The Weeds by Katy Simpson Smith

From Macmillan Publishers:

In Katy Simpson Smith’s The Weeds, two women, connected across time, edge toward transgression in pursuit of their desires.

The book was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in April 2023. Picador’s paperback edition is scheduled for April 2024. The jacket design is by Grace Han, with art direction by Na Kim. Gretchen Achilles designed the book’s interior.

Mark Sinclair included Han’s work in his “Book covers designs of the year 2023” for Creative Review, and comments:

Single-colour book covers are rare and I’ve not come across one that takes the blue palette of cyanotypes and employs it across both illustration and typography. Everything is stretched, too, while the overall aesthetic feels indebted to early New Directions paperbacks. Grace Han’s intriguing cover does an awful lot with very little.

The explicit oblongness is indeed an eye-catcher. For a second I was tempted to find typographic meaning in the weeds illustration, too: the dense pattern of blue and white with an occasional diagonal is reminiscient of extremely elongated typeface designs.

I previously hadn’t paid close attention the more condensed styles of Etna. Mark Simonson’s design is inspired by the Aetna wood type style of the late nineteenth century, which also was produced in various widths. The font in use is Etna XX Condensed Light, the narrowest out of thirty styles in the family. It’s similar in feel to Joy Redick’s Willow, which is even narrower, and also based on wood type, namely a Clarendon. Etna is distinguished by its flared strokes, among other things.