Since the 1960 s, consolidations and takeovers in the book
publishing industry have increased competition for shelf space and put
greater emphasis on the marketing and promotion of books. Book jacket
and cover design in the 1960 s was typified by Paul Bacon’s jackets that
featured large type for titles and author’s names and small, illustrated scenes
intended to summarize the book.
In the mid to late 1970 s Fili—then art director at Pantheon—
and others departed from modernist aesthetics and approached their
designs as miniposters with integrated type and image in the spirit of the
late nineteenth-century advertising posters. They researched typographic
styles of the past and drew inspiration from movements like futurism,
Jugendstil, and constructivism, incorporating them into contemporary
work. This style, called “retro,” was similar to postmodernism in its
eclecticism and reliance on past motifs; postmodernism, however, drew
more from Greek, Roman, and Renaissance sources. Fili’s work was
distinguished by a conceptual underpinning and an ability to set a mood
appropriate for literature that superseded postmodernism’s tendency toward
a cut-and-paste pastiche of passé forms.
At Pantheon, a trade division of Random House that published
fiction and popular nonfiction titles that leaned toward the academic, Fili
was given a comparatively small list of books, which allowed her to design
most of the covers herself. Initially little attention was paid to her covers,
just like those of the other designers before her. She soon realized what
great opportunity for change lay in this environment where no one had
high expectations. Fili recalled a comment made to her by an art director
colleague, “You’re lucky. My editors have bad taste; yours have no taste.”
How did she create an environment conducive to innovation and
inspired design? “Slowly, very slowly.” Fili recalled. “I set out to educate
them, albeit very slowly and continuously, with incremental changes and
innovations: matte laminations, unusual paper stocks, different types of
photography and illustration, and, of course, experimentation with type.”
She broke new ground graphically but always spent less than any of her
colleagues, so no one complained.
By 1985 , when The Loverwas published, Fili had used hundreds of
typefaces devised from reinventions or interpretations of existing typefaces
that were either outdated, overlooked, or from a different era. In Fili’s
hands they came alive. Her long-time love of letterforms found a home at
Pantheon, where for Fili the best part of designing jackets was that “every
day I could use a different typeface.” Since college she had frequently
traveled to Europe to collect all types of printed ephemera, to photograph
signage, and to study poster and type design. She clipped faces from old
tuis.
(Tuis.)
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