A redesigned cover of Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow.

I decided to do my cover for Gravity’s Rainbow for two main reasons: I knew it would be a challenge and I disliked the Frank Miller cover, which in my opinion didn’t convey the craziness of the novel in a symbolic enough manner. Overall, I think that the cover design I created is visually representative of the reading experience and important symbolism of Gravity’s Rainbow, while giving the novel an updated cover for a modern audience with more of a digital aesthetic.

I wanted my Gravity’s Rainbow cover to be aesthetically appealing while still conveying major symbols of the novel, and I wanted viewers to get a feeling of what the reading experience might be like simply by viewing the cover. The entire thing was created by hand in Adobe Photoshop and uses no found images except for the Tower tarot card.

Nothing on any part of the cover was placed without reason; every shape and color used has meaning. I designed the cover in such a way that it would gain significance after the book was finished, and that it would grow more significant with further thoughts and viewings.

The first symbol I created was white rocket missiles twisting impossibly into two parabolas, which would form a circle, as a gesture both to the rainbow as two halves of a parabola and to the book's ouroboros references (a snake biting its own tail; instead I used two missiles as the “snakes”). The warped shape of the missiles would also remind readers of the physical impossibilities in the Gravity’s Rainbow world. I also took some inspiration from Frank Miller’s use of a white phallic symbol dominating the darker space on the cover, which I think plays very well into the racial themes of the novel and also alludes to its sexual encounters. 

I shadowed the white rocket with lime green and magenta rockets, two purely synthetic colors that cover designer Peter Mendelsund pointed out as particularly relevant. I played around with the two colored shadows, moving them, making them half-tone (Img. 2), but the canvas still seemed empty, and I didn’t like the title and author’s name as going together in a straight line parallel to the top or bottom of the book. I stumbled across the cover found on the Vintage Books cover of Gravity’s Rainbow (Img. 4), and really liked the color palette, so I came up with the final cover design (Img. 6). The rainbow around the rocket-ouroboros is what a rainbow would look like without the natural green and violet colors, which are sucked and distorted into the center rockets.

The contrast between the natural colors of the rainbow and the synthetic, psychedelic version of normal green and purple (lime green and magenta) speak to the themes in the book involving natural vs. manmade, and science vs. nature. The four colors in the rainbow are also directly taken from the Marvel comic book palette (Img. 5), a nod to Pynchon’s love of and references to comic books.

The background (which is actually a dark shade of gray, rather than absolute black) alludes to the darkness of wartime, literally and metaphorically, and I purposefully left the center of the cover blank, to give the viewer the impression of emptiness, loneliness, and confusion. I hoped to suggest imagery of whirlpools (Charybdis, the obstacle Odysseus had to face on his journey), labyrinths, and colorful mandalas—all important and significant symbols—with the design, as well as a psychedelic eye, alluding to drug use in the ‘60s—representing the book’s self-awareness and desire to elevate itself—and a screaming mouth, again suggesting paranoia.

As a member of the design team on the Harvard Advocate, I had been experimenting a lot with glitch art for the Advocate covers, and I was hoping to incorporate some of that from the start, but I was worried that using glitch art on the cover would ruin the clean and crisp graphic I had designed. The way I create glitch art is through a random processing program that takes the raw data of the image and repeats certain sections; each time I refresh the program, the image is a distorted in a different way, and I never know what the result will look like. Some brief experiments (such as Img. 1) yielded aesthetically interesting results, but I felt that the glitch art ultimately compromised the strength of the symbolism on the front cover. I really loved the idea of how the process of glitch art itself represented the theme of randomness vs. Planned Intention in Gravity’s Rainbow, and wanted to include it somewhere, which is how the back of the cover was conceptualized. I decided to use the Tower tarot card not only because Pynchon himself wanted the Tower on the cover of Gravity’s Rainbow but also because it seems to hold a special significance because it is a symbol of the multifaceted nature of the novel: 

[The Tower] is a puzzling card, and everybody has a different story on it. It shows a bolt of lightning striking a tall phallic structure, and two figures, one wearing a crown, falling from it. Some read ejaculation, and leave it at that. Others see a Gnostic or Cathar symbol for the Church of Rome, and this is generalized to mean any System which cannot tolerate heresy: a system which, by its nature, must sooner or later fall. We know by now that it is also the Rocket. (762)

But I was taken away: driven in a Hispano-Suiza with Blicero himself, out through the gray weather to a petrochemical plant that for days had stalked us in a wheel at our horizon, black and broken towers in the distance, clustered together, a flame that always burned at the top of one stack. (494)

I ended up liking the glitched Tarot card so much that I thought about putting it on the front cover, but as one of the last sentences in the novel is “Till the Light that hath brought the Towers low” (776), I thought it fit better as the back cover, the image that gets seen as soon as the reader closes the novel. I went through several designs, but I liked the mirroring of the front circle on the back (Img. 9), rather than connecting the two circles (Img. 11) or having the card fill the whole back (Img. 10). 

The last thing I needed to design was the spine, which was actually the most difficult thing for me. I couldn’t find a way to put the spine text in an aesthetically pleasing way that was—more importantly—cohesive with the rest of the cover. You can see in Img. 9 that I originally just had the author’s name and the title, because I wanted the book to look very unassuming when it was placed on a shelf; only after it was pulled off the shelf would readers see the colorful chaos of the cover. However, Img. 9 was too simple, and the final text design, fit into the rocket, was another appropriate phallic symbol, fit in with the rest of the design, and referenced and “foreshadowed” the destruction on the back cover through its white clouds of smoke. All three panels have white phallic symbols and tell a roughly sequential story: the white rocket, its launch, and the devastation that follows it. Many of the colors present on the front cover are also there in the back cover, as if the front image had exploded.