once effects were defined.

Based on Unnamed Press’ preferred option, I explored alternative typefaces and color combinations.

I was included in exploratory discussions with the printer to discuss options for the casewrap. There were a lot of variables to navigate: limited foil and cardstock color options, accuracy of an emboss, degradation of inks at folds, and absorption of Pantones over nonwhite paper. Luckily, I have had a lot of experience in book arts and production and was very familiar with the constraints, but also the possibilities. I was doubly lucky that the publisher and printer agreed to my proposed solution.

I chose a light sand colored stock with texture, printed a Pantone emerald ink overtop, and embossed. I was thankful for restrictions to be able to refine the design, while fully recognizing how arbitrary perfection seemed at this stage.

Everything I made for both editions I wanted to throw out. Likewise, while editing the interior, I wanted to delete everything that wasn’t my best writing ever, except then there would be no book. Cyclettes is not the best book of all-time, nor will it likely be my best book. For any work of art, I could torture myself for eternity with tweaks, erasures, total abandon for other torturous efforts to create something worth sharing. But I don’t. Instead, I usurp author-me with designer-me who practices playing deeply, then, cycling away to other projects, allowing the alchemy of today to be enough.

Cyclettes will be published in the US on November 1st and in Canada on November 10th. Preorder it here and here.