Staring Down an Icon

Tyndale Momentum had a book with a claim no other Churchill book could make: his great-grandson co-wrote it. Jonathan Sandys and Wallace Henley set out to answer the question printed on the back of the jacket. What drove Churchill to greatness?

Their answer starts with a sixteen-year-old schoolboy telling a friend that one day he would save London and England from disaster. A sense of destiny, and where it came from. That’s the book.

The cover had to carry that claim, and treat one of the most recognizable faces in history with respect, without becoming one more history book.

Research did the heavy lifting here. I pulled every photograph of Churchill I could find, and every Churchill cover already on the shelf, dozens of them. Side by side they blur: the cigar, the V sign, the hat, the name in enormous type.

When everyone already knows the face, the hard part is getting anyone to look at it again. So the wall had two jobs: show me what had been done to death, and show me what nobody had tried.

I also went looking for period ornament. Engraved labels, rules and flourishes, the kind of detail that could dress a jacket in gold without shouting.

Then we found the portrait. Yousuf Karsh’s Churchill: the jaw, the glare, the hand on the hip. The story goes that Karsh got that look by plucking the cigar out of the great man’s mouth a moment before the shutter.

It comes with strict conditions on how it may be used, and the rights took some securing. Worth every email. No clever picture of resolve was ever going to beat the real thing.

A book about destiny should feel as if it was always going to look this way. So the palette is two colors. Black for the weight. Gold for the authors’ names, the spine and the fine ornament that frames the flaps and the back.

Under the jacket the case is printed too, with the same gold detail. Take the jacket off and the book is still dressed.

I designed the pages as well. Each part of the book opens on a black page, so every section begins the way the cover does. Chapter openings get room to breathe: a number, a title, one of Churchill’s own lines, and a good deal of white.

Most readers will never notice the typesetting, which is the point. They only notice that the book feels like one thing, from the jacket to the last page.

The finished book is a hardcover that looks you in the eye from across the shop. It gave the title real presence on a crowded shelf, drew warm feedback from the publisher’s team, and set the tone for the Momentum imprint.

And it looks nothing like the rest of the shelf. Same man, same century, a photograph everyone has seen. The way to make people look again turned out to be standing closer.