Retirement reflections : my career as a book cover designer

A while ago I wrote that I thought a bit of looking back from retirement was OK. You might even learn something that helps with planning your retirement. In one blog I wrote about the nearly careers I had had. One of these was trying to get a gig as a cartoonist. That didn’t work out so well which has meant I’ve inflicted my and Mrs Summerhouse’s efforts (she did the drawings) on the readers of this blog. Now I’m going to do something similar and tell you about my ‘career’ as a book cover designer. It made perfect sense at the time. I like books, I like art with words in it, I like messing about with photos I have taken, which is why I enjoyed the graphic design bit of my life for a short while (see below for my ‘company’ logo) and why I like old railway posters and old advertising  etc. etc. It (the book covers) didn’t work of course, I put together a CD Rom of about 50 covers and sent them off to some publisher or other, with the usual result – nothing, no reply, yep, the usual. Same as the cartoonist venture. If looking back from retirement, at all the things I tried to do, is a source of satisfaction then I should be a very happy man indeed. Nobody can say I didn’t give things a go.

Looking for something else entirely I stumbled across these images of book covers and the above logo, I had constructed. They’re all made up of course and they’re all from my own photos by the way. There were 50 of them as I recall, I have only given you access to 12 of them. Stumbling across things is the usual course of events for me because my organisation of my electronic images is poor beyond words. I suppose it means that occasionally I have a nice surprise when I come across something that I think, hmm, that’s rather good. So it was with these book covers and that’s why they’re here now.

Friends of ours have a daughter. They’re Australian but she works in London, when we asked her father what she did, he said casually, she designs book covers. Bugger, I thought, there was a time I would have given quite a lot to know that. Not sure what I would have done with the information, probably pestered her. I did not show my friends the envious side of my nature, I just smiled in a philosophical way and thought, to myself, what a funny old business life is.

Incidentally, I really enjoyed this kind of creativity which rather makes me wonder what life would have been like had I changed careers about 20 years ago. I know one thing I wouldn’t have the kind of decent pension I have now courtesy of working until I was 65 as a local government employee, which doesn’t sound very exciting at all. But retirement would be a very different experience I suspect and that probably wouldn’t have been a good thing.

Anyway now for the book covers.