Face on a white background for about one-third of the cover image, with a
unique illustration filling the rest of the space. For the illustrations, he hired
the best: Andre François, Folon, Ronald Searle, and Roland Topor, among
over two hundred others. But each series had its own character. “My
favorite period is the first age of typography,” he injects, “Garamond and
Venetian Italic—and Didot too.” So, for Gallimard’s Soleil Collection, each
cover was a simple setting of Didot on a flat color background—nothing
that would drive the fashions of the day, but the formal subtlety that
underlined the classical nature of the texts was a perfect fit.
Massin is more than a book designer; he is intimately involved
with the organism of books, and it has made him acutely aware of how
writing functions in the world. Therefore, it came as no surprise that by
1979 , after leaving Gallimard Editions, he was offered an editorship at
Hachette, France’s other leading publisher. In recent years the concept of
designer as author or auteur has been debated and critiqued in some
graphic design circles, yet decades earlier, Massin accomplished the feat.
Under the imprint Atelier Hachette/Massin, he conceived, often wrote,
edited, researched, and designed various books on popular culture. And
later he became a publisher as well, with Proust—a selection of excerpts
from A la recherché du temps perduconceived as a hypertext. He also
published a volume of Robert Doisneau’s elegant photographs of French
street life, and is currently working with the Emile Zola family to bring
Zola’s rare photographs into public view.
In 1989 ,L’ABC du Métier,an illustrated biography of Massin’s own
collected work, was published in France. As he states, it is a “résumé of a
career, where is demonstrated the interaction of different arts.” Despite the
requisite reprise of a lifetime’s artifacts, it is not only a retrospective, but
also a chronicle of a self-taught artist and artisan who markedly influenced
attitudes of graphic design. Yet most practicing designers have never heard
of Massin. A few recent articles about The Bald Sopranoin the design press
have only served to spotlight one of the twentieth century’s most significant
typographic artifacts, not the breadth of the designer’s contributions. Not
until the exhibition at the Herb Lubalin Study Center did I understand
that The Bald Sopranois only one appendage in an entire body of design.
tuis.
(Tuis.)
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