THE BROKEN ROAD

The publishers John Murray recently commissioned me to design the jacket and endpapers for Patrick Leigh Fermor's final book 'The Broken Road'. The English artist John Craxton (1922 - 2009) produced designs for the first editions of seven of Fermor's books. Craxton's bold and playful covers are synonymous with the work of Fermor. This posed a certain design challenge - I had to ensure that the new jacket sat comfortably within the series whilst expressing my own approach. I referenced the colours of the covers 'Roumeli' and 'Mani'. Whereas both of these depict a daytime scene with a sun-like motif in the sky I wanted my design to represent a nocturne. The inspiration for this came from a passage in which Fermor, accompanied by a stray black dog, discovers the ruin of a mosque at night under a bright moon.