respective publishers and art directors to inject Modernist notions of
minimalism, abstraction, and symbolism to signal a more serious publishing
genre. And so, they challenged entrenched marketing conventions that
proscribed such minute details as type size and color palette.
Following World War II, the mass-market paperback industry
decreed that appealing to the “masses” meant that cover art must reduce all
content, even William Shakespeare’s most emotional dramas, to romantic
or sentimental pulp realism with movie matinee typography. On the other
hand, quality paperbacks—initially developed by Anchor Books in 1947 as a
vehicle for reprinting classics and serious out-of-print books on better
paper and with sturdier bindings—sought a new market of college students
as well as earnest general readers. Consequently, quality paperback covers
required an urbane visual language that included abstract illustrations and
spare modernist typography—a scheme that elevated books but did not
rarify them.
Arthur A. Cohen, an audacious twenty-three-year-old cofounder
of Noonday Press (in 1951 ) and of Meridian Books (in 1954 ), noted, “It
would have been quite easy for me—in deference to the conventions of the
publishing industry—to have resisted the seductions of ‘good design.’” He
was referring to the widespread tendency among established hardcover
publishers to squander book jacket real estate with mediocre design
solutions that sensationalized rather than edified. So, Cohen commissioned
Alvin Lustig (and after he died in 1955 , Elaine Lustig) to design the
majority of the Noonday and Meridian covers in a modern manner, which
effectively raised the overall level of design for most quality paperbacks.
Cohen had proclaimed, “Paperbound publishing seems destined to
obliterate cloth trade publishing as we presently know it.” And the
“paperbound book revolution” of the late 1950 s and early 1960 s, while not
an absolute overthrow of old standards, was a sea shift in the publishing
industry’s customs that exerted unprecedented influence on Americans’
reading habits. College students, for example, could now afford their own
portable classics (and received what Cohen called “a paperback education”).
Many important books once relegated to out-of-print purgatory had
another shot at immortality. Some publishers also originated new titles as
quality paperbacks rather than first launch them in hardcover, which made
innovative design and typography even more essential.
As a leader in paperback books, the English publisher Penguin
introduced a much-celebrated though inflexible typographic format,
designed in 1946 by Jan Tschichold, that replaced design excess with
Spartan solemnity. While this established a strong identity, the Penguin
scheme nonetheless reduced all titles, regardless of content, to a single
tuis.
(Tuis.)
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