On the cover of Caldecott Medalist Chris Raschka’s new middle grade novel, That Curious Thing, one element is conspicuous by its absence: a title. For Raschka’s longtime editor Michael di Capua, however, it’s actually a case of history repeating itself. PW spoke with Raschka and di Capua together on Zoom about the cover and the book’s origin story, the inscrutability of cats—of which there are many in this book—and what makes an enduring editor-author partnership tick.

Michael, this is the second time you’ve edited a book that doesn’t have a title on the cover. Can you explain why you felt That Curious Thing was well-suited for this unconventional approach once again?

Michael di Capua: Chris and I collaborate with Steve Scott on the design of the books that we’ve done together. Steve is a great designer. Chris started off the jacket design by creating exquisite hand-lettering for the title and his name. Steve embellished it, adding a long swash to the bottom curve of the “c” in “Curious” which sort of suggests a cat’s tail. Although later I realized that most domestic cats don’t have foot-long tails, it just felt cat-ty. Then we superimposed the beautiful lettering on a trail of cat paw prints. And Steve came up with a very unusual color scheme: two shades of turquoise and deep purple.

And there we were: Chris, Steve, and I thought this was one of the best jackets ever. We sent it to HarperCollins, and they admired it. But they basically said, “It’s a middle grade novel and you have to have some sort of illustration on the front.”

Easier said than done, since the entire front was covered by this terrific hand-lettering and paw prints. But I understood the need from the point of view of sales and marketing for illustration, and that basically triggered in my head a plan to have our cake and eat it too.

Chris Raschka: Upside down cake.

Di Capua: Yes, upside down, exactly. So I suggested to Steve and Chris to take our beautiful design for the front of the jacket and move it to the back, and give the good folks at HarperCollins the illustration they longed for on the front—but to not have any type on the front.

And the reason that even entered my brain is that in 1990 I published Fred Marcellino’s first picture book, Puss in Boots—it was a Caldecott Honor book—and it famously was the first children’s book anyone knew of that had no type on the front of the jacket. It was a wild success... in terms of achieving a “buzz.”

I never would have had this same thought for That Curious Thing if the HarperCollins folks had simply said they loved the jacket without the illustration on the front. I only thought of it because they really wanted an illustration. I did some research to see if such a textless cover had been done on a middle grade novel, and no one could think of one that had.

And that’s how we ended up. We think that the way the jacket looks on the book itself is so much more dramatic and effective than we even imagined that it would be.

Chris, you’ve mentioned in another PW interview that you’d been working on That Curious Thing for a long time. When you heard Michael’s idea for the cover, did you think, “Hey, it’s finally getting published—what are you doing?”

Raschka: Oh no. I trust Michael’s wisdom and Steve’s acumen. I know that nothing would get across Steve’s desk that he didn’t think was good from a design point of view. I’m always happy to try something new, and I hadn’t done something like this before.

What took so long for the book to reach publication?

Raschka: I wrote it pretty much of a piece and Michael and I were looking at it 12 years ago and it was more or less ready to go. And then a number of things happened in our lives and it was put on hold. We returned to it some years ago, I rewrote sections, we kept smoothing it, refining up to the very last moment, making sure it was coherent. I’m very happy with it.

Di Capua: Part of the delay is that Chris and I gave precedence to finishing a picture book called Star Stuff [2023], with text by Rand Burkert. And then we immediately plunged back into That Curious Thing.

The cover approach put a lot of pressure on the illustration. Did you go through a lot of iterations?

Raschka: I checked my notebooks and Steve and I worked on that cover over the course of eight months. Steve had initial design ideas that were quite traditional and quite simple, which I did my versions of. And we felt they were a little bit too static, not enough interest in them. But part of the designs I was creating in them had a frame, so we had this idea of a frame for quite a while. When Michael suggested that we flip the book and put an illustration on the front, that frame came back. I drew the frame and Steve streamlined it and made it square, and then I did the illustration.

We decided that the illustration should match the way I illustrated the chapters in the book—they’re basically little watercolor paintings, more painting than drawing, they’re all done with brush. We decided to keep it in tones of gray, which allowed Steve to choose that trio of colors which are quite unusual: the two turquoises, highlighted by the purple. The cover of the book itself is also purple and you see that color peeking through on the sides, which is very nice.

Di Capua: So not only is it all illustration on the front of the jacket, it’s also a black and white illustration! The interior of the book includes nearly 80 black-and-white illustrations—it’s a lot of illustration. The conventional thing is to have the art on the jacket be full color, no matter what’s on the inside. My conviction was that having no type on the front and having black-and-white art cover the front instead of full-color art, would mean that if the book was surrounded by a hundred other books, it would dominate your eyes.

Raschka: Once we decided it would be a textless cover, I thought the most attractive cover would be a quasi-portrait of the two main characters of the book, Cleo and Muffin [her pet cat]. I wanted it to be pretty much a close-up of them, rather than whole figures standing in an environment of some sort. I did many iterations of the scheme—Cleo holding Muffin this way or that.

In that previous PW interview, you described the plot of That Curious Thing as “two groups of cats in two different apartments in Manhattan and they are both members of espionage agencies. And, of course, they can speak. And they are in a terrible international conflict that comes to a head on the Upper East Side.” That’s quite a plot—where did it spring from?

