Being a publisher is a bit like being a treasure hunter. Except you want to share the treasures you find with everyone. To share the joy of a first reading (for example, the eerie ending of Triumph over the Grave from this last collection): that is what a publisher lives for.
And to top it all, as a book designer, I get to invent the cover! As The Largesse of the Sea Maiden is all about entropy, and as Elvis is at the centre of the last story, I decided to combine these tropes on my cover. The King is still alive here, but you can see that the end is near.
Jesus' Son (on the right) – this book has more life in a single sentence than the others in their hefty tomes! Some people are unnecessarily alarmed by the modest size of this volume. That's the way I planned it: I feel that smaller books force a more intimate contact.
On the cover you can see an American side street, an American car and an American night. The crumbling USA is a very aesthetically pleasing subject, and you could spend days flipping through images of downright apocalyptic entropy. What struck me about Patrick Joust's photo was the contrast of light and dark, a Manichean juxtaposition in a trashy setting, which I think fits well with Johnson's book.
The excerpt embossed in gold on the dust jacket is looped (as is the spine): we enter the book in the middle of the action and the order of the events is mixed up. Eleven stories make up this micro-novel, but their chronology is whimsical at best.