If you were to choose a single book that defined a moment in time, which would it be? What era would it represent?
Indigo, Canada's beloved lifestyle department store (I'm pretty sure they invented that term), has been in business for 25 years and to celebrate they set out to determine the books that defined the last quarter century for them.
The resulting list is called The 25-Year Collection and is composed of 28 bestselling titles from a particular moment in time, either reflecting a burst in popularity, a collective Canadian memory, a long-term consistent best seller, or an important perspective in Canadian culture.
For instance, The Handmaid's Tale which surged in popularity when the TV show premiered in 2017 has been a staple of Indigo throughout the years according to the brand's media release.
Chris Hadfield’s autobiography An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth also made the list as one of the first books to sell over 120,000 copies in a single quarter.
Each book on the list is being re-released with a limited edition cover designed by a Canadian artist, four of which are from Vancouver (and one from Vancouver Island). The artists are a mix of well-established and up-and-coming and they come from a diverse range of backgrounds. They have each been tasked with designing one or more of the covers.
Vancouver artists including Aman Aheer, Elizabeth McIntosh, Jean Paul Langlois and Scott Sueme are featured on 11 of the 28 sleek, minimalist, and contemporary-designed book covers that have a single colour background and a peekaboo keyhole view of an art piece.
Aman Aheer illustrated The Handmaid's Tale cover. Painter Elizabeth McIntosh designed the covers for Shake Hands with the Devil by Canadian Forces Lieutenant-General Roméo Dallaire about the Rwandan Genocide, Leonard Cohen's memoir Book of Longing, and Canadian author Esi Edugyan's third novel Washington Black.
The graphic and geometric art of Scott Sueme brings to life five different book covers including How to Pronounce Knife, The Book of Negroes, Bobby Orr's memoir, and Educated by Tara Westover.
The work of colourful and at times playful Metis artist Jean Paul Langlois is on the covers of Thomas King's An Inconvenient Indian and Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner. For the Kite Runner, Langlois chose an arid landscape of the Prarie rape seed fields.
"I'm a huge fan of Thomas King," says Langlois “I had a piece that seemed appropriate.” Langlois used to listen to King on the Dead Dog Café Comedy Hour on CBC with his mother and incidentally the cover art featured on An Inconvenient Indian is part of a series called Return to Spirit River or 'Meeting the Inlaws as told by my mother.' The specific art Langlois chose is from a memory his mother has of crossing the Little Smoky River in a canoe to meet Langlois’s father's Metis family.
Designing the book covers was a highly collaborative process with both artist and author having a say on the final pairings. Each artist was provided with a list of titles that had the potential to align either thematically or emotionally with pieces from their body of work. The artist suggested existing works of theirs that connected to the central storyline, message, or theme and the authors reviewed the pairings to give the go-ahead.
There will be 3,500 to 5,000 copies of each volume available as part of this one-time printing of the collection and they are available online and in-store on September 4.
