It's near midnight and black storm clouds mottle the full moon as our young protagonist rushes to find shelter from the wind and torrent. There, across the street, a small shop's light glows dimly. Our unsuspecting hero hastily enters to find himself amid shelf after shelf of used books. This is one store he has certainly never noticed before. His calls of "Anyone here?" bring no reply.
Then, a large volume catches his eye. It's out of place, lying on the floor by his feet. He is inexplicably fixated on its worn leather-bound cover, the faded gold lettering, and the strange interweaving symbols. He has to open it.
Most of us are familiar with a storyline similar to this: The main character spots a most intriguing book, gives in to the temptation to peek inside and is summarily transported to another realm, endowed with supernatural powers or, sometimes, cursed. It's a favorite and commonplace scenario in genres like fantasy and horror. But the power of book covers alone to lure us closer has always been a part of reality as well, and this has never been clearer than at present.
When we browse in Borders or Barnes & Noble, how many of us actually think about what goes into making the many book jackets we so quickly skim? Certainly there are those particularly spectacular covers that manage to hold our gaze for more than the customary millisecond, but the truth is that most of us fail to acknowledge those fantastically gripping covers as the products of a whole field, a whole history, a whole set of specialists entirely centered around book jacket design.
Great Expectations
Before we ever read a book - or even pick it up - we see its cover. Designers, publishers and marketers alike have capitalized on this fact by replacing the boring and bland book jackets of the past with virtual works of art. Today, a book's cover can be just as intellectually provocative as its contents.
The book jacket's beginnings are humble. According to "The Growth of the Book-Jacket" by Charles Rosner, book jackets were originally just dust jackets, their sole purpose being to keep dust off precious works of literature. By and large, before the 19th century the book cover as we know it today did not exist. The novels of Charles Dickens are a notable exception; they featured colored wrappers and illustrated images of characters.
In the 1920s and '30s, now considered to be the golden age of book jackets, flourishing interest in innovative book cover design began to turn heads. In his article, "When it's acceptable to judge a book by its cover," John Mullan of British newspaper The Guardian writes that, during the golden age of cover design, the medium of book jackets "attracted talented artists" and that design "often reflected the currents of Modern European Art."
The impact of this new movement was intensified by the involvement of highly talented writers. In 1925 the publication of Ernest Hemingway's collection of short stories entitled "In Our Time" sported a jacket designed as a collage of newspaper articles, a scheme that perfectly fit Hemingway's style.
As Mullan points out, however, not all famous writers followed this new trend of hiring famous designers. Virginia Woolf's sister Vanessa Bell designed the original jacket for Woolf's "To the Lighthouse" and J.R.R. Tolkien drew the cover of "The Hobbit" himself.
In 1935, the newly founded Penguin Books boldly advertised its belief in providing high-quality writing at affordable prices by publishing plain, color-coded books (orange and white for general fiction, green and white for crime fiction, a maroon color for the travel series, and dark blue for biographies) and selling them in drugstores and general shops.
By the 1960s, however, the popularity and prevalence of graphically interesting book covers had become too great for Penguin to hold out any longer. On top of that, the rapidly increasing use of photography in design gave a whole new spin to the field.
Penguin responded in the 1970s by incorporating images of famous paintings into the covers of their Classics series (the ones with the Penguin trademark in the corner). But the vast majority of modern designers prefer the power of photographs and a more unorthodox approach.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
When it comes to the prominent book jacket designers of today, there is none more famous than Chip Kidd, whom I had the opportunity to interview. Born in Shillington, Pennsylvania in 1964, Kidd grew up under the heavy influence of popular culture, quickly developing an obsession with all things Batman. He attended Pennsylvania State University from 1982 to 1986, majoring in graphic design. After graduating, Kidd became junior assistant to Sara Eisenman at Alfred A. Knopf Books in New York, where he still works today.
