BY ITS COVER

Modern

American

Book

Cover

Design

NED DREWPAUL STERNBERGER

Princeton Architectural Press New York

Published by

Princeton Architectural Press

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© 2005 Princeton Architectural Press

All rights reserved

Printed and bound in China

08 07 06 05 4 3 2 1 First edition

ISBN: 1-56898-497-9

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without

written permission from the publisher, except in the context of reviews.

Every reasonable attempt has been made to identify owners of copyright.

Errors or omissions will be corrected in subsequent editions.

Editing: Mark Lamster

Cover Design: John Gall

Book Design: Brenda McManus and Ned Drew

Design Consultant: Paul Sternberger

Special thanks to: Nettie Aljian, Dorothy Ball, Nicola Bednarek,

Janet Behning, Penny (Yuen Pik) Chu, Russell Fernandez, Jan Haux,

Clare Jacobson, Mark Lamster, Nancy Eklund Later, Linda Lee,

Katharine Myers, Lauren Nelson, Jane Sheinman, Scott Tennent,

Jennifer Thompson, Paul G. Wagner, Joseph Weston, and Deb Wood

of Princeton Architectural Press —Kevin C. Lippert, publisher

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 7

i JUDGING THE BOOK 8

1 A UNION OF FUNCTION AND FORM: THE EVOLUTION OF THE BOOK JACKET IN AMERICA 18

2 AMERICANIZING UTOPIA: PROGRESSIVE DESIGN IN AMERICAN HANDS 42

3 MODERNISM AND BEYOND: HISTORICAL FOUNDATIONS FOR CONSTRUCTING THE FUTURE 72

4 THE BLAND BREEDING THE BLAND: AMERICAN BOOK COVER DESIGN DISORIENTED 96

5 THE PILLAGED, PARODIED, AND PROFOUND: POSTMODERNISM AND THE BOOK COVER 114

6 REDEFINE AND REDESIGN: MAKING POSTMODERNISM WORK 134

NOTES 172

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 178

INDEX 182

IMAGE CREDITS 186

CONTENTS

A UNION OF FUNCTION AND FORMTHE EVOLUTION OF THE BOOK JACKET IN AMERICA1

A UNION OF FUNCTION AND FORMTHE EVOLUTION OF THE BOOK JACKET IN AMERICA1

20 The book jacket evolved from a simple utilitarian

object into a highly visual and conceptualized means

of communication. While the first book jackets date

to the 1820s, until late in the century they had only

been used as protective packaging and tended to be

nonpictorial, labeled wrappers with little focus on

design. Book jackets began to gain importance in the

1890s with the recognition that they could be a way

to attract the attention of potential buyers. Thus the

book jacket became a focus of design in and of itself,

separate from the front board of the book. By the end

of the first decade of the twentieth century, the book

jacket began to take root as a promotional tool, and its

design received more attention.1 By mid-century in

America, what had begun as prosaic illustration and

straightforward lettering grew, through the adaptation

of European modernism, into a sophisticated integra-

tion of type and image.

The rise of the book jacket as an object of graphic

design in America coincided with the definition of

the field of graphic design as a profession. Just as it

offered ways to add formal complexity to design,

modernism also gave designers a means to reconceive

the theoretical bases of their practice. By the 1930s,

many of America’s leading graphic designers looked

for ways to reconcile the utilitarian and economic

demands of their field with a self-image based on

individualistic creative expression. Perhaps this

tension between the demands of commerce and the

possibility for conceptual depth made modernism

attractive to so many American designers: it offered

an interweaving of rigorous formal aesthetics and

potential for creative expression with an ultimate goal

of social and economic utility.

As a forum for designers to engage modernism and

define their practice, the book jacket was an intriguing

choice. Book cover design required reconciliation of

the individuality of the designer with the needs of the

client. The jacket was understood to be an ephemeral

utilitarian protective device and odious marketing

necessity whose useful purpose was all but depleted

when the book was purchased by the consumer.

Furthermore, any book claiming to have literary merit

was understood to be the creative expression of its

author, thus the designer presented with the task of

creating a cover for that book was asked not only to

speak for the publisher but for the author as well. Yet,

despite all its reputation as a crass commercial device,

and the challenge to serve both publisher and author,

the book cover was a vital forum for experimental

graphic expression by some of the most progressive

designers in America.

21

A NEW VOCABULARY ARRIVES

Many of the experimental approaches to book cover

design in America had their stylistic and theoretical

roots in Europe. European movements in the fine arts

inspired new ways of thinking about graphic design.

