Although it was a small part of the overall graphic system, the parenthesis was one of Sutnar’s signature devices.
Although it was a small part of the overall graphic system, the parenthesis was one of Sutnar’s signature devices, among many used to distinguish and highlight various kinds of information. From 1941 to 1960, as the art director of the F. W. Dodge Sweet’s Catalog Service, America’s leading distributor and producer of trade and manufacturing catalogs, Sutnar developed an array of typographic and iconographic navigational tools that allowed users to efficiently traverse seas of data. His icons are analogous to the friendly computer symbols used today and were inspired, in part, by El Lissitzky’s iconographic tabulation system in Mayakovsky’s 1923 book of poems, For the Voice. In addition to designing grid and tab systems, Sutnar made common punctuation, including commas, colons, and exclamation points, into linguistic traffic signs by enlarging and repeating them, which was similar to the constructivist functional typography of the 1920s. These were adopted as key components of Sutnar’s distinctive American style.
While he professed universality, he nevertheless possessed graphic personality that was so distinctive from others practicing the international style that his work did not even require a credit line, although he almost always took one. Nevertheless this graphic personality was based on functional requisites not indulgent conceits and so never obscured his clients’ messages (unlike much of the undisciplined commercial art produced during the same period).
“The lack of discipline in our present day urban industrial environment has produced a visual condition, characterized by clutter, confusion, and chaos,” writes Allon Schoener, curator of the 1961 Ladislav Sutnar: Visual Design in Action exhibition, which originated at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, Ohio. “As a result the average man of today must struggle to accomplish such basic objectives as being able to read signs, to identify products, to digest advertisements, or to locate information in newspapers, books, and catalogues… . There is an urgent need for communication based upon precision and clarity. This is the area in which Ladislav Sutnar excels.” If written today, this statement might seem like a critique of current design trends, but in 1961, it was a testament to progressivism. Sutnar introduced the theoretical constructs that for him defined “good design” in the 1940s, when such definitions were rare in American commercial art. Design was one-third instinct and two-thirds market convention, and the result was eclectic at best, confused at worst. Such ad hoc practice was anathema to Sutnar, who was stern about matters of order and logic, fervently seeking to alter visual standards by introducing both American businessmen and commercial artists to “the sound basis for modern graphic design and typography,” which he asserts in his book Visual Design in Action (Hasting House, 1961) is “… a direct heritage of the avant-garde pioneering of the 1920s and 1930s in Europe. It represents a basic change that is revolutionary.”
Sutnar synthesized European avant-gardisms, which he says “provided the base for further extension of new design vocabulary and new design means” into a functional commercial lexicon that eschews “formalistic rules or art for art’s sake.” While he modified aspects of the New Typography, he did not compromise its integrity in the same way that elements of the international style became mediocre through rote usage over time. “He made Constructivism playful and used geometry to create the dynamics of organization,” observes designer Noel Martin, who in the 1950s was a member of Sutnar’s small circle of friends. Despite a strict belief in the absolute rightness of geometric form, Sutnar allowed variety within his strictures to avoid standardizing his clients’ different messages. Consistency reigned within an established framework, such as limited type and color choices as well as strict layout preferences, but within those parameters a variety of options existed in relation to different kinds of projects, including catalogs, books, magazines, and exhibitions as well as the Bell System’s instructional materials.
In the field of information design, it is arguable that contemporary missionaries Edward Tufte and Richard Saul Wurman are really just carrying the torch that Sutnar lit decades before. Many design students, either knowingly or not, have borrowed and applied his signature graphics to a postmodern style. Nevertheless, Sutnar would loathe being admired only as a nostalgic figure. “There is just one lesson from the past that should be learned for the benefit of the present,” he wrote in 1959, as if preempting this kind of superficial epitaph. “It is that of the painstaking, refined craftsmanship which appears to be dying out.”
Modern Paperback Covers
Back in high school during the late sixties, existentialism fed a ravenous adolescent appetite for self-indulgent despair, and the covers of two angst-ridden paperback books, Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre and The Stranger by Albert Camus, did for me what religious iconography triggers in devotees. Only, rather than provide spiritual uplift, each cover made me melancholic. Book covers should, of course, create an intellectual bond with a reader, but rarely do they tap as deeply into a psyche as these did.
