Bestseller Book Jackets^237
Paul Bacon“If I was born to do something,” states Paul Bacon,
“it was to design book jackets.” And that’s exactly
what he did for about fifty years. But not just any old
jacket for any old book. Although he did his share of
obscure titles, his jackets have adorned some of the
most prestigious bestsellers of the second half of the
twentieth century. In fact, Bacon can be said to have
invented the bestseller jacket as we know it: His
designs have been emblems for such eminent works
as E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime,William Styron’s
Sophie’s Choice,Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint,
Joseph Heller’s Catch-22,Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over
the Cuckoo’s Nest,James Cavell’s Shogun,and Robert
Caro’s The Power Broker.And while each of these
covers was distinctively designed, they all shared
three traits that in the early 1960 s fused into
something known as the “Big Book Look”: large title,
large author’s name, small symbolic image.
The “look” had its inception in 1956 , when
Bacon was commissioned by Simon & Schuster’s
art director, Tom Bevins, to design the jacket for
Compulsionby Meyer Levin, a roman à clef about
two young men who systematically plan and carry
out the cold-blooded murder of a young boy to see if
they can get away with the crime. The publisher
knew that the highly publicized real-life killing of
Bobby Franks by Loeb and Leopold would
popularize the novel, but was uncertain how to devise
a jacket that would be suggestive without being lewd,
and evoke a sense of mystery without resorting to
clichés. Bacon sketched out a number of ideas until
he came up with the rough, hand-scrawled word
“Compulsion,” which he positioned at the top of the jacket, taking up a
fifth of the space, while below it, an empty taupe rectangle bled off the
field, and below that, at the bottom, was scrawled “a novel by Meyer
Levin.” Sparse and dramatic—yet Bacon felt something was missing.