Cubism presented a means of disintegrating and

distilling form, challenging traditional notions of

representation, embracing the abstracted flatness of

the painted surface and integrating text as a legitimate

formal element of composition. The Futurists and

then the Dadaists took some of the formal innovations

of Cubism and applied them to more specifically

design-related projects. Artists including Filippo

Martinetti experimented with typography as an active

expressive element, no longer subservient to the

content of the text. Artists associated with the De Stijl

and Constructivist movements made tremendous

contributions to the idiom of modernism that would

impact the design world. Not only did they attempt

to contract a highly refined distillation of form into

purified geometries, but they also fostered an ideolog-

ical stance that this new vocabulary of forms could

serve modern society–from the most basic practical

needs to the most ethereal. This notion of formal

innovation as both personal and social expression

would greatly inform the practice of America’s first

generation of true modernist book cover designers,

most notably Alvin Lustig and Paul Rand.

The challenge to the commercial designer was to put

these lessons gleaned from the modernist worlds of

fine art and theoretical experimentation to practical

use. The widely published and highly respected British

design and cultural critic Herbert Read pondered

such challenges in the 1930s. Read pointed out the

risk of superficiality when formal manifestation of art

theory was applied to what he saw as the essentially

utilitarian field of design. Read was one of the greatest

proponents of the aesthetic potential of nonobjective

art in design, but he feared that “such an art, which in

the hands of a Mondrian or a Kandinsky is an art of

intuitive apprehension, an infinitely subtle and varied

response to form, line, and color, becomes in the

hands of those who seek without real understanding

to apply its principles to the construction of utilitarian

objects, an art completely devoid of the intuitive

element.”2 Despite the dangers of shallow stylistic

quotation pointed out by Read, many European

designers managed to apply the new ways of consider-

ing visual art to their field, and American designers

were paying attention.

LADISLAV SUTNAR THE GREEN AND THE RED

1950 Golden Griffin Books

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designers the opportunity to learn the theoretical

underpinnings of modernist design and to see the

application of modernist principles in action. Among

the most influential publications to find its way to

America was Jan Tschichold’s Die Neue Typographie,

published in 1928. Motivated Americans also managed

to get their hands on the German graphic design

journal Gebrauchsgraphik, which began publication

in the 1920s and included English translations. By the

1930s American trade publications such as Advertising

Arts (published in New York from 1930–35) attempted

at times to ponder the nature of modern design and

the relationship between design and modernism.

As useful as published examples were to American

designers interested in modernism, the immigration

of their European colleagues to America would prove

more influential. In response to the threat of rising

fascism in the late 1930s, many of Europe’s most

gifted designers and theoreticians emigrated to the

United States, where they made indelible marks on

design in America. Josef Albers founded design

programs at Black Mountain College and Yale

University. Herbert Bayer acted as consultant for

one of the great patrons of progressive design in

America, the Container Corporation of America.

Alexey Brodovitch served as art director at Harper’s

Bazaar and taught at the New School for Social

Research in New York. Will Burtin acted as art

director at Fortune, as did Leo Lionni. Herbert Matter

continued his unique uses of photography and type.

And Ladislav Sutnar, designer of the spectacularly

bold 1950 cover of THE GREEN AND THE RED, advocated

extreme functionalism in modernist design.3

Most of these Europeans were associated with the

Bauhaus, an institution that was perhaps the greatest

conduit for the integration of graphic design and

other fields, including the traditionally recognized

fine arts. From its founding in 1919, the Bauhaus was

a hotbed of experimentation in the application of

modernist principles to mass-produced, socially

beneficial goods.4 In the 1930s, the Bauhaus was given

new life in Chicago by immigrants including László

Moholy-Nagy and Gyorgy Kepes who would design

book covers like THE LANGUAGE OF VISION and FALSE COIN.

Veterans of the Bauhaus like Bayer and Moholy-Nagy

established themselves within the American commer-

cial and academic realms of design, each writing

extensively on the both ideological and theoretical

applications of modernism. The significance of this

influx of Bauhaus designers was not lost on American

designers at mid century. Designer and critic Marshall

Lee, who was not particularly inclined to attribute

advances in book design to Europe, noted in 1951

that the American manifestation of the Bauhaus was

making its mark, in his estimation, taking “firmer

root in the United States than on its own continent.”5

23

GYORGY KEPES LANGUAGE OF VISION

1959 Paul Theobald & Company

GYORGY KEPES FALSE COIN

1959 Little, Brown & Company

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As American designers started to focus their efforts

on cover design, they felt compelled to justify putting

so much effort into an object so often discounted as

crassly commercial. One way designers seemed to

come to terms with this problem was to consider the

cover as a part of the larger project of designing an

entire book. An adventuresome cover design might be

created by an illustrator who had the task of creating

images for the interior of the book, as was the case

with Rockwell Kent and his Art Deco woodcut designs

for editions of PAUL BUNYAN and MOBY DICK. This dedica-

tion to the design of the book as a whole, integrating

the cover with the interior, was shared by many of the

first generation of American designers to embrace

book cover design as a serious endeavor, among them,

William A. Dwiggins, George Salter, Ernst Reichl,

Arthur Hawkins, and E. McKnight Kauffer. Rather

than embracing the subtle formal and theoretical

intricacies of modernism, these designers, with the

exception of Kauffer, most often attempted to create

a new modern look for American book cover design

based more or less on stylish, decorative elements.