Raschka: We had a house guest staying with us and when we were away, she was afraid that she’d left the door of the apartment open and that our cat Apollo had wandered out. She went in search of that cat, and there was a neighbor’s door that was open, and she thought it had gone in there. As it happened our cat did not. But that was the seed for the story. The heroine Cleo follows the cat and ends up in a mysterious neighbor’s downstairs apartment, which turns out to be the headquarters of a secret cat society—talking cats are saving the world—which is pretty typical for a New York apartment.

You give cats a lot of credit in the novel—they can talk, and you reveal that cats or cat-human hybrids are behind every technological leap save the wheel. Are you particularly fond of cats?

Raschka: I like many animals. But I’ve lived with cats most of my adult life and I think cats are genuinely fascinating creatures. They clearly have a certain kind of intelligence when you live with them and you look them in the eyes. But they sleep 20 hours a day. So something must be happening when they’re sleeping. Maybe they’re saving the world—it’s possible. We had a cat who genuinely learned how to say the word “water” very clearly when she wanted water. If she could learn how to say water, then cats could learn how to say anything.

It’s just a kind of philosophy of mine that the world is limitlessly interesting and strange and always more complicated than we expect. So from there you can let your fancy travel.

Michael, are you a cat person?

No, I’ve never had a cat, a dog, or any pet. What does that tell you about me?

Chris, you’re a longtime New Yorker and That Curious Thing is another one of your books that’s also a love letter to the city and its eccentric residents.

Raschka: I guess what makes New York a fertile field is that we are all living very close together and we literally rub up against one another and often wind up in one another’s apartments. At the same time, New York can offer you anonymity—so you can be anonymous and very much with other people.

All you have to do is walk across town and walk into a different neighborhood and you feel like you’ve traveled across the world. So you can see New York from a traveler’s viewpoint, and at the same time you can be very close to the community that’s right around you.

Di Capua: I was born in Manhattan and lived on 17th Street for most of my life. Chris and I have known each other for quite a long time and he continually surprises me by mentioning some weird nook and cranny of New York City that he’s been spending some significant time in. He gets a lot of exercise.

That Curious Thing and the story of its cover seems emblematic of the relationship between the two of you. Do you think the kind of deep, mutual trust you’ve talked about is a rarity in publishing these days?

Raschka: I don’t know if it’s rare, but it’s a precious thing. Michael has taught me an enormous amount about making books. One of the things I’ve learned from Michael is you always bring what you’re working on to the highest degree of finishing before you take the next step‑even though you know there’s more finishing to be done. In the past, I’d thought “We’ll clean this up later.” Now, I always make sure I’m certain about one step before taking another. Do you agree, Michael?

Di Capua: Yes.

Raschka: I remember when we were doing picture books in the beginning, Michael would insist that if there’s a printout, you trim off the white margins, so you see what the book looks like. I didn’t think it made a difference. But no, you trim the white paper. It makes a difference.

The first time we did close copyediting with my first middle grade novel, Seriously, Norman! [2011], I sat down with you and I didn’t get up for five hours. I was not expecting that—and then we did that for five days in a row. That surprised me, how much work that was. I don’t know if anyone else does that anymore.

Di Capua: Some people would say that I’m an insane person—that attitude about working tirelessly until it’s right. But it’s built into Chris’s bones, too. I remember specifically the very first book we did together was a picture book called The Hello, Goodbye Window [2005] by Norton Juster of Phantom Tollbooth fame. That went on to win Chris’s first Caldecott Medal.

I had acquired that text and was looking for an illustrator and I thought of Chris—who I had never had anything to do with before. Chris proceeded to illustrate, in small very rough sketches, almost every phrase of the text.

Raschka: Yes.

Di Capua: He did about 200 small exploratory sketches of what the finished art might look like. I was sort of speechless at the time. But that intense labor on his part paid off so beautifully. Because we looked at his very rough sketches, we discussed them, we pointed to the aspects that we thought were most appealing, and then he went ahead and did the finished art for a 32-page picture book based on these 200 sketches. It was a distillation of all the exploration he had done.

At heart, both Chris and I are tireless fanatics and that’s why we get along and produce good work together.

Were there any moments in collaborating on That Curious Thing where you didn’t agree?

Raschka: I do trust Michael completely. And this book is complicated enough. When Michael had it in his hands there were probably many more cats. And Michael gently said, “Maybe you want to get rid of some of those cats…”

Di Capua: I think he got rid of three.

Raschka: It must have been at least three. It’s hard to eliminate characters that you dreamed up, but that was absolutely correct. When I was doing the illustrations, I made little clay figurines of all the cats so I could keep them straight [for continuity’s sake]. And even then, there was one cat that we had to go back and look at carefully where I screwed up—there was a patch on the left eye that should have been on the right eye, that sort of thing. I think we fixed it. I know we fixed it.

Di Capua: Do you understand what Chris said? He actually made a small statue of each of the cat characters in the book so that when he was doing an illustration of that cat, he had a model to look at. Do you see what I mean by tireless?

That Curious Thing by Chris Raschka. HarperCollins/di Capua, $21.99 Sept. 17 ISBN 978-0-06-285827-6