Thomas Taylor where are you?

The ‘fresher vs. experienced’ debate

Anybody heard about Thomas Taylor? No way! Because, even I didn’t knew about him until one day I discovered him inside the covers of a favorite book of mine. For those who still haven’t got an idea Thomas Taylor is an illustrator.

You must be thinking why I’m so concerned about this unknown person. Well I’m nobody to have concerns for him but I simply wonder where he has disappeared? I have already told you that I discovered him inside the covers of a favorite book of mine. And that book is none other than the first book written by J.K.Rowling. Yes! You guessed it right -- Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.

Thomas Taylor was the person who did the cover illustration for the U.K. edition of this book. A book, which brought fortunes for J.K.Rowling and heralded a new era in children’s book publishing. An interesting piece of fact is that this illustration which he did for Bloomsbury was his first ever commissioned work too. A first time writer Rowling and a first time illustrator Thomas, both worked on a book which became famous later. What happened next? While J.K.Rowling became a celebrity writer with her book, what happened to Thomas Taylor? Why didn’t Bloomsbury commission him to illustrate for their next Potter books?

In order to find out some facts I searched on the web. Surprisingly, I couldn’t find much about him but I did found info about other illustrators who worked on the later books in the Harry Potter series. I was really intrigued by this I searched again. All I could gather was a short bio of him on www.pfd.co.uk (Update 17/dec/07: This link used to automatically lead to Thomas's Bio which now asks you to download a file with python extention. Strange!!). One day I stumbled upon an article in Wikipedia about Cliff Wright, the illustrator who did the illustration for the second and third book of the series. Here I found the reason why Thomas Taylor was not offered the work for other books. Bloomsbury wanted an experienced illustrator instead of a fresher just coming out of an Art School.(update 17/dec/07: I recently found an old article which appeared on books.guardian.co.uk. It says,"Thomas Taylor, the young graduate artist who decided what Harry Potter ought to look like, made only two or three hundred pounds for his first drawing of the boy hero in 1997....Taylor's foot-square picture showed the Hogwarts Express bearing down on Harry, but was his only work for the books. He had just graduated from art college and was paid a flat fee for his first publishing commission. Publishers Bloomsbury dropped Taylor after the first book in favour of a more experienced artist, Cliff Wright, who drew the covers for the second novel, The Chamber Of Secrets, and the third, The Prisoner Of Azkaban." )

I’m quite amazed by this reason. If Thomas was inexperienced so was Rowling. Why didn’t they commission a new and experienced writer to write further? And how could one call Thomas fresher when he had already done paid work for them ? Interestingly, the U.S. publishers of this book Scholastic Inc. had made Mary Grand Pre to do the covers all throughout the series. That's commendable though!

Intriguing as ever is the ‘fresher vs. experienced’ debate. As a freelancer and a fresher I’m indeed concerned about the way service buyers decide on commissioning designers and artists.

If you were a service buyer what you would choose ‘fresher’ or ‘experienced’ designer? And why?

Do comment.

How do you pick your books?

I have never done a book cover. Yet I often think about them. As a genre they have made me think about my book browsing patterns. And after reading seven books in a row from the same author and publisher I think about it more often.

I was doing some research for this topic and found some interesting article about book cover design. “Publishers think we're all mugs and, by and large, that's exactly what we are. We judge books by their covers. We know what to expect. The bookshop is almost color-coded to make selection easier”, writes Tom Dyckhoff in an article in The Guardian. May be that’s what I did in the library.

But what after that? You don’t just recognize a familiar book’s spine and put it in the bag. You carefully gaze the front cover for some clues, turn it over, read the blurb on the back and if you feel further curious then read the flaps. That’s what I normally do in case of books for casual reading. But when I intend to read book of theoretical value I go a step further and browse the whole Index for the relevant topics and also read the Preface and a bit of content to get a grip of the book before pocketing it in.

So, like Tom Dyckhoff says, most of the times I do act like a ‘mug’ and judge a book by its cover. And how do you pick your books? Do let me know.

The color-coded spine !

I had been browsing in the library for a favorite book of mine. I knew which section that book of hers belonged to. But there were plenty of shelves to search. I wanted to lay my hands on it before anybody else could. “Would that be possible?” I wondered. And, ah! There it was. The three colored spine book waved at me from between its neighbors. Yes! I had in my hands ‘Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire’!!

The idea of a book waving a hand to you might seem a bit odd or magical to you. Right? But the truth is that Book Covers are all meant to do that kind of waving-“Hello…I’m here!!” sort of thing to its potential readers.

I’m really surprised by the way I picked up the book in the library. Well I don’t always go for color-coded spines – it just happened with the potter series.

Now that I have seen, explored and read all the seven books in the series I can safely say that the design strategy adopted by the Bloomsbury was a smart one.