I am excited about tonight’s logo. It is for the book of Kings. Some people think there are two books of kings, but there is really only one. They split it up as a logistical matter because scrolls could only be so long. If you don’t know me very well, I love me some Bible. I could talk about the Bible even longer than I can talk about fonts. I also like line art, apparently, because whenever I set off on a years-long project that I will never finish I use a line-art style.
I am rambling.
Let’s talk about publishing books for a second. In the early days of publishing, it was one dude and a press (one of the first books ever printed was the Bible by Johanes Gutenberg), but it was this crazy specialized thing that hardly anybody could do. Eventually it became so complicated it took 1000 people banded together as a publishing company to make a book. Then technology changed and just one dude could become a publisher again. Even me. And this time you don’t even need to own a press. I will spare you the rest of the details about the publishing industry. You can read more about that on my publishing page. I will just say that publishing a book is fun and rewarding. If you are reading this and you think you would like to publish a book, DO IT. It’s not that hard.
This is getting long. Sorry.
I know how to publish books, and I love the Bible, and I like to design things. I decided to put that all together and publish my own Bible. I put together a 6-volume bible. Each volume has a woodcut illustration on the cover by Gustav Doré and a line-art icon drawn by me. I want the icons to say something about the book, and ideally, relate to each other in a way that mirrors how the books relate to each other. You can read about the KR15 Bible here, and you can buy it on Amazon.
I couldn’t leave well enough alone, and I decided I want to publish each book in the Bible individually, in a format that mimics the size of an iPhone. So now I have to design an icon for EVERY BOOK OF THE BIBLE. There are 66 of them in the protestant canon.
And so, at long last, we come to today’s logo. The book of Kings.
The book of Kings starts with the split of Solomon’s kingdom into the northern kingdom of Israel and the Southern Kingdom of Judah. It highlights important moments in both kingdoms and grades the kings not on how prosperous their reign was, but on how well they followed God’s teachings. The book ends with the fall and exile of both kingdoms into exile.
Here is what the cover will look like:
Kings has so many great stories in it. I had a lot of choices for the illustration, but I HAD to go with “Jehu's Companions Finding the Remains of Jezebel.” In case you aren’t familiar with the story, Jehu stages a coup and convinces Queen Jezebel’s own people to throw her out of a tower to her death. Her blood splatters on the wall and her body is trampled by horses. Then dogs eat Jezebel’s corpse, leaving only her head, hands, and feet.
Here is the complete illustration by Gustav Doré.
