Spring 2025
Jacket required
A love of reading gives Jon Gray’s book covers their edge. By Robert Hanks [EXTRACT]
Anyone with an interest in modern literature probably owns a cover by Jon Gray – usually credited to ‘gray318’. Now that vinyl records have become more niche, book cover design is perhaps the most democratic form of art. It is likely that some of his best known work is in more households than The Fighting Temeraire, The Hay Wain or The Singing Butler – though, admittedly, the Gray will almost certainly be less prominently displayed and more dog-eared. But in a competitive, increasingly pressurised field, Gray has sustained a successful career for more than 30 years. The contemporary writers he has designed for include Jonathan Coe, Jonathan Safran Foer, Jonathan Lethem, Deborah Levy, Sally Rooney, Salman Rushdie and Zadie Smith, and among the classics he has rejacketed are books by Orwell, Salinger, Plath and John Kennedy Toole.
A large part of what makes Jon Gray’s covers interesting is his own interest in what is inside: ‘I really am keen to read the books,’ he tells me. That is perhaps partly a matter of inheritance: his late father was an archivist by profession, and an enthusiastic, even obsessive collector of books.
Robert Hanks, writer and editor, Cambridge
Read the full version in Eye no. 108 vol. 27, 2025
David Pearson (Eye
77)
has written that Gray’s cover for Everything
Is Illuminated (2002)
‘represents everything I’m afraid to do. There’s such energy in
his work, which is never over-processed. He leaves his blemishes in,
and it makes his work feel daring and essential.’
Gray has been working on a new edition of Hermann Hesse for the leading German literary imprint Suhrkamp Verlag. The covers take central images from each book: the wheel from Unterm Rad (Beneath the Wheel, 1906) and a ferryman on a river in Siddhartha (1922).
Eye is the world’s most beautiful and collectable graphic design journal, published for professional designers, students and anyone interested in critical, informed writing about graphic design and visual culture. It is available from all good design bookshops and online at the Eye shop, where you can buy subscriptions and single issues.