Remembering our earlier book cover for Vladimir Nabokov's collected stories, where the letters were mounted on Butterfly pins for tales by this lepidopterist, Vintage (check) art director John Gall commissioned multiple designers to create covers for numerous re-issues of Nabokov novels—each a work in an insect box. Lucky us, to be commissioned to create a cover for Pale Fire, a novel consisting of an exquisite poem, and a wickedly funny fictionalized back story about the poet, narrated by the poet's stalker. The poem is a searingly beautiful elegy for the poet's daughter who has committed suicide, hence the match we snuffed out on the cover, and the ethereal smoke—a memory—that we have preserved.