The guy who designed the cover of X Saves the World is named Roberto de Vicq de Cumptich. Because I have never met or spoken with him, and because of the baroque, Pynchonian quality of his name, I was not sure, for a while, whether he was a real person. Perhaps, I thought, this aristocratic configuration of syllables was the publishing world equivalent of “Alan Smithee,” the quasi-secret pseudonym that film directors slap on their movies when they want to disown them. (And wait — doesn’t the dashing Baron de Vicq de Cumptich make a cameo appearance somewhere in Nabokov’s Pale Fire?) But no. Just a few days ago my friend Todd Pruzan, who used to work with me at Details and who’s now an editor at Conde Nast Portfolio , and who himself once published a brilliant nonfiction book, The Clumsiest People in Europe , about the way that people leap to strange and incorrect conclusions, assured me that Roberto de Vicq de Cumptich is 100% real. Nor did Todd stop there: He went on to say that he considers Roberto the best book-jacket designer in the business. (Take that, Chip Kidd .)

And I have to admit, I’m psyched about the way X Saves the World looks. It’s bright and bold and comic-booky, and when you shake it back and forth under a lamp, as I do, oh, maybe 120 times a day, you can see these glorious (but ironic, of course!) rays of solar illumination shooting out from the center of the X. Thank you, Roberto. Someday I hope to visit your thousand-acre hideaway in Umbria so that I can express my gratitude in person, preferably over a bottle of Torgiano Rosso Riserva from your own private vineyard. Would the week of May 12th work for you? While we’re on the topic, a lot of friends have asked me about the book cover because they’re perceptive (or stalkerish) enough to have noticed three different versions, and they’re wondering which is the right one.

The right one is this one, the cover with the big blue-and-red-and-yellow X gleaming triumphantly (but ironically!) on a field of white space. That’s the final version; that’s what you’ll be seeing in stores. (I hope…) If you’ve stumbled across an online variation in which the X has a circus strongman’s muscular arms and legs attached to it, along with a couple of ringed coffee-cup stains on top of the X, well, that was the first draft of the cover. Amazon.com had it up for a few months as a placeholder, and at some point it accidentally wound up getting passed around the Internet. Which is fine, even though it’s not the cover that received the official seal of approval. It was a very clever design, but I felt—as did the expert designer Julie Schrader, who happens to be my wife—that the combination of visual elements made the cover feel a bit crowded and cramped. Eventually the limbs of the circus strongman were jettisoned.

So that led to the galley version of the cover. That’s the second one you might’ve seen. On the galley variation, you’ve still got the coffee stains. I admit it, comrades — I’d become attached to those coffee stains. I liked the way they helped undercut the superhero-ish gallantry of the title with a dash of grimy barista realism. I always expected that the coffee stains would remain a crucial component of the X Saves the World multimedia experience.

But something weird happened — and I hope, ahem, that my lovely and generous friends at Viking don’t mind my talking about this in public. For some reason, and nobody seems to know precisely why, the coffee stains evaporated when the final edition of X Saves the World was printed up. The books came back from the book factory, and that brown, caffeinated Venn diagram was just…gone. Was it a happy accident? I don’t know. I can’t say for sure whether the remarkable Roberto de Vicq de Cumptich had a hand in this, but as soon as Viking mailed me a copy of the book a few days ago, I could tell that losing the coffee stains was a stroke of good fortune, and my crack team of experts on the morning commuter train agreed. I hesitate to use the phrase “it pops,” because I’m pretty sure that that’s become one of those icky media/marketing catch phrases that we’re all supposed to be too cool to use by now, but I’m having trouble avoiding it. The cover does indeed pop. It stands out. It doesn’t shirk the limelight. I suppose there’s a lesson in here somewhere — something about it being time for a generation to move beyond coffee stains. But I’m a Gen Xer, so that word — “lesson” — makes me cringe.

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