The Quiet American by Graham Greene

Prophetic novel set in 1950s Vietnam. ...more info on wikipedia

About the artist: Steve Pillfrom the UK

Steve Pill is a journalist and photographer from London, England. Art of the City is his photographic portfolio, a collection of personal work from cities around the world.

Why this work

”I have a condition known as grapheme-colour synaesthesia, a neurological condition that means whenever I read black and white text, my brain perceives each letter in colour. As such, the idea of book cover design is something that has always appealed to me: representing monochrome text in full colour. Apart from a love of Graham Greene, I chose The Quiet American in particular because the character of Alden Pyle lives his life by what he has read in the books of York Harding, which I thought was an interesting theme to tackle for a poster campaign to help fight illiteracy. Ironically however, Harding was a fictional author, so when it came to creating the poster, I first had to design a cover for The Dangers of Democracy. Elsewhere, my design deliberately nods towards the period in which the book was written and set - the 1950s - with the recurring number three a reference to Pyle’s believe in a ‘Third Force’.”