Design, Design, Design.
Over the years, I’ve looked at more book covers than I can count. I’ve ordered dozens of art books to study the buying process, the shipping time, the unboxing experience, and of course, the books themselves.
I’ll tell you one thing: Table of Gods won’t be a standard hardcover book shipped like a package of malt. I don’t want to publish just another cookbook—I’m trying to invent a time machine (which is why I’m still working on it after 67 months).
I’ve hired three design studios, fired two, and spent five times more than I budgeted for to get the design right. So what’s the right design? One that does what it’s meant to do. And after years of pondering over the cover for Table of Gods, I think I know the answer. Let me present the evolution of the book cover.
2021: I told the studio to create a cover inspired by this Assyrian stone relief. What you see are just early sketches. But I didn’t like that the cover only depicted males and that they were servants carrying loads of food.
2022: I told the studio to create a cover inspired by this relief of King Ashurbanipal and Queen Libbali-Sharrat dining under the vines. This is the cover many of you have seen on my website and social media. I think it’s beautiful. But it’s modern, somewhat expected, and too “cover-like” with a huge title.
2024: After hiring a new design studio that ONLY designs art books and knows everything about paper and printing techniques (it’s a science), I told them I wanted a cover inspired by the world’s oldest recipe tablet. But the cover was still too modern, the color too Mediterranean, and didn’t feel right (I rely on my feelings for most things—especially design).
2025: Over the holidays and New Year, I thought about the purpose of Table of Gods: to bring people back to the cradle of civilization. The design should be an extension of that. Which means the cover can’t resemble a book cover. There were no books in ancient Mesopotamia. But since I can’t ship 350 clay tablets weighing half a ton to everyone who orders a copy, I’m limited to paper.
Still, I told the studio to forget about what’s considered accepted in book design, and design an artifact that will be beautiful a thousand years from now, just like the clay tablets from ancient Mesopotamia. It’s still not exactly where I want it to be. But with further iterations, you could actually believe you were looking at a 4,000-year-old clay tablet.
Ready to see it? 🤩
Drum roll 🥁
Summary
We’ll continue to make design iterations going forward. But designing something digitally is only half the job—the other half is choosing paper samples and running print tests. This will take months of back and forth tweaking. But I won’t settle until the look and feel of Table of Gods is exactly what I want it to be.
Perhaps you see why this project is in its 67th month :) After all, I’m only one person who in January also edited the manuscript based on beta reader feedback, recorded new videos for social media, gathered invoices for bookkeeping (the most boring task in the world), started redesigning tableofgods.com, as well as replying to fans who write to me daily (thank you for writing, I appreciate it!).
Though I can’t give an exact release date, rest assured I’m making steady progress and still aiming to pre-sell Table of Gods in 2025.