We were tasked by Culicidae Press to design the cover for Marian Clark’s latest book These Doors, an autobiographical novel about growing up in Oregon. According to the author
These Doors presents Timber (Pop. 50), sequestered in the Oregon woods from which few emigrate and fewer want to. In the style of a novel where plot threads unfold chronologically from 1959 to 1983, characters appear and reappear. They remember blackout curtains and their neighbor killed in Pearl Harbor, haggle over clear cutting, mourn fellow loggers killed in the woods, voice curiosity about Chet who shows up from eastern Oregon to extract his son from white man’s land, and are suspicious of the hippies on the old Marshall place who log with mules. They disagree about whether or not the preacher who claims he saw God is crazy and if the ex-con who returns from prison with a new wife killed his old one. But they agree that the Portland transplant who pushes her petitions ‘for the good of Timber’ is a pain in the ass and that the poem over the entry of the Timber Valley Store that says “The best people in the world pass through these doors,” is mostly true.
The design for the cover recto consists of a watercolor painting of the Timber Store—a small-town general store—and a cut log that recalls the logging industry in this part of Oregon. The background color of the verso, drawn from the log, carries around to the bottom of the recto, listing the book description and two blurbs.
