BOOK OF NUMBERS - Joshua Cohen

The Book of Numbers is a book of ideas fizzing with energy. The novel touches on autobiography, family memoir, phoned-in ghostwriting, geeky tech history, transnational surveillance thriller and sex comedy – it is an epic journey through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first.

The theme of surveillance was the spark of this cover. We had admired the RGB wallpaper work of Carnovsky for a while (a Milan based artist/designer duo comprised of Francesco Rugi and Silvia Quintanilla.) Their RGB work experiments with the interaction between printed light and colours. Images in these colours are overlaid, lines and shapes entwine but when seen under a filter/coloured light one of the three layers is revealed.

The duo were given a large list of subjects from the novel, highlighting the ones that felt particularly important to be included. We then gave Carnosky an unusual circular grid. The idea was that this circle would fold down to wrap around the book as a jacket but when opened out would for an extraordinary poster of the novel.

Below is a brief bit from Carnosky:



‘When we were approached by Vintage to illustrate the cover artwork for Joshua Cohen’s Book of Numbers, we accepted with enthusiasm. Literature has always been one of our passions and we are avid readers. Another aspect that fascinated us is the book’s complexity and the richness of iconographic elements it contains. We have always loved complexity: indeed minimalism is not for us. What we tried to do, and most of all when Vintage allowed us to work in a magnificent round foldout format was exactly this, to try to render the book’s complexity by creating a sort of great celestial map, or zodiac, inhabited by the most diverse objects, animals, characters and deities. A zodiac of the absurd where the most strange and surreal encounters, between a pigeon and Krishna, an old Mac and a monkey or a buffalo and a helicopter, take place, just like in the popular phrase by Comte de Lautréamont ‘As beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table.’

Published by Harvill Secker in June 2015