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"I had read the manuscript of Eclipse, and for a few weeks the story was percolating in my mind. Meanwhile I had 18,000 other distractions and other titles with pressing deadlines that needed attention. One night on the way home, I stopped by the Strand bookstore on Broadway to look through some art books, to see if anything would strike a chord. I bought a great stack of books. One of them was a survey of 20th-century photography with small 4x5 pictures in it. I was sitting in my bedroom and I thought skimming through the pages that maybe I'd find something for a book on India I was designing. I turned a page and then I saw this photograph, by Teun Hocks, and my mind was blown -- I said to myself, that's the guy in the Banville novel! He's confused, it's night, he's wearing his pajamas, he's outdoors -- it's hopeless, surreal, every single quality of Eclipse I thought an image could have without being a literal scene from the book. Alexander Cleave, the character in the book, does walk out into a storm at some point, and somehow the scarf also reminded me of the author photo of John Banville, who is wearing one. The tone and ambiguity of the image itself also appealed to me on it's own merits -- it's hard at first to tell whether it's a photograph or a painting.

"With an eclipse, something is always a little bit off. With an eclipse of the moon or the sun, you look forward to it -- knowing that it will be weird, unique, that there will be magic in the air. There is magic in this photograph; the wind is blowing the man's hat and scarf, but the candle flame is standing perfectly still and upright. . So I made a sketch of the cover and put in on my shelf face out and it really grew on me while waiting for others in the publishing process to give or withhold their approval; the editor was away for two weeks, and the author unreachable temporarily in a small village in Ireland. Then the pieces came together -- everyone here gave it their approval, as did the author, and there were no hitches in obtaining permission to use the image. I had never heard of Teun Hocks -- and luckily it turned out that his gallery is in New York. Now I am tripping over Teun Hooks everywhere -- just a few blocks from our office, in Grand Central Station, in the food court, there's a whole display of his work in lightboxes, that shine at you from the walls. He's his own model in all of his photos -- it's quite a piece of performance art."

---Carol Devine Carson, Art Director, Alfred A. Knopf.