Design Literacy: Understanding Graphic Design

and sales device meant to be torn from the book the moment it is sold or it
is an indispensable cover. If the latter were true, the logical procedure
would be to dispense with the costly, unseen binding design. The jacket
then becomes the binding, and the function of both binding and jacket will
be the same.”
Dust jackets were the low end of graphic design practice, tainted
by their association to crass advertising departments. As mini billboards,
they followed the principles of mass marketing applied to packaging. Dust
jackets were ephemera and readers habitually discarded them before books
were entombed on the bookshelf. Moreover, during the 1920 s and 1930 s,
trade book jackets were illustrated by taking a key sentence or word and
rendering it verbatim as a monumental vignette in either a sentimentally
realistic or fashionably stylized (art deco) manner. The lettering was usually
done by hand in the au courantnovelty style of the time. The sole purpose
of the jacket was to attract and hook a reader (similar to the movie posters
of the era). The pictorial representation often had little to do with the
book’s essence. Even the classics sometimes acquired contemporary imagery
and design motifs in order to eschew any hint of mustiness. It might have
been false advertising, but the disparity between the author’s intent and the
artist’s interpretation was accepted for marketing reasons. “This technique
of allegory,” wrote historian Stephen Greengard in The Journal of Decorative
and Propaganda Art(No. 7 , Winter 1988 ), “does not require the artist to read
the book itself, merely to distill from its pages a high impact visual which
may be apprehended at a single glance.”
“It seems ironic,” wrote Greengard, “so many great, important
ideas, the products of the finest minds of humanity, [were] wrapped in
pieces of whimsical, brilliantly colored paper.” During the 1920 s and 1930 s,
in addition to providing protection,promotion, and genre identification,
the design of book jackets made a variety of fiction and nonfiction books
appealing and accessible to broad audiences. The old saying “you can’t tell a
book by its cover,” is usually true, but the cover piqued interest. In some
cases the cover was the best part of the book.