Forest coverage

Earlier this week, we at the Vermont Historical Society published our latest book: When the Trees Came Back by Robert A. Mello, a history of deforestation in Vermont, which I've been really excited for. Of all the books that we've published, this is the one that I like the most, and I think it's a really important story that we're telling.

Since I arrived at VHS, I've been heavily involved in the selling and marketing process, and looking back at that process has become something of a series here: I've written a handful of posts that look back on the work that goes into designing each of the covers, and how it's changed from book to book.

Last summer, one of our board members on the publications committee let me know that they were considering a new book from one of the authors who had written for us before: Robert Mello, a retired Superior Court judge.

His prior book was Moses Robinson and the Founding of Vermont, an in-depth biography of one of Vermont's formative founding fathers, and before that, he published Last Stand of the Red Spruce. He also authored a paper for VHS's academic journal, Vermont History: Summit Preserve: The University of Vermont’s Unprecedented 1859 Purchase of the Summit of Mount Mansfield.

Our board member noted that the book was about the history of deforestation in Vermont, and that the title was tentatively When the Trees Came Back.

I was excited about this: I've written a lot about environmentalism and the fragile nature of our world's ecosystem before, and this was a period of history that I was particularly interested in: how Vermont's forests were almost completely cut down, a far cry from the forests that now cover the hills and mountains now.

With that bit of information to go on, I had one idea that came to mind right away: an overhead shot of a forest that's been restored. I found a pair of images from Unsplash and put together a couple of covers with some of the same design language that I'd used for concepts in the last couple of covers: big centered title.

The results were... fine? It would work for a more modern, popular science book and this is about Vermont's history. This needed something that telegraphed history a bit more, and it would be good to find an image of Vermont's deforested hills rather. The images that I had quickly grabbed images probably aren't of Vermont in any case: if we had gone down that route, we would have sourced an image of our own.

I turned my attention to Winters' Time for the time being, but when I learned that we were moving forward with this book later in the fall of 2025, I went back and started playing around with another couple of ideas. After doing some searching in our archives, I came across one fascinating and horrifying image: a log drive in Sharon that was taken sometime in the early 20th century. It featured a river full to the banks with felled logs, and I realized that this was a good candidate. Better yet: it was an image in our collection.

I tossed the image into the mix, and changed up the font a bit. Because this was a longer title than Winters' Time – and because I wanted to change things up a bit from what we did with Life Became Very Blurry, I ended up changing the position of the title into some different variations.

Nothing really worked until I adjusted the title with everything off to the right side of the cover. That clicked: with the title, subtitle, and author all along the right, it allowed me to really show off the image, and it felt historical in a way that I can't quite put my finger on: it reminded me a bit of some of the covers of books that my parents had that I'd look at while growing up.

We made some further adjustments along the way. moved the image over so that the people were in the center (which helped show the scale of the image), gave the title a little bit of a shadow and after some discussion, we updated the subtitle to "The Great Battle to Save Vermont's Forests", which had been the manuscript's working title.

From there, it didn't really change too much! Bob suggested that we throw some color into the title, and after a couple of attempts, we realized that the only color that really worked with this particular image was a golden yellow.

From there, we reached out to a handful of Vermonters who're currently in the environmental/conservation/forestry scene, and activist Bill McKibben provided us with a really great one: One of the few hopeful stories on a planet that's turned mostly brown." Ethan Tapper (author of How to Love a Forest: The Bittersweet Work of Tending a Changing World – which I'm a big fan of) and Michael Snyder, (the former commissioner of the Vermont Department of Forests, Parks and Recreation, and author of Wood Whys: An Exploration of Forests and Forestry) also provided some excellent quotes, which made it onto the back cover.

Of all the covers that I've worked on, this is the one that's come together the quickest. Some of these, like Winters' Time were a pretty long process as we worked to narrow in on the right look and feel, but I think we nailed the right tone and appearance for this one early on. Bob was a fan of it from the start, saying that the image was a striking one, and the rest of the staff did as well.

Once the cover was in place, we did the usual marketing stuff, putting together some graphics for our website and catalog, and let the usual folks in the media and bookstores know about it.

What's different about this book is that its subject lent itself to quite a few more other people that we could tell about it: not only are there a lot of environmental and conservation-minded people here in Vermont, but there are a whole bunch of organizations who were very interested in it when we let them know about it.

Hopefully, curious readers will find it just as compelling, and learn something about the state in which we live.

When the Trees Came Back: The Great Battle to Save Vermont's Forests by Robert Mello is now available from VHS. If you like and appreciate the work that we do, you can sign up as a member of VHS here.