Possible print books

For quite a while I’ve considered making the Twin Canterlots series available in print format. Two questions that niggled at me, though, were how to arrange the stories into volumes and how to design the covers. Recently I finally was able to work through both difficulties.

Solving the former just took grinding away until I came up with something reasonably satisfactory, if not ideal. I decided on four volumes, as follows.

• Cook’s Tour: Foreign Nationals of Unusual Importance, Diplomatic Overtures, Mister Cook Goes to Canterlot, Talking Heads, “The Farmer in the Dell”, appendix (chronology for MLPFIM, MLPTM, and MLPEG)
• Brass Ring: Rose Brass, Amphorae, “Oops.”, Three-act Play, “Conference”
• Bookends: Lectern’s New and Used Books (Summer Break, Fall Semester, Spring Semester), Virga
• The Campus: The Campus, Off Campus, and any other post-Virga stories I come up with in the future

(I realized later this set-up ensures every volume includes stories on both sides of the portal. I hadn’t planned that, but I consider it serendipity.)

To solve the latter, I ended up doing what I always end up doing, and what I should have done in the first place: rummage around on the Web looking at vintage examples. I designed and tweaked versions for paperback, casebound (hardback), and dust jacket. Other than the wax seal, which was a freeware vector image, I created and assembled all elements; the corner and spine flourishes are glyphs from a couple of dingbat fonts.

Front covers

Spines

Wraparound views

Comments

[Scampy]

All of these are gorgeous

[Dave Bryant]

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Thankee! I’m inordinately pleased with them.

[dragstormer]

Dude those are cool

[FanOfMostEverything]

Exquisite work on all of them.

[Dave Bryant]

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Thanks very much! After all that hand-wringing, I was pleased to come up with a design scheme that I really liked.

[iisaw]

Very nice! I loved matched sets!

[Dave Bryant]

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I do as well, and I never considered doing otherwise. I did try, though, to balance contemporary and vintage design elements, for two reasons. One, of course, was to be pleasing for a modern readership. The other was to reflect, so to speak, the two worlds connected by the mirror-portal.