In the fifties and sixties, during the nascent period of what in the United States was (and still is, for that matter) called “quality paperback publishing,” many covers for so-called serious fiction and nonfiction were designed as signposts that grabbed the eye and sparked the imagination. They further branded the identity of individual books more profoundly than most hardcover jackets, which were so predictably formulaic that little room was left for the reader’s personal interpretation.
The covers of Nausea and The Stranger were cleverly symbolic and disturbingly mysterious. Nausea, designed by Ivan Chermayeff, is a high-contrast, double-exposed black-and-white photograph of a dyspeptic man, which so keenly illustrated the title that over four decades later, the original is still in print. The cover for The Stranger, with a surreal line drawing by Leo Lionni of abstract faces, was a perfect evocation of anonymity and loneliness. (However, it is no longer in print.) Both of these covers defined existentialism, yet merely hinted at the books’ contents. When compared to most hardcover jackets, with their turgid literal illustrations, or mass-market paperback covers with tawdry sensationalist vignettes, the vast majority of quality paperback covers exhibited a high degree of subtlety, sometimes cut with wit, that demanded the reader’s interpretive participation.
The designers and illustrators most identified with this genre, including Chermayeff, Lionni, Paul Rand, Alvin Lustig, Milton Glaser, Seymour Chwast, and Rudolph deHarak, were encouraged by their respective publishers and art directors to inject Modernist notions of minimalism, abstraction, and symbolism to signal a more serious publishing genre. And so, they challenged entrenched marketing conventions that proscribed such minute details as type size and color palette.
Following World War II, the mass-market paperback industry decreed that appealing to the “masses” meant that cover art must reduce all content, even William Shakespeare’s most emotional dramas, to romantic or sentimental pulp realism with movie matinee typography. On the other hand, quality paperbacks—initially developed by Anchor Books in 1947 as a vehicle for reprinting classics and serious out-of-print books on better paper and with sturdier bindings—sought a new market of college students as well as earnest general readers. Consequently, quality paperback covers required an urbane visual language that included abstract illustrations and spare Modernist typography—a scheme that elevated books but did not rarify them.
Arthur A. Cohen, an audacious twenty-three-year-old cofounder of Noonday Press (in 1951) and of Meridian Books (in 1954), noted, “It would have been quite easy for me—in deference to the conventions of the publishing industry—to have resisted the seductions of ‘good design.’” He was referring to the widespread tendency among established hardcover publishers to squander book jacket real estate with mediocre design solutions that sensationalized rather than edified. So, Cohen commissioned Alvin Lustig (and after he died in 1955, Elaine Lustig) to design the majority of the Noonday and Meridian covers
in a modern manner, which effectively raised the overall level of design for most quality paperbacks.
Cohen had proclaimed, “Paperbound publishing seems destined to obliterate cloth trade publishing as we presently know it.” And the “paperbound book revolution” of the late fifties and early sixties, while not an absolute overthrow of old standards, was a sea shift in the publishing industry’s customs that exerted unprecedented influence on American’s reading habits. College students, for example, could now afford their own portable classics (and received what Cohen called “a paperback education”). Many important books once relegated to out-of-print purgatory had another shot at immortality. Some publishers also originated new titles as quality paperbacks rather than first launch them in hardcover, which made innovative design and typography even more essential.
As a leader in paperback books, the English publisher Penguin introduced a much celebrated though inflexible typographic format, designed in 1946 by Jan Tschichold, that replaced design excess with Spartan solemnity. While this established a strong identity, the Penguin scheme nonetheless reduced all titles, regardless of content, to a single typography with limited color. Cohen wrote that this “simple and often painfully boring design” had one virtue: “Everyone who can see and read knows that two swathes of blue bisected by a white area containing the title and author means Penguin.” In a market where all publishers hawk books “with clamor and stridency, the soft-sell conservatism of Penguin Books communicates an impression of solidity, impassableness, and confidence.” Yet for his own books, Cohen avoided what he called Penguin’s “monolithic conservatism” as well as the greater tendency for repetitive fashion. As much as he objected to Penguin’s “stoic self-discipline,” he also refused to succumb to “sleek photographs which look as though they were cut out of terribly chic New Yorker advertisements, woodcuts which become so important in the jacket that typography becomes an afterthought, and clichés which go on endlessly.” Cohen’s vision of the quality paperback relied strongly on an exclusive look defined by Modernist graphic design.
