Cue, a handwritten letter to a bizarre very unlikely seeming address (tracked down by a bit of super sleuthing)! I was beside myself with excitement when a couple of weeks later I logged in to my inbox to an email from the man himself who was (almost) just as excited as we were about our edition of Gilbert and who generously passed on his thoughts. The thing is, with Markus Zusak we knew that he’d already read and adored Gilbert Grape – my colleague Emma who is excellent and keeping tabs at what’s going on in the book world had spotted that Markus had listed Peter Hedges’ debut novel among his top books over on his Good Reads profile. With this fact in mind, we had high hopes that getting Markus to pass comment should be a straightforward thing… the only slight flaw in our plan was that we had no direct contact link to Markus and he lives in Australia. This is because if you’re asking an author to comment on a book, quite often you’re also asking them to read it, and of course, you need to allow a reasonable amount of time for this to happen.
A book’s tagline, much like it’s cover, is something that we begin thinking about very early on in the publishing process. From a distance you might not realise how it has been constructed, but when you’re up close it’s a thing of true beauty: hundreds of tiny pieces of card, each one cut and carefully arranged by hand to create a scene in a quiet American store, where a woman is flirting with a shop assistant.Īpart from Marian’s gorgeous artwork, there’s another element of our Gilbert Grape cover that I’m particularly proud of and that’s the endorsement tagline from one of our favourite writers: Markus Zusak – the author of “The Book Thief”.
Marian works in collage and the original artwork for Gilbert really is something incredibly special. And on the day when the books arrived back from the printer, I was able to hand her a copy and see her reaction. This meant she was able to deliver her amazing artwork to us in person, to add extra details as our ideas shifted. What made working with Marian even more special is the fact that she’s actually been a Mr B’s customer for many years and lives locally.
It was striking and different and also wonderfully voyeuristic, which was perfect for our grocery store concept. It was a book that sat proudly on our table a few years ago, and which we all commented on. We all remembered Marian Hill’s striking cover for “Tomorrow, There Will be Apricots”. When we happened upon the idea of a shop, I instantly knew who we should ask to do the design work. We all crowd around my messy desk and think about key elements of the book and how we’d like a reader to perceive the story from its cover. We’re never usually stumped for ideas, although the quality of the concepts at this point can be pretty varied! Some of the ideas that didn’t make the cut for the Gilbert Grape cover included: a car weighted down on one side (read the book to find out why!), a fairground merry-go-round and a design which would have been a massive spoiler for the story’s ending. One of my favourite elements of working on a new Fox, Finch & Tepper title is coming up with a concept for the cover. You’ll find lots more information about the narrative of Gilbert Grape over on our book page, but for now I thought I’d tell you about some of the cool/weird/brilliant stuff that happened behind the scenes when we were publishing this book.
#GILBERT GRAPE FULL#
It’s a funny, moving, quirky novel full of quintessentially small-town characters, family dramas and emotional twists and we’re so proud to be able to introduce it to new readers. This is a novel about family, about brotherly love and about a young man, wracked with desires beyond his dwindling hometown, but stranded by his sense of duty. Fellow fans of the film will already understand why we fell in love with the story of Gilbert and his dysfunctional life. It’s a book that we came to via the critically acclaimed 1993 film adaptation, which saw Johnny Depp as the troubled, brooding Gilbert and a baby-faced Leonardo DiCaprio as his mentally-disabled brother, Arnie. We’re thrilled to be introducing Peter Hedges’ debut novel “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape” to UK readers.
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