experiment with graphic forms. New Directions’ eccentric list of reprinted
contemporary classics, which featured authors such as Henry Miller,
Gertrude Stein, D. H. Lawrence, and James Joyce, was a proving ground
for Lustig’s visual explorations and distinctive graphic poetry. While
attaining higher sales was always an issue, Lustig believed that he should
not “design down” to the reader. Although mindful of the fundamental
marketing precept that a book jacket must attract and hold the average
book buyer’s roving eye, Lustig crossed over into taboo marketing territory
with his introduction of abstract images and small, discreetly typeset titles,
influenced by the work of Jan Tschichold and other European moderns.
Lustig’s first jacket for Laughlin, a 1941 edition of Henry Miller’s
Wisdom of the Heart,eclipsed the previous New Directions books, which
Laughlin described as jacketed in a “conservative, ‘booky,’ way.” At the time
Lustig was experimenting with nonrepresentational constructions made
from slugs of hot metal typographic material, suggesting the influence of
architect Frank Lloyd Wright, with whom he studied for three months at
Taliesin East. While decidedly unconventional, some years later Laughlin
noted that this particular jacket “was rather stiff and severe.... It scarcely
hinted at the extraordinary flowering which was to follow.”
Laughlin was referring to the series of New Directions New
Classics that Lustig designed from 1945 to 1952. With few exceptions, the
New Classics seem as inventive today as they were when they first appeared
almost fifty years ago. Lustig had switched over from typecase compositions
to drawing distinctive symbolic “marks” that owed more to the work of
artists like Paul Klee, Joan Míro, and his friend Mark Rothko, than to
any accepted commercial style. Although Lustig rejected painting as “too
subjectivized” and never presumed to paint or sculpt himself, he borrowed
liberally from modern painting and integrated the abstract sensibility into
his total design.
Each of his New Classic jackets is a mix of expressionistic and
analytical forms—sophisticated doodles, really—that interpret rather than
narrate the novels, plays, and poetry. For Franz Kafka’s Amerika, Lustig
used a coarsely rendered five-pointed star divided in half by red stripes and
out of which emerges childlike squiggles of smoke—a reference to Kafka’s
intemperate critique of a mythic America. For E. M. Forster’s The Longest
Journey, he used stark black bars that suggest a labyrinthian maze. It does
not illustrate the author’s romantic scene; instead the symbolism alludes to
the emotive tension of the story. “In these as in all Lustig’s jackets the
approach is indirect,” wrote C. F. O. Clarke in Graphis(No.23, 1948), “but
through its sincerity and compression it has more imaginative power than
direct illustration could achieve.”
tuis.
(Tuis.)
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