Birnam Wood Gets the Paperback Makeover

New Zealand-born author Eleanor Catton’s bestseller Birnam Wood is one of “eight intriguing” paperbacks included in a New York Times piece about book design – “the paperback edition is the second chance, an opportunity to market a book at a lower price and, in many cases, with new cover imagery aimed at new audiences,” Scott Heller and Miguel Salazar report for the newspaper.

“The shift in perception can be quite dramatic or quite subtle, but the energies are redirected,” president and publisher of Farrar, Straus & Giroux Mitzi Angel says.

To be released in 2024, the paperback cover of Birnam Wood “presents Justin Metz’s overhead illustration of a forest from the perspective of a flying drone. Unlike the hardcover, this one is bursting with colour … The grassy enclave is shaped like an eye, a reference to the book’s surveillance themes.”

Original article by Scott Heller and Miguel Salazar, The New York Times, December 27, 2023.