1957 AIGA symposium on the role of the designer (reported in Publisher’s
Weekly): “Books of today are read today. So let’s not design for all eternity.”
And one of the foremost quality paperback publishers at the time was
Vintage Books, with covers ministered by art director Harry Ford and
production manager Sidney Jacobs. Paul Rand was commissioned to design
Vintage covers that paradoxically stand the test of time because he employed
abstract forms, expressive collages, and witty sketches that were dictated not
by fashion but by modernist preference for play and economy. His covers
were mini-posters that interpreted rather than illustrated content.
By the mid- to late 1950 s, when the golden age of modernist
Vintage covers was produced by Rand, Lionni, Chermayeff, Ben Shahn,
Bradbury Thompson, George Guisti, and others, most bookstores had
become used to displaying more quality paperbacks than a few years earlier,
when Lustig’s covers were virtually the only ones on the shelves. This
meant that cover design could not afford to be as uniform as in Lustig’s
graphic scheme, and eclectic solutions were increasingly more common.
Ivan Chermayeff—who in his student days was an assistant to
Lustig and followed through on some covers and designed other original
covers—also made formidable contributions to modern and eclectic design.
In addition to Nausea,he explored the range of photomontage for New
Directions’ covers. He composed others for art director Frank Metz at
Simon & Schuster using typographic puns, including the Art of Dramatic
Writing, where exclamation points are substituted for all the instances of
the word “is.” Wordplay was an effective way of illustrating otherwise
un-illustratable ideas by making titles of the books into word games. In this
way, Chermayeff made the cover into a laboratory for his developing work.
Likewise, Rudolph deHarak experimented with the nearly 350
paperback covers created for McGraw-Hill Paperbacks during the early to
mid- 1960 s. His basic systematic format, based on a rigid Swiss-inspired
grid, was a tabula rasa where symbolic and allegoric imagery interpreted a
wide range of nonfiction themes including philosophy, anthropology,
psychology, and sociology. The format offered deHarak a control with
which to test limits of conceptual art and photography as he introduced
approaches inspired by dada, abstract expressionism, and op-art
movements. The McGraw-Hill covers, which epitomized a late-modernist
purism, were subsequently copied by many other paperback cover designers
at various publishers.
In 1964 Milton Glaser, Push Pin Studios cofounder, was given the
enviable assignment to develop a series of contemporary illustrated covers
for a popular mass-market paperback line of Shakespeare’s plays. Art
director Bill Gregory wanted the Signet Shakespeare series to have
tuis.
(Tuis.)
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