WHAT IS YOUR BOOK COVER TRYING TO TELL US?
PART FOUR: CHROMOPHOBIA



More responses to the book cover discussion. François Luong has a long, interesting post on Les Editions Flammarion and French book cover design, generally.

Barry Schwabsky and Johannes Göransson reminded me of New Directions; Göransson offered a link to a Web site for the late Alvin Lustig, who not only designed a lot of early “Euro/modernist”-looking New Directions books, but who also seems to have invented the signature Black and White and Gray All Over look Laughlin settled into from the mid-50s through the 90s.

That’s one of Lustig’s designs above, from 1953. One doesn’t get the sense here of “all over grayness”—the “pre-smoked” look—one may associate with many later ND book covers. That’s in part due to a signature feature of Lustig’s that later ND cover designers didn’t always pick up on: The extreme crispness defining separate areas. (There’s a kind of Matisse-y cut-out look to Lustig’s earlier, color ND covers, though he uses a far more muted pallet than the painter.)

I just started David Batchelor’s Chromophobia, a book Nada picked up about a year ago, and which she subsequently raved about. Batchelor traces color bias in Western civilization back to the Greeks, and shows how color, in the West, is generally assumed to be a secondary element in art and design. He shows how color is often used or talked about by Westerners to suggest the feminine, the minor, the infantile, the pathological, the other—even corruption, contamination, and chaos. Color, he argues, is something Westerners need to feel in control of, and this, he further argues, is one reason that color is most often relegated to “merely decorative,” rather than fundamental.

I haven’t finished Chromophobia—let alone digested it—but there is no question that book design reflects, among other things, cultural value, and that—to measurable degree—much Western book design, including that for poetry books, reflects a level of chromophobia.

François mentions the French tendency to emphasize “Literature, high art. Everything else,” he suggests, with respect to the French, “is extraneous. Eye candy.” I remember the two times I went to Paris, the effect of walking into the bookstore and seeing all that white.

Interesting to think about that—and the New Directions look, which seems reflective of similar values—while reading Batchelor.

Göransson left the last post’s comments field with a provocative statement: “Of course,” he writes, “the issue that may be important to discuss is exactly why poetry should not look like the latest hot paperback from a major publisher.”

More tomorrow a.m. …