September ‘22

Cover Story

My first mistake was coming up with a good (well I thought so) title. This had not happened with the previous three books. Landscape of Dreams was called Wonderland throughout the making of it, but we all knew we had to come up with something more original. It was difficult and not entirely satisfactory. What we came up with was passable, but I notice it has not fixed in people’s minds and gets garbled. Landscape of Dreams is clearly not nailing it as a book title. The cover was equally contentious, and the also-ran image got to be on the cover of the paperback. I don’t know which is better. Scent Magic was always going to be called Inhale while I was working on it. But then, fatally, I tried it on a friend, and they gave it the thumbs down and that was it done for. But I still think it was way cooler. Husbandry came to me in a moment of semi-dementia, and I liked it so much I just had to fit a book around it. Which proved difficult and a less satisfactory way forward.

The cover needed something of the ‘husband’ and Pimpernel loved all the images of JB all teeth and smiles. I wanted loads of pictures of Mr B, but not on the cover. He is not a celebrity. Yet I had a long-held desire to make the end-papers of a book in the manner of the end-papers of Tintin books, remember those? They were covered with jokey family portraits on stripy wall paper. In my mind they were all of ancient and various Haddocks but in reality they are of all sorts of characters from the stories. But this wasn’t a big enough book. In the end, after a lot of tussling, Mr and B and I agreed on the cover which is floral with his presence barely perceptible, but there.

I & J Bannerman

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