By Its Cover

Modern American Book Cover Design

BY ITS COVER

NED DREW PAUL STERNBERGER

Princeton Architectural Press

New York

Published by Princeton Architectural Press 37 East Seventh Street New York, New York 10003 For a free catalog of books, call 1.800.722.6657.

Visit our web site at www.papress.com. Š 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

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

7

i

JUDGING THE BOOK

8

1

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

2 AMERICANIZING UTOPIA: PROGRESSIVE DESIGN IN AMERICAN HANDS

3

MODERNISM AND BEYOND: HISTORICAL FOUNDATIONS FOR CONSTRUCTING THE FUTURE

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

5

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

18

42

72

96

114

6 REDEFINE AND REDESIGN: MAKING POSTMODERNISM WORK

134

NOTES

172

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

178

INDEX

182

IMAGE CREDITS

186

1

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

1

20

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

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 integration 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.

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 ideological 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 considering visual art to their field, and American designers were paying attention.

21

LADISLAV SUTNAR

1950

THE GREEN AND THE RED

Golden Griffin Books

A UNION OF FUNCTION AND FORM 22

A number of European publications offered American 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 commercial 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

1959

GYORGY KEPES

1959

LANGUAGE OF VISION

Paul Theobald & Company FALSE COIN

Little, Brown & Company

A UNION OF FUNCTION AND FORM

GETTING SERIOUS ABOUT COVERS: LOOKING MODERN

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 dedication 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.

24

ROCKWELL KENT

1924

PAUL BUNYAN

Harcourt, Brace & Company

25

ROCKWELL KENT

1930

ROCKWELL KENT

1930

MOBY DICK

(front board)

Random House MOBY DICK

Random House

(interior)

A UNION OF FUNCTION AND FORM

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 illustrational 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.

26

W. A . DWIGGINS

1949

ON WRITING

Alfred A. Knopf

27

W. A . DWIGGINS

1931

THE TIME MACHINE

Random House

A UNION OF FUNCTION AND FORM 28

George Salter was another designer who firmly believed that book cover design could transcend the crassly commercial sphere and be an honored professional 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

1947

GEORGE SALTER

1947

THE SCARF

The Dial Press THE TOWER OF BABEL

Alfred A. Knopf

29

GEORGE SALTER

1937

BREAD AND CIRCUSES

Oxford University Press

A UNION OF FUNCTION AND FORM 30

ERNST REICHL

1934

THE DARING YOUNG MAN ON THE FLYING TRAPEZE

Random House

ERNST REICHL

(title page) Random House

ULYSSES

1934 (later printing)

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 designer 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 .

31

ARTHUR HAWKINS

1931

ARTHUR HAWKINS

1934

LAST AND FIRST MEN

Jonathan Cape & Harrison Smith THREE PLAYS

Dodd, Mead & Company

A UNION OF FUNCTION AND FORM 32

ARTHUR HAWKINS

1932

RED SMOKE

National Traveler Club

ARTHUR HAWKINS

1944

BASES OVERSEAS

Harcourt, Brace & Company