Alan Bennet quote
Some things in the first draft were clearly never going to make it past the editors, including this adaptation of an Alan Bennet quote (from The History Boys)…
Category: Behind the Scenes
The cover that never was
The US publishers, The Penguin Press, came up with this design for the book cover. I really like this concept – I think it neatly encapsulates the core theme of The Knowledge about how you can learn to do and build essential things to support yourself, if you ever needed to. The graphic illustrates the progression from the most basic materials of sticks and stones, through to spinning gathered fibres into your own ropes, and reinventing the battery or constructing a wind turbine from scavenged components. But when The Penguin Press team saw the UK cover from Bodley Head they decided they preferred the simplicity and elegance of the design (and to be honest, I agree too) and also adopted it for their publication. So unfortunately this imaginative composition will never see the light of day, but it does mean that The Knowledge is published across the English-speaking world with exactly the same title and front cover – something that rarely happens.
Want to read more about the behind-the-scenes fundamentals of how our modern world works, and how you could reboot civilisation if you ever needed to...? Check out The Knowledge - available now in paperback, Kindle and audiobook.
Future-proofing the proofs
Several month’s before a new book is due to be released, the publishers send out advance proofs to editors so that it can be reviewed in newspapers, magazines, and websites in time for its launch, as well as to people you hope will say nice things about it for the blurb on the back cover. The cover for these paperback proofs is generally the same design that the final published jacket cover will use but the UK publishers, Random House, thought they’d try a different tack with The Knowledge to tickle editorial curiosity.
Playing with the theme of preserving knowledge in case of the apocalypse, the proof copies were bound in bright yellow covers, and labelled as a quickstart guide for rebooting civilisation from scratch.
