Modern Paperback CoversBack in high school during the late 1960 s, existentialism
fed a ravenous adolescent appetite for self-indulgent
despair, and the covers of two angst-ridden paperback
books,Nauseaby Jean-Paul Sartre and The Stranger by
Albert Camus, did for me what religious iconography
triggers in devotees. Only, rather than provide spiritual
uplift, each cover made me melancholic. Book covers
should, of course, create an intellectual bond with a reader,
but rarely do they tap as deeply into a psyche as these did.
In the 1950 s and 1960 s, during the nascent period
of what in the United States was (and still is, for that
matter) called “quality paperback publishing,” many covers
for so-called serious fiction and nonfiction were designed
as signposts that grabbed the eye and sparked the
imagination. They further branded the identity of
individual books more profoundly than most hardcover
jackets, which were so predictably formulaic that little
room was left for the reader’s personal interpretation.
The covers of Nauseaand The Strangerwere
cleverly symbolic and disturbingly mysterious.Nausea,
designed by Ivan Chermayeff, is a high-contrast, double-
exposed black-and-white photograph of a dyspeptic man,
which so keenly illustrated the title that over four decades
later, the original is still in print. The cover for The Stranger,
with a surreal line drawing by Leo Lionni of abstract faces,
was a perfect evocation of anonymity and loneliness.
(However, it is no longer in print.) Both of these covers
defined existentialism, yet merely hinted at the books’
contents. When compared to most hardcover jackets, with
their turgid literal illustrations, or mass-market paperback covers with
tawdry sensationalist vignettes, the vast majority of quality paperback covers
exhibited a high degree of subtlety, sometimes cut with wit, that demanded
the reader’s interpretive participation.
The designers and illustrators most identified with this genre,
including Chermayeff, Lionni, Paul Rand, Alvin Lustig, Milton Glaser,
Seymour Chwast, and Rudolph deHarak, were encouraged by their232