ROCKWELL KENT PAUL BUNYAN

1924 Harcourt, Brace & Company

25

ROCKWELL KENT MOBY DICK (front board)

1930 Random House

ROCKWELL KENT MOBY DICK (interior)

1930 Random House

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W. A. Dwiggins was among the American designers

most adamantly dedicated to total book design.

He chose to embrace a style more firmly rooted in

traditional design and typography, but incorporating

a few elements of modernism like abstracted illustra-

tional and calligraphic elements. He brought to book

cover design a sense of sobriety and depth in his

carefully calculated orchestrations of type in layouts

that tied together every line of his books. From the

subtle variations within the system he created for the

jackets of the CRITICAL STUDIES ON WRITING AS AN ART series,

to the sophisticated understatement of the front board

of THE TIME MACHINE, with its slip cover rather than a

dust jacket, Dwiggins set the stage for generations

of designers to approach book cover design with

steadfast professionalism and treat the book as a

precious object.

W. A . DWIGGINS ON WRITING

1949 Alfred A. Knopf

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W. A . DWIGGINS THE TIME MACHINE

1931 Random House

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George Salter was another designer who firmly

believed that book cover design could transcend the

crassly commercial sphere and be an honored profes-

sional pursuit. Like Dwiggins, Salter rooted his style in

tradition. Salter emigrated to the United States in 1934

after many years of working as a typographer and book

designer in his native Germany. His cover design style

was based in illustration, but he often would give his

images a modern twist. A hint of Surrealism in his

cover for THE SCARF, the blending of collage, geometric

abstraction and figural drawing in THE TOWER OF BABEL,

or the fragmentation of photomontage in BREAD AND

CIRCUSES granted Salter’s designs an air of artistic

respectability. By mid century, Salter was not only a

revered cover designer, but he also had proved himself

to be one of the most outspoken advocates for serious,

professional book cover design in America.

GEORGE SALTER THE SCARF

1947 The Dial Press

GEORGE SALTER THE TOWER OF BABEL

1947 Alfred A. Knopf

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GEORGE SALTER BREAD AND CIRCUSES

1937 Oxford University Press

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ERNST REICHL THE DARING YOUNG MAN ON THE FLYING TRAPEZE

1934 Random House

ERNST REICHL ULYSSES (title page)

1934 (later printing) Random House

31

German-born immigrant Ernst Reichl also helped

gain respectability for book cover design in America.

After receiving his Ph.D. from the University of

Leipzig at the age of 20, he started as a graphic design-

er in Germany and came to the United States in 1926.

In an American career that lasted over five decades,

Reichl designed thousands of books, working for

Knopf, Doubleday, and H. Wolff Book Manufacturing

Company. He started his own firm in 1945. Perhaps

Reichl’s most significant design was for the first

American edition of Joyce’s ULYSSES published by

Random House in 1934. A proponent of whole book

design, Reichl included a number of innovative

features in the design of the interior of ULYSSES as well:

for instance, he experimented with the use of type as

image by enlarging the “U” on the title page spread.

An even more remarkable playful manipulation of

typography is his DARING YOUNG MAN ON THE FLYING TRAPEZE

where a mélange of styles prefigures the eclectic mixes

Push Pin designers would use in the 1960s.

The decorative, semi abstract style of Reichl’s ULYSSES

cover might be categorized as what design historian

Lorraine Wild has called “moderne,” a style in which

typefaces “were designed with exaggerated geometry

solely for stylistic purposes; type was used in ways

that neither enhanced nor interfered with content.”6

In contrast to the language of modernism adapted by

American designers like Alvin Lustig and Paul Rand,

who were more dedicated to creating meaning through

an interplay of type and image, Reichl’s design seems

to pursue the look of the modern, but not much more.

The same could be said for covers by Arthur Hawkins

for LAST AND FIRST MEN and Bernard Shaw’s THREE PLAYS. ARTHUR HAWKINS LAST AND FIRST MEN

1931 Jonathan Cape & Harrison Smith

ARTHUR HAWKINS THREE PLAYS

1934 Dodd, Mead & Company

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ARTHUR HAWKINS RED SMOKE

1932 National Traveler Club

ARTHUR HAWKINS BASES OVERSEAS

1944 Harcourt, Brace & Company