Hasta La Ideas

It’s not unusual to see the title of an author’s most well known work included on the cover of their latest book. But in the case of Harper Lee’s first novel in 55 years, the reference to her classic work of 1960 is evoked via some clever typographic shadowing…

The cover for the UK and Commonwealth edition of Go Set a Watchman, which will be published by William Heinemann on July 14, has been designed in-house.

Set in the mid-1950s, the novel features many of the characters from Lee’s hugely popular novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, some twenty years later. Go Set a Watchman was originally written before Lee’s most famous work (which has gone on to sell over 40m copies to date), and was discovered last year by Lee’s lawyer, Tonja Carter. Lee thought it had not survived.

According to the publishers “Scout (Jean Louise Finch) has returned to Maycomb from New York to visit her father Atticus. She is forced to grapple with issues both personal and political as she tries to understand both her father’s attitude toward society, and her own feelings about the place where she was born and spent her childhood.”

The publishing world has changed immeasurably since Lee’s first novel came out – and her new one is being duly promoted across all of the available platforms: on Twitter; Facebook; Tumblr; and Instagram.

*Update – below is the US edition of the book from Harper Collins. A less subtle (and more conventional reference) to TKAM and, it has to be said, a really strong illustration. And as author Jonathan Gibbs has pointed out on Twitter via @Tiny_Camels, does the UK edition really need both a visual and textual clue to her previous work?