Judge a Book by Its Amazing New Revamped Cover (and Original Art Inside)

The mordant quality of Yuko Shimizu’s illustrations for the Folio Society’s centennial edition of The Great Gatsby is striking indeed. Her images make heavy use of foreboding grays, blacks, deep blues, and dark greens, with lurid bursts of yellow or red where fireworks explode over Gatsby’s estate during one of his self-consciously lavish parties, or where blood leaks from the bundled form of a victim of vehicular homicide in a late scene of the novel.

Shimizu is one of the talents on display at a show in New York City. “The Art of Folio” showcases no fewer than 91 artists’ unique interpretations of well-known fictional narratives. The show at the Society of Illustrators in Manhattan features images made from 1957 through 2024 for canonical works of literature that the U.K.-based Folio Society has reissued in new formats. Among the titles are The Handmaid’s Tale, Dune, Wolf Hall, The Color Purple, A Wizard of Earthsea, and A Game of Thrones, along with The Great Gatsby.

The illustrations for these works capture the spontaneous, surprising results of an artist’s sensibility applying itself to the vision of an equally idiosyncratic writer. In some cases, the artist has been at the task for a good part of his or her life, thinking about the novel, mapping out the possibilities of adapting it, revisiting and refining those plans, meditating on the task for years before carrying it out. In other cases, the illustrator may have known the work yet chosen to approach the task with more or less fresh eyes.

Shimizu, who did the art for Folio’s 500-copy centennial run of The Great Gatsby, spent a bulk of her early years in Japan, where the book was required reading in many courses. She even recalls when the 1974 film, starring Robert Redford, Mia Farrow, and Karen Black, hit screens in Tokyo.

Nonetheless, when lending her talents to the Folio Society as it made ready to release a new edition, Shimizu says she made a conscious effort to forget everything she knew about Fitzgerald’s novel and earlier visual interpretations of it.

“I tried to ignore everything I knew about Gatsby and to reread it as if it were a brand new novel,” Shimizu said.

The book has won over readers and fueled scholarly debate for well over a century now. One aspect of Fitzgerald’s tale of vain striving, sordid intrigues and double-dealings leapt out at Shimizu. “The violence in the book was what struck me,” Shimizu stated, though she acknowledged that that element may seem a bit muted according to our contemporary, Tarantino-influenced standards.

“It came out a hundred years ago, and how shocking it must have been [then], with the darkness, the violence, all the blood.”

Another ingredient that made an impression, Shimizu continued, was the class animosity and conflict that permeates the novel and imbues nearly every scene with tension, sometimes subtle, more often acute.

“So, I decided to focus on those two aspects. Minimal colors, almost black and white, and a complete lack of romance,” she recalled.

The result is a set of images that stand apart from any past attempts at transferring Gatsby from the page to other media. And that, according to Shimizu, was exactly what she hoped and planned.

“It was, in a way, a gamble for us, because it is very different from the other illustrated Gatsbys,” she said. “I believe the job of an illustrator is to provide something new and fresh to the audience.”

The party on Gatsby’s estate, in Shimizu’s rendering, is particularly inspired. Shimizu’s fireworks contrast jarringly with the muted hues of the guests’ expensive attire. They all stand there staring at the display, their backs to us, as if the fireworks represent the spark and passion so absent from the void of their own lives which they strive to paper over through their association with a millionaire they barely even know as a person. You don’t need Nick Carraway to tell you: Everybody who’s anybody comes to Gatsby’s bash, of course, but every last guest is, secretly, a nobody.

Shimizu’s art is only the latest acknowledgment of the cross-cultural impact of Fitzgerald’s powerful vision, which has influenced no less a figure than Haruki Murakami. Coincidentally, Shimizu recently read that famous Japanese author’s memoir, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running.

“He wrote about Gatsby in this book, [noting] that every time he rereads it, he learns something new,” Shimizu observed. “It is a compact and masterfully written novel, so ahead of its time.”

The Folio Society launched in 1947, and as of this writing, its collection includes 281 titles varying widely in price and format. Notebooks containing art from a few of the publisher’s limited editions, such as Philip K. Dick’s Short Stories or Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore, sell for as little as ₤12.95, while its collected editions of George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones sell for ₤825.

If you spend ₤825, the equivalent of more than $1,100, for illustrated editions of Martin’s collected works, are you as vain and spoiled as the toffs and strivers who show up on Gatsby’s estate just to see and be seen? Not at all—this and other books in the collection bring ineffable literary, aesthetic, perhaps spiritual associations for people who read a given work at an early age and have always yearned to enlarge the theater of their engagement with it.
Print book sales edged up slightly in 2024 compared to 2023, according to a recent Publishers Weekly article. It was not a huge bump, but a bump nonetheless. Jeff Bezos and others who have gleefully predicted the demise of the printed book are, once again, dead wrong.

“In part as a reaction to this increasingly digital age, many readers crave the tactile experience of a printed book,” Tom Walker, publishing director of the Folio Society, told Book and Film Globe. “When that experience is heightened with illustrations, with curated book choice, with impeccable texts and introducers, and with thoughtful design, it becomes a really joyful and important part of people’s lives.”