Tin Hats & Rice

I designed the cover for Tin Hats and Rice: A Diary of Life as a Hong Kong Prisoner of War, 1941–1945 by Barbara Anslow, published by Blacksmith Books in Hong Kong.

Anslow was twenty-three and working as a shorthand typist for the Hong Kong government when Japan attacked in December 1941. Her family had arrived from Britain three years earlier and had chosen to stay through the evacuations, on the reasoning that going home meant going back under German bombs. After the surrender they were interned at Stanley Camp for three and a half years. She worked in the hospital office, taught shorthand, wrote plays for the children to perform, and kept a diary the entire time. Then she showed it to nobody for the better part of seventy years. It reached print in 2018, when she was ninety-nine — 372 pages, still in her voice, still dated.

The problem

The prisoner-of-war shelf has a uniform, and it is a war memorial: sepia, khaki, a watchtower, a helmet resting on something, barbed wire silhouetted against a low sun. It is a visual language built to be solemn, and it is almost always wrong for a diary.

Wrong because a diary is not a history. Anslow was not writing about the Second World War; she was writing about Tuesday. The book records the bombing of the camp by American aircraft, and it records dentistry, roommates, funerals, hunger and a dolls’ house, at roughly the same pitch, because that is what three and a half years actually feels like from inside. A monument on the cover promises the reader a war. The book delivers a life, which is harder and stranger and much more worth reading.

Wrong, too, for a plainer commercial reason. The book sells off a specific table in Hong Kong bookshops, alongside two dozen other regional histories that have all reached for the same restrained photographic cover. Solemnity is the house style there. A book that joins it disappears into it.

The photograph

Blacksmith supplied the image, and it came with a fact that decided the whole cover.

The photograph was taken in December 1941, hours before Hong Kong surrendered. The roll was not developed until 1945, when Anslow was released after three years and eight months in Stanley. The exposure sat latent in its canister through the entire internment and came up only when she did.

So the cover treats it as a latent image. The photograph is bleached almost to white across the field, and returns to full tone only inside the letterforms of the title. The type is the developer. You cannot see 1941 except through the words — which is the literal condition of the book, a period nobody could look at until someone finally printed it.

The second decision is quieter and matters more. The picture is not a war photograph. It is young people in the sun, one of them in a hat, unhurried, an ordinary afternoon. Nothing in it knows what is coming. A cover showing barbed wire tells a reader what happened; a cover showing the afternoon before tells them what it cost. The camp is not on this book. The thing the camp took is.

The type

TIN HATS & RICE is four syllables containing an entire civilian war — a helmet and a ration, the two objects that replaced everything else. The title is doing enough work that it needed no help, so it got size instead: condensed caps, stacked in three lines, set larger than anything else on that bookshop table would risk. The subtitle runs across the top as a thin letterspaced line, where it can carry the dates and the word diary without competing.

The author’s name sets in a script, low on the cover. It is a typeface, not a facsimile of Anslow’s hand, and it is not pretending otherwise — but it drops the register from history to one person, which is the correct register for a book of dated entries written by someone who was still alive to sign copies of it.

Beneath the name, one hairline of barbed wire. That is the genre’s entire vocabulary, reduced to a rule. Everything above it has already said the rest.

Scope of work

• Book cover design — art direction and typography for the published edition

Barbara Anslow signed copies of this at ninety-nine, and turned a hundred not long after. Her roll of film is on the front of it. Her handwriting, from the notebooks in the second photograph here, is what the 372 pages inside were set from. A cover is usually an argument a designer makes on a book’s behalf. This one only had to get out of the way of a woman who had already made it, in pencil, while it was happening.