JOIN USBook covers are like people’s faces,” said Orhan Pamuk once, “either they remind us of a lost happiness or they promise blissful worlds we have yet to explore. That is why we gaze at book covers as passionately as we do faces.” Not everyone looks at book covers quite in the way he is suggesting they do, but many of us have stopped to look twice at a book jacket before we have opened a book.
My own fascination with book jackets continues in this column, where I quickly look at a few books dealing with modern jacket design. In By Its Cover, an intelligent, analytical and richly produced book that looks at the history of book-jacket design, the authors, Ned Drew and Paul Sternberger, tell us that it was the cover of Joyce’s Ulysses that signalled the arrival of modern book-jacket design. Ernst Reichl’s now-famous cover used ‘elongated typography that seemed as modern as Joyce’s book’.
Until the 1970s, modern book design seems to have largely experimented with typeface and illustrations — designers such as Paul Bacon, who used a combination of typography and illustration for Catch 22 and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. “With the 80s,” notes By Its Cover, “book design moved to Postmodern collage... constructing Postmodern jumbles that challenged modernist notions of continuity and creative individuality.” And it was the design team at Alfred Knopf that first met the challenge of Postmodern book-jacket design by using collaged imagery. When Faber & Faber turned 80, they celebrated with a lavishly illustrated book of their best book covers. In 80 Years of Book Cover Design, Joseph Connolly, an ardent collector of Faber first editions, demonstrates the art and beauty of these memorable covers. Faber’s familiar typography, brush lettering and hand-painted covers were largely the work of its great art director, Berthold Wolpe.
Random House, of course, has the star jacket designer, Chip Kidd, who published 2 books displaying his striking work. At a time when most graphic designers experimented with typography and illustrations, he used a collage of photographs, illustrations and typography. The design for Chip Kidd: Book One, a monograph of his work, is itself tantalising. Kidd picks more than 800 of his best book covers and lavishly and playfully showcases them here, along with commentary by the authors he designed these jackets for. His signature style is not to have an obvious cover image, but something oblique — even wild — that would still evoke the book. He often blurs and crops photographs, and is fond of using pop-culture images to suggest wit, irreverence and zip.
In another evocative, slim and finely produced monograph on Kidd’s work (titled Chip Kidd) by Veronique Vienne, the author notes that Kidd “uses every surface of a hardcover jacket — the spine, the back, the flaps — to escape the 2-dimensional world of graphic design.” Kidd readily admits that it was his boss at Knopf, Carol Devine Carson (who pioneered conceptual photography on covers), who inspired him. Knopf’s legendary editor, Sonny Mehta, is his other mentor. Kidd’s work is not just slick.
It has edge and depth. Updike notes in the book’s introduction, “Kidd reads the book he designs for and locates a disquieting image close to the narrative’s dark, beating heart.” Some of Kidd’s iconic book covers will be familiar to most readers now: most popularly the Tyrannosaurus silhouette on Crichton’s Jurassic Park; the clear, acetate jacket and the enlarged doll’s head in Donna Tartt’s The Secret History and The Little Friend, respectively; the bloody close-up of a dead man’s eye in Richard Lattimore’s translation of The New Testament and the panels of red and blue in Orhan Pamuk’s My Name is Red. Kidd has designed more than 1,500 covers and is so sought after that authors stipulate in their contracts that he design their book jackets.
At Faber, the legendary Wolpe also went on to design more than 1,000 jackets. Apparently, he would hand-paint some covers and usually within an hour when some last-minute change was called for. The Faber covers that I know well are the jackets for those Lawrence Durrell books (Justine, Balthazar), Eliot’s Four Quartets and Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (1939), Becket’s Waiting for Godot, Golding’s Lord of the Flies, Sylvia Plath’s Ariel, Larkin’s Girl in Winter, and The Faber Book of Children’s Verse.
Book design has been so central to publishing for more than a century that it makes you wonder what role it will play in the ebook.