Sketches: Vernon Dent: Stooge Heavy

I almost never have a chance to do anything lively and fun with the interiors of the books I design — most books don't readily lend themselves to it (this was the rare exception), so when the opportunity came up again, I had (what I thought was) a great idea. This was a book about a character actor, a second banana, little known now, probably known no better then, but one of the faces you've seen in hundreds of films, even if you never knew his name. In fact, that was to be part of the title of the book.

So I thought it might be fun to use a banana as a sort of subtle design element. Spent the entire morning looking for just the right one, too — I had something specific in mind (it would have to be recognizable at a small size), and you'd probably be surprised at how many there were to choose from. (Just a simple search for photographs with the term on iStockphoto yields an impressive 10,163 results. Now you know why it took the entire morning.) Having found one I thought I could use, I made a few modifications, most notably converting the image to greyscale, since there would be no option for color inside the book.


I wanted to use the bananas at the chapter breaks. You'd see them every so often, but (hopefully) not so much so that they'd wear out their welcome. (I could use them on the cover, as well, though I hadn't really thought ahead any further than that.) My first thought was to incorporate them with the chapter numbers, but once you obscure the shape of the object, it becomes difficult to make out what the object is. (It seemed to in this case, at least.) You can get around that by making the object bigger, but then you begin to lose the subtlety. So as a solution, I put a small photo on the bottom of the beginning of each chapter. (This had a super-secret added benefit, in that should the idea did not go over well with the Author, I could remove the banana but add space to the top of the page.)


Then came a moment of insecurity, and I began to wonder: if you remove the distinctive yellow color from a banana, is it still a banana? That's not a philosophical question, but one of perception: will the humor be lost if the object isn't immediately recognizable? My wife's objective opinion was that she knew what it was without a second thought, and that was enough reassurance for me.

About five minutes later, more or less, I remembered that the title of the book had changed — removing the "second banana" reference. (The Author, Editor and Publisher had been back and forth and back and forth on this, but once I got this idea in my head, I conveniently forgot the rest of the discussion.) There wasn't much of a punchline to the visual joke without that title, so the notes and sketches have been filed away, to await another book on another "second banana," another day.

The cover was still lots of fun, though. I had a fairly simple idea from the start, I just needed to choose the details as I went along. (That's a sort of rudimentary color study on the right.) It took an endless afternoon to get the letterspacing just so, particularly the a/v combination in "Heavy," because the letterforms don't fit together as well as all of the others. (Even now I'm fighting the compulsion to go back and make adjustments.)

I decided to use the discarded title after all, as a subtitle, because I felt that it was necessary on the cover, for both editorial and design reasons.