Under the Cover: Searching for Petronius Totem and, What about the robot chickens?

When we started working on the cover design of Searching for Petronius Totem, we had a lot of false starts – covers that weren’t quite conveying the right tone. The problem was, we weren’t really sure what the tone should be. After all, how do you sum up a novel that features an unrepentant narrator who is described as a “Pathetic Skirt-chasing Middle-Aged White Guy with a Drinking Slash Drug Problem,” provocatively takes on lofty ideas such as art and love and authorship, and includes an epic cross-Canada road trip, a knitting assassin, and flying edible robotic chickens?We were puzzled until the author, Peter Unwin, had an idea. What if, he suggested, the book’s paratext (that is, everything that is not the main text of the novel itself – the blurbs, the dedication, the copy on the cover, and so on) was a continuation of the book itself? In the book, our narrator, Jack Vesoovian, is kicked out by his wife and becomes determined to get her back – so what if the dedication at the front of the book is a plea to her?

We turned to blurbs. Instead of the standard practice of soliciting blurbs from other authors, that (for example) praised the book’s energy and Unwin’s sly satirical writing and postmodern jabs, could we use the traditional blurb real estate on the cover to give a sense of the book’s seriously offbeat humour? Could we hint at the plot, surrounding the disgraced artist Petronius Totem and the shadowy, sinister Leggit Company? Most of all, could we entice some future bookstore browser to glance at the back cover and think, “Seriously, what IS this?”(And in fact, Peter Unwin fully expected publishers to have the same reaction. After we’d signed a contract, Peter wrote to us: “I never really expected to get this book published, I nearly fell out of my chair when Hilary [his agent] sent me an email announcing your decision; my first thought was “these people must be crazy.” Maybe we are – and we ran with it.)It wasn’t from a lack of good conventional blurbs to choose from (for example, Bill Gaston wrote, of one of Unwin’s previous books, that “Peter Unwin’s prose is at once exuberant, tough and elegant.”) The back cover of Searching for Petronius Totem now reads:And when it came to the design of the front cover, we decided to make the book look like something you might find in a second-hand bookstore of dubious quality – the cover battered and worn, maybe stained, like something that just might be unsavoury. We even discussed removing the name “Peter Unwin” from the jacket entirely (and having the author listed as “Jack Vesoovian,” the narrator of the book) – but ultimately we decided that while that would be fun for our postmodern paratext-as-text game, it might be more confusing to readers than anything else. Luckily for us, our designer Natalie Olsen (of Kisscut Design) found a way to hint at the question of just who is the author anyway. (She’s such an expert and intelligent designer – she even hid a few other bonus design features between the covers.)

Peter Unwin is someone who thinks seriously about what books are, as texts and as objects, and why they should exist in the world. He is currently completing a PhD, and his area of expertise is – not making this up – “the death of the book.” Incidentally, Searching for Petronius Totem is his eighth book.* * *Thanks so much to Kelsey at Freehand for sharing the cover story of Searching for Petronius Totem for Under the Cover! For more stories behind your favourite stories, click here.