Reading with... Paul Buckley

photo: Ingsu Liu
Paul Buckley oversees a diverse group of designers and art directors creating book covers and branding for 15 imprints and countless authors at Penguin Random House. For the past two decades, his iconic design and singular art direction has been showcased on thousands of covers and jackets, garnering him hundreds of awards and frequent invitations to speak in the United States and abroad. His book, Classic Penguin: Cover to Cover (Penguin, July 26, 2016), showcases more than 10 years of stunning cover designs from Penguin Classics. Buckley lives in Brooklyn, N.Y., with his wife, Ingsu Liu.

On your nightstand now:

The manuscript for Ben Loory's amazing new book, Tales of Falling and Flying. I like to read books I'm designing covers for as I fall asleep, as that weird between states of consciousness area is fertile for imagery--often unusable, but every once in a while a gem of an idea will present itself--if I actually remember it the next morning.

Favorite book when you were a child:

Audubon's Field Guide to North American Reptiles and Amphibians. For much of my life, I was torn between wanting to be either a herpetologist or an illustrator. Eventually my journey led me into design and art direction. I still peer under every log and stone I have the strength to hoist. Last week my finds were a copperhead, a ringneck snake, four water snakes and one garter snake.

Your top five authors:

This is an impossible task, truly, so next week they might be different, but it seems that not unlike music, my tastes lean toward formative years of my youth in which I read everything I could find by Truman Capote, Kurt Vonnegut, and Stephen King. Then later when I arrived at Penguin, I became enthralled to be working with the likes of T.C. Boyle in real time and amazing authors like Mary Shelley within the Classics.

Book you've faked reading:

I've always loved reading and am pretty sure I've never had to fake having read anything. I have literally designed thousands of book covers and clearly I cannot have enjoyed every one of those books, but be it for school or for work, I do my best to read them. Especially with fiction, in the instances where I cannot find the time to read a certain title, I may art direct it with someone who has read it, but I'll not design the cover myself.

Book you're an evangelist for:

Anything by Sam Harris.

Book you've bought for the cover:

The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway, designed by the always amazing Jason Booher. It has pink and green flocking and is absolutely beautifully loud and distinctive. I was on an escalator going down and saw it on a table on the floor I was leaving and had to go back upstairs and grab it.

Book you hid from your parents:

What book would one hide from one's parents? Spells to Conjure Up Satan? I Fell in Love with My Dog? No, I've never felt the need to hide any book(s) from my parents.

Book that changed your life:

Siddhartha by Herman Hesse. I learned to stop wanting to be somewhere else.

Favorite line from a book:

"All movements go too far," from Bertrand Russell's Unpopular Essays.

Five books you'll never part with:

Grammar of Ornament by Owen Jones, 1877 edition.
Les élémens, ou Premières instructions de la Jeunesse by Étienne de Blégny, 1740 edition.
The Book of Genesis Illustrated by Robert Crumb.
Salty Sayings, illustrated by Henry R. Martin, 1959.
Every art book my father gave me as a child.

Book you most want to read again for the first time:

Any of Carlos Castaneda's books. They were hugely influential on me as a child, and now that I'm a jaded adult New Yorker, I wonder, were I to re-read them, if I'd just think "yeah, right..." or whether it would re-instill in me the sense of wonder it did when I was young and impressionable. My major takeaway from these books was to stop requiring firm answers for exactly how everything works and just enjoy the wonders of the world, almost in an agnostic way. Which possibly explains why I did not excel in science and math.

Why should we buy your book:

This book was conceived and put together not only to appeal to an art and design crowd--our covers excel in this area anyway, so it will sell well to that crowd regardless--but my intent has been to have content that would appeal to anyone who reads the New York Times Book Review or the Paris Review, McSweeney's, the New Yorker, or listens to NPR, etc. Basically anyone who appreciates literature and books. We go out of our way to have authors, designers and artists of every stripe discuss the process of creating covers, which trust me is not always pretty and diplomatic. We have everyone from James Franco (yup, James Franco) to Erica Jong discussing this fascinating yet never discussed publicly facet of creating these well loved books.
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