unique in publishing; in my case, Paul Bacon did it for me, and I’ve been
lucky and glad!”
The cover for Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint( 1969 ) was also
characteristically uncharacteristic. Though the vast majority of Bacon’s
covers are built on some conceptual idea or image, this one consisted solely
of pure type against a yellow background; no fancy touches, except for the
swash capitals in the title and author’s name. Asked why he avoided his
signature conceptual image, Bacon says it was because of the difficulty in
portraying the book’s most prominent element: masturbation. But also, “In
color, it was just so simple and raw,” and this was one of the things “I
started to do for books like Sophie’s Choice that were strictly lettering covers,
which in some ways I suppose was a coward’s way out. But it just seemed
appropriate for these enormously complicated books.” Given the epic plots
of Sophie’s Choiceand Ragtime,Bacon felt that attempting to do anything
other than a solution that proclaimed, “Important book—read it!” would
not work. “I guess that’s kind of a dumb thing to say, but it was at the back
of my mind,” he admits.
Ragtime,with its Victorian sheet music–inspired, hand-lettered
title, was not only symbolically astute; it also indelibly evoked the book’s
character. About his increasing use of illustrated lettering, Bacon explains
that he didn’t try to be “too accurate in a time sense” and did not, as a rule,
go after a face that was used during the period of the story. He simply
would write the title and author’s name out to see what they looked like in
upper- and lowercase and in caps, and then see if there was some interesting
feature, like a double consonant, that could be manipulated. “I did all that
stuff by hand and I wonder why I didn’t go crazy,” he comments. E. L.
Doctorow himself says of the Ragtime cover, “I believe it’s a classic of book
jacket design—simple and immensely evocative at the same time.”
No trend follower, Bacon confides that he did what seemed
feasible at the time. “I had a feeling for the art directors and the editors of a
given house,” he says. “If they had certain prejudices or if they were going
to be resistant to something I had in mind, I wouldn’t waste my time with
it, even if I thought it was fundamentally good.” Yet he was so highly
regarded that editors often would just send him a manuscript with the
mandate to “figure it out” for himself. Except that every so often, Bacon
would get a note saying, “Please, no swastika,”—this because he had been
justifiably dubbed “King of the Swastika,” having done many books about
World War II that incorporated the Nazi emblem.
To Bacon, a successful jacket is one that the reader makes sense
of. “If after you’ve read the book, you then look at the jacket and say, ‘I
wonder why he did that,’ that doesn’t make it for me,” he states. These
tuis.
(Tuis.)
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