Making my books look great: Lindsay Starr

Photo by Lindsay Metivier.

It came about due to luck-of-the-draw happenstance, but I’ve sort of had my very own personal book-cover designer for most of my university-press writing career. That’s Lindsay Starr, currently the art director at University of North Carolina Press (shown here with her best pal Bucky), who has been making me look better than I deserve for over a decade. Like me, she’s a native Texan with a past tenure at University of Texas Press. And she has designed three of my last four books including 2023’s “Oh, Didn’t They Ramble: Rounder Records and the Transformation of American Roots Music,“ for which she just picked up a major award.

“Ramble” is one of Lindsay’s four UNC Press book designs in the Association of University Presses’ latest “Book, Jacket & Journal Show,” the organization’s prestigious annual design competition. I’m honored that “Ramble” was one of her UNC Press entries that made the final cut out of all the entries submitted by university presses across the country.

“It’s one of the only book-design competitions left and they generally get 600 to 800 entries every year,” says Lindsay. “So it was nice to be in there.”

Lindsay and I go back about a dozen years to the first book of mine that she designed, “Ryan Adams: Losering, A Story of Whiskeytown,” published in the fall of 2012 by her then-employer UT Press. I’d had some ideas about the cover, and I was disgruntled about the fact that UT Press largely ignored my suggestions. But the wisdom of that was immediately apparent as soon as I saw the cover Lindsay came up with, centered around a shattered beer bottle. It could not have been a more perfect visual representation of the themes, moods, sounds and vibes of that story. I will always remember the thrill of seeing it for the first time.

Lindsay also designed my other UT Press book, “Comin’ Right at Ya: How a Jewish Yankee Hippie Went Country, or, the Often Outrageous History of Asleep at the Wheel,” which I co-wrote with Wheel frontman Ray Benson in 2015. I figured I would probably never cross paths with Lindsay again after I parted ways with UT Press a few years later, so it was a hugely pleasant surprise for me when she landed at UNC Press as newly hired art director just in time to do the cover for my “Ramble” book.

By now I’m used to being wowed by Lindsay’s cover illustrations for my books, and this latest one is no exception. It incorporates the Rounder Records logo to stand in for the letter “O,” an inspired touch. And the illustration is a 1971 Carl Fleischhauer photograph of Rounder founders Ken Irwin, Marian Leighton Levy and Bill Nowlin — a picture so iconic that a rendition of it adorns the founders’ plaque in the IBMA Bluegrass Hall of Fame.

All that, and she even had time to design the logo for the new American Music: New Roots series I edit for UNC Press, too. “Ramble” was one of about 60 books Lindsay designed for UNC Press in 2023, which is a pretty typical annual workload. Her design process starts with an “author cover questionnaire,” which I filled out for her in late 2022. She’ll draw from that, peer-review reports and as much of a given book as she has time to read to craft a design. Sometimes, as with the Rounder and Asleep at the Wheel books, the main design element is a photo. And sometimes, as with Ryan Adams, it’s an illustration.

“Ray Benson is an institution in Texas and that’s such a great photo of him,” she says of the “Comin’ Right at Ya” cover, which pictures Ray trying on a pair of cowboy boots. “It’s so fun – the boots, the attitude, conveys how funny he is. The challenge was fitting in the title and subtitle around it. Ryan Adams was harder, more of a creative cover. A smashed bottle seemed to represent so much of what was going on with that story. And this book, that photo of the three founders is so great. It really captures a time and says so much without words. The title’s so melodic, makes you think of the song. It came together nicely and I’m happy it won the award.”

Me too! Congratulations, Lindsay. It’s great to have you in my corner.