Praspar Press
Our ongoing partnership with the micro-publishing champion of contemporary Maltese literature
Scintillas
Praspar Press’ anthologies of Maltese writing showcases new prose, poetry and literary nonfiction by a selection of emerging and established Maltese writers from across the world.
A spark of inspiration
For Scintillas, we were influenced by an amalgamation of the Latin and English roots of its title—a literal spark-like ember as seen in the pattern of each anthology’s interior covers, and the concept of the imperceptible or intangible.
Praspar’s wonderful founders and editors Jen Calleja and Kat Storace had outlined a wish to explore graphic grids and patterns to create a cover that would form the basis for this ongoing series, and the final approach was somewhat a deconstructed version of that concept: intricately-bordered geometric forms drifting (scintilla-like!) inside and beyond the cover’s edge, text constrained into boxes and then bursting out.
Dream themes
For each anthology, a different overarching theme inspired the colour palette and the often semi-abstract motifs that populate the cover and interior spreads.
For Scintillas 1 we focussed on shapes that had ‘domestic leanings’—a mirror, a glass etc.—alongside a palette that depicted a specific representation of Malta itself: a sun-bleached background punctuated with warm reds, yellows and a deep ocean-like blue.
With the sophomore Scintillas 2, it was The Year of the Prickly Pear™ and this and other mouth-watering and markedly Maltese fruit–a citrus, a fig, an apricot etc.—adorned a cover punctuated with hot, vivid and juicy greens, pinks, oranges and yellows.
Scintillas 3 takes a 1970s confectionary twist with an assortment of salty and sweet items (reflecting the division of the works within) aiming to depict the remnants of a table in a Maltese snack-bar of that era, replete with a half-eaten pastizz and a palette that honours packets of Twistees and bottles of Kinnie.
Typographically speaking
One of the other goals of Jen and Kat’s brief was to establish a body typeface that could be used across all Praspar publications—an elegant, legible and multi-weight choice that would take an ever-so-slightly embellished lead from Romie, the font of Praspar’s logotype. Needing to compliment both the pure theatre of Scintillas with the ultra-expressive typographic punctuation of Swear in its ‘cilati’ style, and the comparative restraint of the other titles, Meno Text was a very worthy winner.
what will it take for me to leave
Alongside Scintillas, we undertook the creation of a separate but interlinked aesthetic for a parallel series of publications focussing on translations of works by single authors.
Our approach to the cover of Loranne Vella’s collection of enigmatic, dark, and at times humorous short stories (deftly translated from the Maltese by Kat Storace) explores the themes evoked by the words ‘behind closed doors’—the phrase a translation from the original Maltese title Mill-bieb ’il ġewwa. Metaphorically, this provokes notions of secrets held in our private spaces, the dark and light of the interior and the exterior, the escape of the inside via daydreams or memories of an outside that we cannot always quite open our doors to find…
Retaining a graphical symbiosis with Scintillas, the “abstract geometric shapes, with domestic leanings” in this instance are doorways (apertures, portals) that may both bind and free us physically and allegorically, enmeshed here with one of Zvezdan Relji’s photographs from the book’s interior. As the sun sets and the clock ticks, the twisting chain that holds the key meanders away out of reach onto the book’s back cover.
The Lives and Deaths of K. Penza
With the design for the second book in this series—Albert Gatt’s translation of Clare Azzopardi’s meta-detective novel—we were able to play with the original blueprint, cementing certain elements and manipulating others.
Here the frames are multiple, splintered, but also ornate—a nod to the forms of traditional Maltese ironwork. In collaboration with Kat and Jen from Praspar, we created a collage comprised of several photographic elements intermingling with various other disparate parts—newspaper cuttings, cutout numbers, swathes of vivid orange paint—with these multiple fragments within fragments intended to evoke the meta nature of the novel: of fiction and life intertwined.
On the back cover, the key motif appears again, but here its form is ancient, rusted and yet again out of reach—hiding some potential clue to Azzopardi’s mystery. The interior cover continues these motifs of ancient ironwork, of unfamiliar Maltese streets and locked gates, and this bar-like form is used too within the book to delineate—along with a pulp-noir transformation of the title typography—the excerpted works of the mysterious K. Penza that are interwoven between the voice of the story’s protagonist.