Bond & Grace’s Secret Recipe for Making the Art Novel

When Jacqueline Bond went searching for a coffee table edition of Pride and Prejudice, she had no idea she was taking the first step to starting her own publishing company. “I have always loved classic literature and am an avid fiction reader,” she says. “I have a collection of more than 50 editions of Jane Austen novels and am constantly searching for unique and beautiful versions of Pride and Prejudice.”

Unfortunately for Jacqueline, no coffee table version of Austen’s seminal novel was available on the market. “I started to realize, ironically, that none of the publishing houses publishing coffee table books were producing works on literature. Their focus remained on travel, interior design, and fashion. They were books not meant to be read,” Jacqueline says. In the same vein, companies that republished classic novels were not doing so as part of the luxury market. “The publishing companies that regularly release the classics were not producing them with collectors in mind. There was little new material to discover in the text and the experience lacked elevation and luxury, they simply changed the cover.”

Each Art Novel contains the full text of a beloved classic novel, over fifty pieces of bespoke original artwork inspired by the text, visual design to shape a unique reading experience, annotations, a new introduction, and a biographical essay from a global team of literary scholars. The Art Novel’s ingenious structure allows readers of all backgrounds and interests to find an entry point to engage with classic literature, whether it be through the story itself, the original artwork, the annotated insights, or the immaculate design. 

Given the level of detail and the expansive team of creatives involved, each Art Novel takes a full year to produce. The first step, of course, is choosing what the Art Novel title is going to be.

With each title Bond & Grace features in the Art Novel, they strive to not only republish the text but to bring something new to readers’ understanding. “We also identify if there is enough of a story beneath the story for us to excavate in our creative process,” Ayana says. 

One of the first ways they accomplish this is through a book club in which all Bond & Grace team members read the text and come prepared to share their ideas, insights, and reactions. Because each team member works with the Art Novel in a different capacity, they see the text in different ways and are able to bring forward different elements of the story that inspire and excite them. “As the producer, I’m thinking about opportunities for us to check the boxes of what we want to accomplish in every Art Novel. So tell a story that hasn’t already been told about the text, remediate topics that may be considered controversial or haven’t aged well since the book was first released, and reimagine some of the visuals that are aligned with the text. As I’m reading the book, it’s important for me to identify opportunities to satisfy that formula,” Aayana explains.

After the book club, the Bond & Grace team gets to work specifying and solidifying the messaging and ideas that were discussed during book club. This means translating everyone’s ideas into the most salient points the team wants to focus on, and identifying how these ideas will be translated into the writing, the artwork, and the design of the Art Novel.

Once the specific Bond & Grace approach to the title novel has been solidified, the Editorial and Creative teams begin seeking out and identifying potential collaborators. For the editorial team, this means finding literary scholars with expertise in the title novel or its author to help Bond & Grace in their analysis. For the creative team, this means identifying the artists whose artistic interpretations will grace the pages of the Art Novel.

“Maggie Lemak is the creative director and curator for our Art Novels and she leads our artist selection and the creative concepts behind our design,” Ayana says. “Some of the criteria we engage with as a baseline is the willingness of the artist to engage the literature as a prompt and to take seriously how the prose and history of the text can inform their process. That is paramount for an artist to be able to participate in this project. We try to create a diversity of perspectives on the text, through selecting people with diverse identities, geographical diversity, and diverse artistic mediums. And then, of course, there’s the fact that many artists have personal connections to the literature. All these things make for a really rich collection.”

“I also think our editions are much more relatable,” Jacqueline adds. “We always try to make connections between what is happening today and what is happening in the novel, and that gives context to readers who may not understand the history. It makes it much more palatable for them to read. I also think that the length of our annotations is familiar to people who are used to reading social media captions. It is just a much more user-friendly reading experience.”

“But I think the main thing is that I’ve never seen a more beautiful annotated version of a classic novel than ours,” Jacqueline laughs. “I might be biased, but I don’t think so.”

For Jacqueline, who does not work directly on Art Novel production, her favorite moment comes a little while later. “My favorite thing is that I don’t see it until the very end,” she laughs. “I get involved in the final editing phase and am always completely amazed. And this is a good thing because I get to see the book as a user would. I’m a normal reader like anyone else would be and it’s easier to make edits when you haven’t been in the weeds. But that’s always my favorite part, seeing the first draft of the Art Novel, because it's always incredible.”

Jacqueline isn’t the only person getting to see the Art Novel for the first time at this stage. Ayana leads a user testing group throughout the Art Novel creation process that gives the team critical feedback at every juncture. “I love interacting with our users,” Ayana says. “We hand-select our user groups and people in our community often ask to be included. It's a very tight-knit group that meets with me and our customer success associate once a month during the development of the novel. Getting to see these ‘Aha’ moments and seeing their reaction to what we have been working on is a pretty awesome part of the process.”

The feeling of opening an Art Novel for the first time is truly one of joy and wonder, there is nothing like it. Experience it for yourself and add a Bond & Grace Collector’s Edition Art Novel to your library.