Collected Hong Kong Stories

I designed the cover for Collected Hong Kong Stories by David T. K. Wong, published by Blacksmith Books in Hong Kong.

Wong was born in Hong Kong, educated across China, Singapore and Australia, took degrees in political science and journalism at Stanford, and then worked as a journalist, an educator, a government official and a businessman before becoming known chiefly as a writer of short fiction. He founded the creative writing fellowship that carries his name at the University of East Anglia. This book collects eighteen stories written across roughly thirty years — every one of them already published in a magazine or broadcast on radio somewhere in Britain, America, Hong Kong or Europe before anyone gathered them into a single volume. They run from the years before the war to the years before the Handover, and the cast runs from barmen and labourers to jockeys, bureaucrats, scholars and tycoons.

The problem

A short-story collection is the hardest cover in publishing.

A novel has one story to signal, one mood, usually one protagonist. This book has eighteen, spread across sixty years of a city, with no shared plot and no recurring character. There is no single true image, because any image specific enough to be interesting is specific to one story out of eighteen and therefore a lie about the other seventeen.

The genre’s two standard escapes are both refusals to read the book. Reach for a stock city photograph — skyline, junk sail, neon alley — and you have sold the place as a postcard while saying nothing at all about the writing. Reach for an abstract literary texture and you have said nothing about anything. Neither requires having opened the manuscript.

There was also a shelf to survive. This lands on the same Hong Kong table as thirty other regional titles, and a good half of them have already taken the harbour view. On that table, whoever reaches for the skyline has lost before the reader arrives.

Don’t show the city — show the people

So the cover shows figures instead. Several of them, in silhouette, overlapping: a man with a pipe, a woman, a profile below, a fourth behind. Different ages, different sexes, different postures, and deliberately no hierarchy — nobody is positioned as the protagonist, because in this book the protagonist changes every fifteen pages.

The subject of the cover is not Hong Kong. It is the number of different people Hong Kong contains. That is what an anthology actually is, and it is the one thing that stays true across all eighteen stories.

Made of the city

Then the part that makes it work: each silhouette is filled with the lit windows of a residential tower.

Hong Kong’s truest image was never the skyline seen from the water. It is the face of a housing block seen from close — hundreds of windows in a grid, hundreds of lives stacked into one wall, the view you get from your own kitchen rather than from a tourist boat. Filling the figures with that grid says what the book says: these people are made of the city, and the city is only ever the sum of them.

It also solves the anthology problem in a single move. One image, true of all eighteen stories, precisely because it is about none of them.

The composite is constructed rather than photographed — separate figures assembled into one overlapping group, with the window grid drawn inside the silhouettes rather than lifted from a photograph of a building. That matters for control: real windows come with a real building’s proportions and a real building’s light, and either would have dragged one specific place onto a cover that needed to stand for a whole city.

The lockup and the ground

Three words, three treatments. Collected light, HONG KONG heavy caps, Stories italic. On most covers that would read as indecision; here it does a job, separating the collection from the place from the form, so a browser gets all three facts in one glance without reading a subtitle. HONG KONG carries the weight because on that table it is the word doing the selling.

The ground is neither black nor neon. It is a mottled sand — the colour of aged paper, or a wall that has been rained on for forty years. The right register for stories written across three decades about a city that no longer exists in the form they describe. A document, not a photograph.

Scope of work

• Book cover design — front cover, spine, and back cover for print

Eighteen stories that each spent years living apart, in other magazines and on other people’s radio stations, before anyone put them between the same two covers. The cover’s job was to make that look like one book without pretending the stories had ever been one thing — which is why the figures overlap and share their edges, and why every one of them keeps its own outline.