Dave McKean's book covers and illustration, King to Blumenthal

What a Dave McKean book cover has to do

The cover-only commissions obey a different discipline from the interior suites: one image has to hold a whole book without retelling it. Batman: Arkham Asylum remains the most-seen example, painted the same year the first Sandman specimen-box cover appeared and a bestseller by that autumn, and the seventy-five Sandman covers ran the same restraint out across seven years before Dustcovers collected them with commentary. Set those beside the table above and the split becomes plain. A jacket compresses the argument to a single surface; an illustrated interior lets the argument breathe across a few hundred pages. The Dave McKean book covers people recognise tend to come from the first camp, while the editions collectors hunt come almost entirely from the second, and the difference in temperament between the two jobs is visible even inside a single year of the catalogue.

Read the table chronologically and it doubles as a history of the studio's materials. The King and Cale volumes sit closest to the layered paint and photography of the nineties. Coraline strips the approach back to pen and ink, the Almond books roughen it on purpose, and Varjak Paw finds a middle register for readers who have not met this kind of picture before. By the cookbook years much of the assembly is digital, though the vocabulary of masks, birds, specimen labels and handwritten fragments barely moves between 1997 and 2013. That stability gives a new reader a workable route through the shelf: Coraline for the drawing, Wizard and Glass for the painting, The Savage for the place where the two habits collide, and the Blumenthal books for proof that the method survives being asked to explain a kitchen.

King, Cale and the nineties prestige jobs

Wizard and Glass came first among the big literary commissions, in 1997, and remains the one collectors ask about. King's Mid-World suited Dave McKean's habits: half western, half dream, all texture. A year later John Cale's autobiography What's Welsh for Zen arrived as a fully designed object, text and image interleaved, and it quietly prefigured the look of a hundred later music memoirs that had none of its nerve.

The children's shelf and the Almond books

Coraline made the illustrated-fiction reputation, but the David Almond collaborations may be the better books: The Savage in 2008, drawn deliberately rough, as if by its own protagonist; Slog's Dad in 2010, tender about death in a way awards juries noticed; Mouse Bird Snake Wolf in 2013, a creation fable with real menace. Add Varjak Paw's two volumes for SF Said and the US Graveyard Book, and the children's list rivals the comics list for depth.

Blumenthal, Dawkins and the odd commissions

The Big Fat Duck Cookbook is the strangest object in the catalogue: a monumental, boxed cookbook for the Fat Duck restaurant with McKean illustrations running through its science and history sections. Historic Heston followed in 2013. Richard Dawkins's The Magic of Reality sits nearby, proof the approach survives non-fiction, and Ray Bradbury's The Homecoming rounds out the gift-edition work. The pattern across all of them: publishers arrive wanting "a Dave McKean book" and get talked into a book that needed him specifically. The distinction is visible on every page, and it is why none of these commissions date.