At Knopf, Kidd has been nurtured by Art Director Carol Carson, who "gives me and the other designers a lot of freedom to pursue design solutions the way we think they should be," Kidd said. "She has great taste. I learned certain aspects of design I had not known before."
Veronique Vienne, author of "Chip Kidd: Monographics" writes that Kidd has been credited with helping "spawn a revolution in American book packaging.
Kidd has now created over 1500 designs and worked with such authors as Bret Easton Ellis, Mark Beyer, Dean Koontz, Alex Ross and Frank Miller. Some of his most notable and famous works include the covers for Michael Crichton's "Jurassic Park," Cormac McCarthy's "All the Pretty Horses," Michael Ondaatje's "The English Patient" and David Sedaris' "Naked." In the case of "Jurassic Park," Kidd's memorable dagger-toothed dinosaur carried on to influence the design of the film logo and associated products.
Apart from books, Kidd's work has been featured in "The New Republic," "Vanity Fair," "The New York Times," "Entertainment Weekly" and "Time." In 1997, the International Center of Photography lauded him with the Use of Photography in Graphic Design award.
When one examines Kidd's many works, there are certain common features one notices: a partiality for obscured images (especially of faces) a strong use of paralleled pictures, and a kind of elegance created by the willingness to be bold and innovative.
When asked why he thinks faces work so well, Kidd said "they serve as the doorway to the psyche...[they] work as signage for the human condition." His reason for skewing the angle and perception of these images is "to avoid being literal...You attract more people by being elusive."
As to the influence of comic books on his designs, Kidd said it was something he has "been in denial about for a long time...It's subconscious." In his work, elements are "integrated in a very separate way" following a "separation of type and state" technique that is a hallmark of comic books with their distinct panels and speech bubbles.
The "magpie method," which Kidd summed up as "seeing the world as your source material...being able to steal or use anything...considering everything" is also apparent in the book covers he creates.
The main source of his inspiration is the text itself, but Kidd also said he looks for images by "haunt[ing] flea markets" in New York, Pennsylvania or Europe. "If I am in a large foreign city, I try to go to a flea market there...With the advent of the Internet, I go to flea markets less."
"Six months or six minutes" is how long the entire process of creating a book jacket can take, Kidd says; "it all depends on the book." Kidd described the process as "a metaphysical treasure hunt...Sometimes you get lucky; other times, you just kind of struggle...no real rhyme or reason to it."
For Kidd, the purpose of a book jacket is to "get the attention of a potential reader." First and foremost, a book jacket "should convey the sense that a book should be read," Kidd said. He wants the potential readers "to invent the characters in their head...to need to pick up the book and read it."
Brave New World
To top it all off, Kidd has even written his own novel, 2001's "The Cheese Monkeys: A Novel in Two Semesters," based largely on his experiences at Penn State. And we can expect even more. "My publisher is tapping his foot," Kidd said. "I've missed my first two deadlines for the sequel." We may even soon see movie posters bearing Kidd's signature designs, though he self-admittedly has "had notoriously bad luck with the movie business" so far.
Still, there are individuals who would dismiss all this hype about fancy book jackets as shallow and beside the point. When I asked Mr. Kidd what he would say to those who might remark that making book jackets so prominent a feature wrongly overshadows the truly important part of a book, the writing, he replied that "books have always had a visual component to them" and that we "use our eyes" to ingest them.
Besides, can we really claim that this is a matter of image over substance when book covers today are actually contributing to the substance of a book? "Covers don't sell books on their own," Kidd said. "I've always said a book is on its own."
Obviously, it's time to consider just how relevant that adage about judging a book by its cover really is. Chip Kidd, along with many other talented graphic designers, have shown the potential of book covers to accurately and powerfully mirror the content, tone and style of the text within. By using text, calligraphy, photography, drawing, engraving, painting and their
combinations in fresh ways, designers can mold the front, back, and spine of a book jacket into a three-dimensional portal that begs to be explored. All we have to do is give in and enter.
