Slade House by David Mitchell (Random House, 2015)

Slade House is a horror/mystery novel by British author David Mitchell. Originally published in the UK by Sceptre, this is the first US edition by Random House. There are at least two different versions. Both have a die-cut window in the front cover that reveals the illustrated endpapers with a labyrinthine stairwell, and both use Klang.

The one shown above appears to be for the Advance Reader’s Edition. The four words of the author’s name and the title here are arranged to all four sides of the window (left, right, up, down), with two of them shown rotated. This nicely echoes the spiraling stairwell. In the final version (see further below), this was changed to a more conventional layout. I wouldn’t be surprised if that was an intervention from the marketing folks who were afraid that some customers would otherwise look for a book titled Slade Mitchell by David House, or Slade David by Mitchell House.