Blue tendrils climb upwards, adorned with roses and thorns and set against a stormy gray cloth sky. The pattern feels toxic and intoxicating, beautiful and prickly and tangled. It channels the torrid love affair and generational intensity in Wuthering Heights. Artist Coralie Bickford-Smith designed the cover for the first series of Penguin’s Clothbound Classics. “It’s got the wildness and the untamability—the drama,” she told Observer. “Sometimes they just happen, and it’s so organic.”
You’ve probably seen her work even if you don’t know her name. Since the initial series of ten covers, which Bickford-Smith completed in a short two weeks for the 2008 release, her clothbound designs have become must-haves for bibliophiles. They’re routinely on BookTokers’ shelves and have even been spotted on Kate Middleton’s desk.
Bickford-Smith, who, in addition to being an illustrator, is an author with four published books of her own, took an interesting path to cover design that was anything but linear. When she was a child, she discounted her own cleverness, thinking, “‘I can’t take simple instructions; I can’t read out loud; I can’t enunciate.’ So it was books, books, books, drawing, drawing, nature. They were my buddies.”
SEE ALSO: Readers Will Fall in Love With New York’s First All-Romance Bookstore
Yet while her thoughts didn’t always articulate themselves eloquently, art allowed her to capture complex sentiments in a visual form and make sense of the world, distilling the chaos down to something legible and controllable. She grew up studying the patterns of William Morris and the multimedia oeuvre of William Blake and became fascinated by design, typography and the beauty behind books as well as the stories themselves.
During our conversation, Bickford-Smith vividly recalled one episode from her young life: when her mother had to sell many of their books. “I walked into the lounge, and all the books were piled up, and she just said, ‘Pick your favorites.’” The event was a key point in her developing obsession with stories.
As she grew, her passions caused friction with her parents, who tried to dissuade her from entering a creative field. There was so much stress at home that at 17, Bickford-Smith was living on her own. From there, she reconsidered what to do with her life and eventually began preparing for a career as a speech therapist. It was a conversation with her half-sister that helped Bickford-Smith remember she wanted to be an artist. Bickford-Smith recalls her saying, “‘Hang on—you want to do art.’ And then it suddenly hit me, and I just thought, ‘I don’t want to regret this.’”
Bickford-Smith earned a spot at Reading University—“I pestered every tutor interviewing,” she said—in a course of study that covered all of her interests, from typography to wood engraving. That education opened doors, but after graduating, she took jobs in publishing and advertising design, then struggled to find work. That is, until an ad for a position at Penguin appeared in the newspaper, like a message from destiny.
Coralie Bickford-Smith’s beautiful bindings
One day, in a secondhand bookshop, Bickford-Smith stumbled upon a volume detailing Victorian bookbindings by Ruari McLean. She fell for the vivid patterning and minimalist coloration of these historical works, which inspired her to look to the past for inspiration. Looking forward, she made these designs her own, departing from the nineteenth-century precursors more than she conformed to them.
She worried, however, that beautiful and ornate bindings were a thing of the past in a world in which technology was already threatening to displace print media. The threat of the Kindle replacing bound paper books loomed large after its 2007 announcement. But despite her initial concerns, Bickford-Smith has achieved great success, chiefly designing several series of new classics editions for Penguin that readers the world over have collected, instilling shelf envy in their fellow bibliophiles.
To Bickford-Smith, “the stories are the thing,” though she hopes people also view her volumes as cherished objects. Sustainability is a focus for her and, just like books were her treasure trove as a child, she wants her editions to resonate across time.
“Books are like treasured memories. You find things inside them: an airplane ticket, or a ticket stub. They become little time warps,” she mused. “And then when I’m gone or somebody else picks up the book, they find this little history in them. I really love that.”
One of the barriers to the sustainability Bickford-Smith would like to see associated with her designs is that the foil patterning sometimes deteriorates through user handling. She told Observer she is fighting to have the cover designs screen-printed instead. She is, she said, an “advocate for the tactile,” and her artistic process involves hand-drawing before rendering anything digitally. She often begins with a preliminary sketch, after which she uses a lightbox and layout pad. From there, she transfers her work to Illustrator and works on a tablet.
Her exhaustive hybrid process also has, perhaps unsurprisingly, a literary component in that Bickford-Smith reads every book she designs. “There’s such a responsibility,” she said. “Because people love these books so much.” She tries to imbue each and every shape with layers of meaning and reasoning.
When we spoke, Bickford-Smith had just finished designing her 100th U.K. clothbound, The Fall of the House of Usher. Every detail she included in the cover has significance, from the blackberries dotting black cloth (based on the ones she and her partner pick from a nearby urban woodland) to the skull pattern modeled after an illustration from William Blake’s burial site.
As noted, the illustrator’s creativity doesn’t end with her imaginative cover designs; she has also written and created the art for vivid picture books similarly laden with profound meaning, such as her first book, The Fox and the Star, which was partially based on her relationship with her mother.
To stay focused, Bickford-Smith anchors herself with routine. She journals three pages each morning, often goes on a run around a nearby cemetery and works in her home studio for the majority of the day. Most recently, she’s taken up oil painting and enrolled in a class. She’s a big believer in stepping out of her comfort zone. “I’ve realized that the things you feel resistance to are probably the things you need to do,” she said. Her own career has been full of risks taken, and scores of readers thank her because we all, to some degree, judge books by their covers.
