Design is a byproduct of a situation, a set of circumstances, and you can clearly see that the designer was not in control of this.” 'The designer would take the opportunity to do something new with this. He says the cover looks like it was chosen by a marketing team, rather than by a designer and for its merits as a book jacket. It’s something that originated in the past but is now being published now, and that isn’t reflected in the cover.” 'There’s so much more that’s interesting how the book came to be-it’s sort of time travel in a cool way. ' was written in the ‘50s, but it was published in 2015,' he says. He calls the cover 'a pastiche, and a parody' and thinks HarperCollins missed a chance to tell a compelling story. Graphic designer Paul Sahre, who has designed covers for Hemingway's work, sees it differently. In that regard, the cover works well as a narrative device, because the first chapter opens to Scout sitting in a train car. Watchman takes place 20 years after Mockingbird, and Scout is returning home to Maycomb, Alabama, from New York. “It’s saying something new is happening, with the hit-you-over-the-head symbolism of the tree, which doesn’t have the leaves on it.

“It clearly relates to the old cover and that time period,” says Jason Booher, the art director at Blue Rider Press, a Penguin imprint. Original 1960 cover of To Kill a Mockingbird. It is meant to convey that the new story is an extension of the original book. The HarperCollins press team wouldn't let us talk to Taylor, but the design is clearly meant to evoke the original cover for Mockingbird, which featured a lush tree with thick, green leaves and a similar 1 brush-stroke font. The cover, designed by Jarrod Taylor at HarperCollins, looks like something out of the 1960s. Lee’s name and the book’s title are typeset in Caterina, a Linotype font designed in 1999. It's all set against a dusky blue backdrop. It shows a black tree with a few yellow leaves, and a train approaching on yellow tracks that emerge from the distance. Of course, few people have actually read the book, but most have seen the cover. But now it's here, along with the reviews and the disillusioning discovery that Atticus Finch, American literature’s favorite paragon of justice, is in fact a bigot. The story of its discovery-it was actually Lee's first draft of Mockingbird-and publication reads like a novel of its own, and the whole affair has been mired in controversy. Go Set a Watchman, Harper Lee's retro-facing sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird, hit bookshelves this week. Go Set a Watchman was published on July 14, 2015.

To kill a mockingbird book cover