Cory Doctorow likes the duct tape on our cover. Cool. I’ve been a Boing Boing fan for years — was quite a nice surprise to see a familiar image there.
There were some early cover designs of the book that included Post-It Notes. And we were thinking, is there anything less sticky than a Post-It? Isn’t that, in fact, the core value of Post-Its, that they aren’t so sticky? I guess we could have gone that direction and renamed the book: Made to Adhere Lightly.
We also played around with images of gum. Gum sticks, ya know. One design showed a woman’s foot in a high-heeled shoe, and she had just stepped in a huge wad of gum, and strands of the gum were trailing the heel into the air. It was a cool photo, almost beautiful. And yet the emotional resonance was, um, less appealing. “Our book — it’s like stepping in gum!”
Bless you, duct tape.