A literary quarterly that began in 1998.

McSweeney’s began as a literary journal with a long name. English Wikipedia says the publishing house was founded by Dave Eggers in 1998, that its first publication was Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern that year, and that it has since published novels, poetry and other periodicals from its base in San Francisco. It names Amanda Uhle as executive director and gives the parent as the McSweeney’s Literary Arts Fund.

The name comes from a family story rather than a founder. English Wikipedia, citing a 2004 interview, says Eggers recalled that when he was a child his family received letters from a man called Timothy McSweeney, who believed he was a relative of Eggers’s mother. According to that account, the confusion came from a coincidence of surnames: the grandfather who had delivered Timothy at birth and the family that adopted him were both called McSweeney. The journal took the stranger’s full name, and the house kept the surname.

The first issues were made in New York before the house settled in California. Writing in Eye magazine in its Winter 2010 issue, Todd Pruzan, who worked at McSweeney’s from 1998 to 2000, remembered the early operation running from Eggers’s apartment in Brooklyn. He wrote that everything in the journal, from its logotype down to its tiny jokes set at 4pt, was set in Garamond 3, and that the effect of working a single font so hard was surprisingly subtle. In Pruzan’s account, the first issues were all black-and-white, and colour arrived only gradually: first an illustration, then a colour photograph, then a DVD. He ended his recollection with Eggers moving to San Francisco.

The online side of the brand followed the same restraint. In an essay on Design Observer dated 29 May 2004, the designer Michael Bierut described McSweeney’s as having begun, and continued, as an online journal with an understated visual presentation, and wrote that while website designers of the late 1990s piled on hyperactive effects, McSweeneys.net kept its plain format. It was the move into print, he wrote, with the Quarterly Concern, that made the design world take notice.

Garamond pages, boxes, rubber bands and leatherette.

Bierut’s essay set out how the design of the journal was read at the time. He described the Quarterly’s pages as both intricate and restrained, densely packed and set entirely in Garamond, mixing a Victorian manner with an ironic one. He wrote that the curator and designer Andrew Blauvelt had used the pages of Eye to announce a new movement on the strength of them, which Blauvelt called “Complex Simplicity”.

The physical object changed from issue to issue. Bierut listed some of the formats: issue 4 came as a set of saddle-stitched booklets in a cardboard box; issue 7 as perfect-bound books held in a case by a large rubber band; and issue 11 in brown leatherette with gold foil stamping. Issue 13, published in 2004, was guest edited and designed by the cartoonist Chris Ware and devoted to comics, a hardcover wrapped in a large folded dust jacket covered in drawings, with work by R. Crumb, Art Spiegelman, Daniel Clowes and Lynda Barry and essays by writers including Michael Chabon and Chip Kidd.

Eggers designed the early issues himself. Bierut called him a self-taught designer who wrote his books in QuarkXPress rather than a word processor, and noted that the cover of issue 2 carried the line “If words are to be used as design elements then let designers write them”. Eye’s Winter 2010 issue returned to the same line in a piece by its editor John L. Walters about Eggers’s talk at “Voice”, the 2002 conference of the AIGA. Walters wrote that Eggers showed examples of his own early desktop publishing, pages of solid text with and without indents, and a slide of an IBM annual report that borrowed the journal’s devices: centred serif text, eccentric subheads, boxes, rules and circles.

Walters also wrote that the style did not spring from nowhere. At the same talk, he said, Eggers showed obscure Victorian covers and title pages that had inspired him, from literary journals, instruction manuals and pamphlets. The book list carried the approach onto jackets. Eye showed the cover of Michael Chabon’s essay collection Maps and Legends, published by McSweeney’s in 2008, with a triple jacket designed by Eggers: layered belly bands printed in Pantone colours, with illustrations by Jordan Crane showing characters from the book over ocean, land and mountains.

A name, a colophon and a series.

For a book publisher, the name has to work in several places at once: on the spine, where a reader scans a shelf, on the title page, where the house is named in full, and on the series that a house builds over decades. Some names describe where a press began. Graywolf Press was named for the Graywolf Ridge and Graywolf River near Port Townsend, Washington, where it started printing poetry chapbooks by letterpress in 1974, and it kept the name after moving to St. Paul in 1985 and to Minneapolis in 2009. Other names describe who a house belongs to. New York Review Books, started in 1999, takes its name from The New York Review of Books, the magazine that publishes it, and shortens it to the initials NYRB for series such as NYRB Classics and NYRB Poets.

Series design often does more of the identifying than the colophon itself. Writing in Eye in the winter of 2007, Rick Poynor described how Penguin’s classics covers of the 1960s, under Germano Facetti, held a series together with a consistent type style and title position, and how Katy Homans’ format for NYRB Classics keeps a title box in a fixed place while changing its colour from book to book, carrying that colour onto the spine and back cover, and leaving the small NYRB logo off the front. When reading a publisher’s identity, look at what stays fixed from title to title, where the house name or mark actually appears, and how far a series format, rather than a logo, tells a reader which list a book belongs to.

From a for-profit press to a nonprofit house.

The company’s structure changed in 2014. The San Francisco Chronicle’s books editor John McMurtrie reported on 16 October 2014 that McSweeney’s would become a nonprofit, so that it could keep taking on projects that do not necessarily make money. Eggers told the paper that McSweeney’s, founded in 1998 as a for-profit company, was already operating as a fiscally sponsored project of SOMArts, the independent nonprofit that runs the South of Market Cultural Center in San Francisco, which let it accept tax-deductible donations. He said it would apply to become its own nonprofit and hoped to gain 501(c)(3) status within a year, and that the house would begin asking for donations for several projects on its website that week.

The report listed what the house published at the time: books, the Quarterly Concern and the magazine The Believer, with imprints including McSweeney’s McMullens for children’s books, the McSweeney’s Poetry Series and the Collins Library of reprinted forgotten titles. It also named Voice of Witness, an oral history series. The paper noted that Eggers had co-founded the nonprofits 826 National and ScholarMatch, which had begun as nonprofits, unlike McSweeney’s. Eggers said he had once thought the conversion would mean closing the company and starting again, until Malcolm Margolin of the Berkeley publisher Heyday explained how he had done it, and the attorney Rosemary Fei explained how it worked. Eggers said the company had been discussing the change for five years or longer.

Other periodicals followed. English Wikipedia says that in 2019 McSweeney’s began publishing Illustoria, an art and storytelling magazine for children founded by Joanne Meiyi Chan, and that the house also runs the humour site McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. Through all of it the name has stayed the one taken from a stranger’s letters, and the house type has stayed a classical serif.

For a design guide, McSweeney’s shows how a publisher can build an identity from a single typeface and a habit of changing the physical form of each issue, from boxes and rubber bands to leatherette and folded jackets, while keeping the pages themselves plain. Compare Graywolf Press, another nonprofit literary publisher, or Penguin Books, whose series design takes the opposite route of one fixed format. For this guide we use leatherette brown, foil gold and letterpress black on cream with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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