Book design
De elskende
Cover designs for the Danish and American editions of Peter Legård Nielsen’s novel about Karen Blixen and the people around her.
De elskende gives voice to people in the circle around Karen Blixen. Through their own stories, their struggles, loyalties, desires and wounds, Blixen appears indirectly — not as the centre of the narrative, but as a figure glimpsed through others.
The cover had to hold that same ambiguity. Not a definitive portrait, but a mask, a reflection, a myth seen from the side. The result is deliberately difficult to decode: romantic and unsettling, theatrical and severe.
Among the available images of Karen Blixen, I found a portrait where she performs one of her many self-created disguises — this time as the moon. The image has both comic and eerie undertones, and became the key to the cover.
I drew the title lettering by hand to strengthen that ambiguity. Are the ornamental lines romantic flourishes, or something more poisonous and tentacular? On the black background, the cover becomes seductive, strange and hard to place.
For the American edition, the author wanted a more restrained and inviting effect. It should not become commercial or obvious, but it needed a warmer point of entry than the Danish edition.
The pair of lions came from the book itself. The final cover keeps the darkness and theatricality of the Danish edition, but shifts the tone: less uncanny, more elegiac — a companion piece rather than a translation.