Alvin Lustig, who in the late forties introduced surreal photomontage and abstract glyphs (influenced by Paul Klee and Miro) to New Directions Books’ hardcover jackets, switched over to using eclectic nineteenth-century wood and metal typography for Meridian and Noonday paperback covers. Akin to earlier typography by Lester Beall, Lustig’s book covers’ typography were a mix of slab serifs and railroad gothics, sometimes paired with antique engraver’s scripts and often set against unusual flat color backgrounds, including rich purples, oranges, and maroons, some with contrasting bars and stripes.
Simplicity was a virtue, since these books had to withstand strong visual competition in bookstores from bestseller book jackets, children’s books, and in some cases record album covers and greeting cards. Rather than try to out-shout the more flamboyant designs, Lustig’s goal, he explained in a collection of unpublished notes, “was to create the effect of a special object which is only incidentally a book.” The method of display required viewing all the books together face-out on shelves and “would be very important in creating the proper isolation and emphasis for the books.” He further noted that the titles were purposely kept small rather than try to “compete with the large lettering of hardcover book jackets and thus lose their sense of quality.” But most important in Lustig’s overall plan, “The designs, although nonrepresentational, would have an emblematic character and would possess overtones of a traditional sense of order. They would strive for freshness and a rather unclassifiable quality rather than try to seem either modern or traditional in the usual sense of those words.”
The mass market paperback industry decreed that appealing to the “masses” meant that cover art must reduce all content … to movie matinee typography.
For graphic designers of the fifties and sixties, quality paperbacks were what CD packages are today—wellsprings of a certain kind of design innovation that was perhaps best characterized by a statement made at the 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 miniposters that interpreted rather than illustrated content.
By the mid-to late fifties, 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-sixties. 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 interesting covers, and as Glaser recalls, “They made an impact partially because they were done in sequence, and could be grouped together in-store.” But there was another, more arcane breakthrough, explains Glaser: “At the time, hardcovers were not usually printed in process color, but the paperbacks could exploit full color.” So he framed a subtly colored ink drawing of Shakespeare’s characters on a white field with a color band on top to identify the books and hold the logo.
Glaser understood that “the form of address had to be more illustrative, and it was my presumption that it couldn’t be abstract or typographical. But it could still stand out and didn’t have to be banal-looking, like most mass-market books.” The cover illustrations helped popularize Shakespeare’s works, and the affordability of these books made Signet a mainstay in high school and college classes.
Following Signet’s lead, during the mid-sixties other mass-market paperback publishers reprinted serious literature and nonfiction, and adopted more sophisticated design and illustration for new markets. Like Glaser, Push Pin Studios cofounder Seymour Chwast employed an eclectic array of graphic styles on covers for a wide variety of themes and authors. “Paperbacks provided creative opportunities,” Chwast recalls. “I was not told what to do, just given the parameters and a free hand.” Accordingly, each style was integrally matched to the subject: “If it was something about the South Se
as, for instance, I’d do a primitive drawing.” For The Plague, another of Albert Camus’s lugubrious existential dramas, Chwast introduced a stark woodcut painted in an expressionist manner. “I couldn’t do anything too fancy,” he says about the morose visage that spoke directly to Camus’s angst. For a biography of the mystic Gurdjieff, he blended Middle Eastern–inspired calligraphy with his eclectic, personal style. Chwast’s variegated designs signaled that anything was possible in this genre.
When mass-market paperbacks were first introduced during the forties, the publishing industry shamelessly acknowledged that they were ephemeral and destined for the junk heap. Although the advent of quality paperbacks did not immediately change prevailing attitudes toward the genre’s overall disposability, the quality of graphic design signaled more serious (and perhaps more durable) content, and this did have a positive impact on readers. Hardcover books will always be more prestigious, but during the fifties and sixties the quality paperback cover as a wellspring of innovative modern design—and even as icon—surpassed hardcover jacket design in freedom and ingenuity. Ultimately paperback covers earned the respect that the designers brought to them, and influenced the state of all book jacket and cover art today.
Bestseller Book Jackets
PAUL BACON
Design Literacy Page 20
