ENDPAPER
Judge a book by its cover
BY PRADEEP SEBASTIAN
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Browsing in bookshops has become a feast for the eyes as the design of book jackets is being turned into an art form.
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Rock star of book design: Chip Kidd and some of his work.
THE Tyrannosaurus silhouette on Crichton's Jurassic Park, the titles flying off the page from James Glieck's Faster, the spoon and fork sleeping beside each other from Vikram Seth's All You Who Sleep Tonight, the clear acetate jacket and the enlarged doll's head in Donna Tartt's The Secret History and The Little Friend, the simple but arresting typography on Katherine Dunn's Geek Love, the bloody close up of a dead man's eye in Richard Lattimore's translation of The New Testament and the "dizzingly variegated panels of red and blue" in Oran Pamuk's My Name is Red are all images on book jackets that have become iconic.
And they are all the work of Chip Kidd, the rock star of book jacket design. Kidd — a staffer on Alfred Knopf who has designed more than 1,500 covers — is so sought after that authors stipulate in their contracts that he design their books.
Signature style
At a time when most graphic designers experimented with typography and illustrations, Chip Kidd used a collage of photographs, illustrations and typography. The design for Chip Kidd: Book One, a just published monograph of his work, is itself tantalising. Kidd picks more than 800 of his best book covers and lavishly and playfully showcases them here, along with commentary by the authors he designed these jackets for. His signature style is not to have an obvious cover image but something oblique — even wild — that would still evoke the book. He often blurs and crops photographs, and is fond of using pop culture images to suggest wit, irreverence and zip. Kidd readily admits that it was his boss at Knopf, Carol Devine Carson (who pioneered conceptual photography on covers) who inspired him. Knopf's legendary editor, Sonny Mehta, is his other mentor. Kidd's work is not just slick. It has edge and depth. Updike notes in the book's introduction "Kidd reads the book he designs for and locates a disquieting image close to the narrative's dark, beating heart."
In another evocative, slim, and finely produced monograph on Kidd's work (titled, Chip Kidd) by Veronique Vienne, the author analyses Kidd's style. "By distancing the title from the image on the cover, Kidd puts a very specific kind of pressure on readers: he asks them to bridge the gap between what they read and what they see... He uses every surface of a hardcover jacket — the spine, the back, the flaps — to escape the two dimensional world of graphic design." In By It's Cover, an intelligent, analytical and richly produced book that looks at the history of book jacket design, the authors, Ned Drew and Paul Sternberger, tell us that it was the cover of Joyce's Ulysses that signalled the arrival of modern book jacket design. Ernest Reichl's now-famous cover used "elongated typography that seemed as modern as Joyce's book". Until the 1970s, modern book design seems to have largely experimented with typeface and illustrations — designers such as Paul Bacon who used a combination of typography and illustration for Catch 22 and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. "With the 80s," notes By It's Cover, "book design moved to post-modern collage... constructing post-modern jumbles that challenged modernist notions of continuity and creative individuality." And it was the design team at Alfred Knopf that first met the challenge of post-modern book jacket design by using collaged imagery.
The gifted Knopf team — Archie Ferguson, Barbara deWilde, Abby Weintraub, Garbriele Wilson, Peter Mendelsund and John Gall — are by no means the only high profile book designers. Equally noteworthy are Michael Ian Kaye, (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Little Brown), Rodrigo Coral, Paul Sahre, Angela Skouras, Christine Kettner and Susan Mitchell to name only a few.
Indian scene
While many Indian publishing houses use freelancers, some of them have begun to build their own in-house graphic team. Bena Sareen, art director at Penguin India who has designed many of their best covers says, "As a book cover designer you only have so much space to convey many 100 pages of thoughts. And only a fleeting moment to catch the reader's eye amid the many titles screaming for attention in bookstores. Mine is a two pronged strategy — either a cover should be arresting or have layers of meaning to trigger curiosity. I tend to judge a cover (and a designer) by its typeface usage. Some of the timeless cover designs display a sense of minimalism with simple stark typography. It is important to strike a balance between the aesthetic and the commercial. For instance, we rejacketed the Vikram Seth poetry backlist in an attractive, small hardback format, gave a series look and were delighted to see sales figures shoot up. A truly satisfying experience when the author and the sales team are pleased!"
"The main thing about a jacket for us," says Shruti Debi, Picador India's chief editor, "is to have the jacket capture some of the mood of the book. Our covers are all by freelance designers, the majority by Moonis Ijlal. Moonis is an artist of the pen, paper and paintbrush variety (quite the opposite of Chip Kidd, as it were), and he's been absolutely superb at translating and distilling a book's tone and content into a singular image. Moonis has done both volumes of the Wonder That Was India; India in Mind; Patna Roughcut; and a toughie, but beautifully done in the end, Pundits from Pakistan. In the very corporate, commercial world of graphic design, to have a designer devote herself to book jackets rather than advertising is moving, gratifying and rare.
Netra Shyam whose lovely, edgy illustrations graced this very column for many years, is one such rare designer so in love with making book jackets that she turned down a career in corporate graphic design. Her rich, peerless work for many Katha book covers show what talented graphic designers can bring to book jackets.
Physical beauty
I would often hear bibliophile and culture critic, T.G. Vaidyanathan, tell me that he had bought a particular book for its physical beauty. He had no intention of reading it, he would tell me, as he caressed the book and put it back on his shelf. Once he had even cello-taped (the thin, transparent kind) the edges of a book whose cover he was smitten by, so that it would stay unopened.
Browsing in bookshops has become a veritable feast for the eyes. Book jackets are an art form. In some cases, the book jacket is the best thing about a book. Sooner or later it happens to all book lovers: coveting books in a physical sense. Books are more than beautiful objects on the bookshelf — they offer presence.
Reflecting on Chip Kidd's work, Orhan Pamuk notes: "We cannot recall the books we most love without also recalling their covers. Book titles are like people's names: they help us distinguish a book from the million others it resembles. But book covers are like people's faces: either they remind us of a lost happiness or they promise blissful worlds we have yet to explore. That is why we gaze at book covers as passionately as we do faces."
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