This week my publisher sent me author copies of the Czech, Dutch, Italian, Japanese, Swedish, and Turkish editions of Steal Like An Artist. (For some reason, the Spanish publisher hasn’t sent us copies yet.)
You can find out more about all the translations available here.
It’s very strange to have versions of your book that you can’t actually read.
Translation is always a creative challenge, but probably more so for Steal, which is a book not just full of writing, but pictures of writing.
I never made a font of my handwriting (all the headers in the book are a scan of my actual writing), so the foreign designers had to start from scratch.
Some of the publishers had an illustrator swap out words in the blackout poems so it would make sense:
The Dutch publisher, Lannoo, actually went to the trouble of finding different signs for the de-sign pages:
I’m not sure whether the Japanese publisher’s choice to switch the red accent color to a lime green was a purely aesthetic choice or if red has some meaning in Japan that I’m unfamiliar with. Their edition has a cool dust jacket with nothing but the arrowhead man on the cover of the actual book:
We’ve sold the rights in several other languages, but I should note that I have next-to-nothing to do with the foreign editions, so I don’t really know in advance when they’re going to drop. I’ll announce new editions on Twitter when they do: @austinkleon
