Sketches: The Bewitched History Book

What do you do with a title like The Omni-Directional Three-Dimensional Vectoring Paper Printed Omnibus? If you think you can get away with it, why, you more or less ignore it when it isn't convenient! And have fun with it when you can, of course.

So I didn't use it on the page headers, or on the spine (though with the book coming in at 700-plus pages, there was certainly more room than usual), but I thought it'd be fun to use it on the cover, to set the tone for the book. (That, and I thought doing something a bit different might help to set the book apart from, you know, the several hundred other books on Bewitched that have been published through the years.)


First thought was to essentially divide the cover in half, and have that first part of the title as a sort run-on sentence — not without spaces or punctuation, but as though it were being said without taking a breath — with the "real" title on the bottom, and a cartoon figure of Samantha (from the familiar opening credits) zipping by as a dividing line. But the title has so many long words that it fitting them all comfortably into a paragraph with the structure I wanted at a large size became kinda difficult. I never could find a way to make it work the way I wanted to.

So I gave up on that, and set up the words as a list, instead. (I had a notion to put the words "The" and "A.K.A" in circles, to liven up the design a bit, but in the end I felt that would attract more attention to them than was warranted.)

(That would have been a cartoon figure of Darrin from the opening titles to the left of the book title, but when all was said and done, it didn't seem necessary. I thought about moving that image to the back cover, but it ended up much more difficult to get a reasonable color image from a screen capture for the cartoon Samantha than I had expected, and not wanting to go through that all over again, I kinda gave up on the idea.)


I like white covers — I think they're unusual and draw more attention to a book because of it. But I thought that white Bewitched logo on the blue background would be more familiar, and more quickly recognized. (And no, that isn't the actual logo, just something similar I set in type.) That, and all those twinkly stars — another iconic part of the opening credits — just didn't read well against a white background. (And yes, I know, the stars are actually white in the opening credits, but I prefer yellow.)

Web colors are doing a disservice to that blue — it's a bit less flat than what I see here. (I might need to adjust it a bit.)


(By the way, the Author tells me that the inspiration for the title came from a contraption that Dr. Bombay called "The Omni-Directional Three-Dimensional Vectoring Cadmium-Shielded Computer for Location Analysis.")