The first time I ever stood in a bookstore and turned over a book to see who designed the cover, I was holding a paperback edition of Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Who was responsible for this amazing design? John Gall. That sounds right, I remember thinking. He sounded like the cousin of Gill Sans. Since then, whenever I come across a cover I like, I turn it over to see if John Gall designed it. Quite often he did. Tom McCarthy’s Remainder is a John Gall design; so is Jeffrey Steingarten’s The Man Who Ate Everything. So is Donald Antrim’s The Verificationist. Here are some others.

Gall has a distinct sensibility: playful, light, intelligent, concise. Other times his covers have a special intensity, as though the book dreamed the cover—as though its soul seeped up from the pages and rested, inkily, there.

He has been in the business for over twenty years. This summer he became Creative Director at Abrams Books. When I spoke with him in his office in the spring, he was still Artistic Director of Vintage and Anchor Books, where he designed covers and oversaw a team of designers who together designed 200 paperbacks a year.

His most ambitious assignment of recent years was a redesign of the entire, 20-title Nabokov backlist. He commissioned a separate designer for each book—including Chip Kidd, Tamara Shopsin and Dave Eggers—with the constraint that they could only use paper and push-pins, and they had to build their cover within a specimen box (a reference to the specimen boxes in which Nabokov displayed his butterflies). Each cover is inventive and unique, yet the series is deeply unified.

He is the author of Sayanora Home Run! The Art of the Japanese Baseball Card.Spine Outis his popular and fascinating book design blog. He teaches graphic design at the School of Visual Arts and lives in New Jersey with his wife and their two boys.

—Sheila Heti

I.THE COVER KIND OF GOES AWAY

BLVR: Your covers seem to communicate, This is a complex, fun, abstract experience. They never suggest it’s going to be a slog. There’s always pop and pleasure in your covers.

JG: I think covers should be fun and pop and smart and inviting and not confusing. They should say: This is going to be an enjoyable experience. I did a cover for a book called Remainder by Tom McCarthy a few years ago. Tom, to me, is part writer part, conceptual artist. We did a photo shoot for his cover so it...