different, albeit more witty in purpose. When done well it can be surrealistically beautiful and comically engaging. When done poorly it is better off as kindling.
This decoflora (my coinage) resurgence also seems to have caught on because it animates so well. In the film Yellow Submarine psychedelic plant life grew wild on the screen, rhythmically choreographed to follow the Beatles music—that was the beginning of the kinetic squigglies as practiced today on TV and computer screens. But like psychedelic art, what began as a novel design approach was quickly co-opted by lesser talents for silly, exploitative purposes, and so doing removed the inimitability from it. There are many examples of that lesser art today, but the English edition book jacket design for Alex Ross’s The Rest Is Noise, in which squidlike tentacles flail across the image area, is a prime example of inconsequence. The squiggly approach is used not to underscore the content of this fascinating book but to fill up the negative space. And that’s the problem: When ornament is profligate design is made trivial. When ornament is misused it just takes up space. This new floriated madness continues to engulf advertisements, magazine and book covers, textiles, T-shirts, package designs, and animations. Vines and other flora have crept onto pages, packages, and screens like kudzu after a summer’s rain. And like kudzu this new ornament is almost impossible to control without a lot of brush clearing. Prune now before it strangulates everything.
Covering the Good Books
When reading was more fundamental than tweeting, Time Life Books played a significant role in getting the general public to acquire books on almost every subject, from the histories of World War I and II, to chronicles of America’s infamous criminals and the Wild Wild West, to the nuts and bolts of home improvement and auto repair. These serial volumes were published every month or two, and available through mail subscription, although some were also on sale in certain supermarkets—imagine that. Most were beautifully art directed, designed, and printed, and various new series were advertised on TV and in magazines and were highly anticipated by young and old.
In 1962 Time launched a new series that was, however, fairly novel even for them, a “soft-cover book club” called the Time Reading Program (TRP) edited by Time magazine’s chief book review editor Max Gissen and art directed by Edward A. Hamilton. The books were published through 1966 (briefly relaunched in the eighties) and ultimately included around one hundred different fiction and nonfiction titles by vintage and contemporary authors. The thematic range was truly ambitious, but the illustrated covers were incredibly groundbreaking. Created by some of the most acclaimed artists, illustrators, and designers of the era—many experimenting with expressionistic forms prefiguring later editorial conceptual illustration—the covers had a huge influence on trade paperback design. Yet the TRP is all but forgotten today, ironically, even by some who created the covers.
When Time Life began the TRP trade paperback, publishing was still in its infancy. Mass market “pocketbooks” or “rack books” dominated popular taste, while so-called trade books were highbrow yet low-priced for an academic audience. Better paper, sturdier binding, and finer printing distinguished trade from mass—they were also slightly larger—but more important were the cover aesthetics. Mass market was known for its detailed romantic realism (usually with a nod to the prurient), while trade, which catered to the intellectual reader, was more abstract—more modern. Many American modernist graphic designers, like Paul Rand, Leo Lionni, Alvin Lustig, Ben Shahn, Ivan Chermayeff and Tom Geismar, Rudy DeHarak, and others, helped develop a trade paperback graphic vocabulary based on stark graphic forms suggesting abstract expressionism wed to Bauhaus rationalism and minimalist typography. Today these early trade paperbacks and their mini-poster covers, which were decidedly less hamstrung by overbearing marketing departments, are prime examples of applied modernism.
TRP was not the only book club to serve up a diet of good, nutritious books. The venerable Book of the Month Club, founded in 1926, was the most successful to this day (although now the offerings are primarily potboilers and other page-turner best sellers). A precursor to the club idea was Albert Boni’s Thirty Great Books program, which offered thirty reprints for $2.98. Also in the mid-twenties clubs catered to devoted book enthusiasts, like George Macy’s Limited Editions Club and the Heritage Book Club, which reprinted classic works in smartly illustrated and expertly printed, slipcased editions. Similarly, the TRP was created to encourage reading and, more to the point, help avid readers expand their literary knowledge and taste. Through smart cover and interior design and typography, a subtext of TRP was to raise the level of the paperback to a higher plane. Yet at the same time, TRP also aimed to save Western culture from its inevitable slide into the abyss caused by television.
Even before publishing its first volume TRP attracted 80,000 subscribers based on the promise that three or four books would be picked by the editors “for their contemporary relevance, their readability and their quality.” Another attribute of the series were new forewords written by scholars, biographers, and experts on the reprinted authors or their themes. While design was not an overt selling point, it definitely contributed to the subscriber’s pride of purchase. A staff of three to four interior designers made certain that each book was typographically pristine (unlike the tightly leaded, small-text type of mass markets). Edward A. Hamilton, who was also the author in 1970 of Graphic Design for the Computer Age, a prescient book, assigned the covers. According to one of the illustrators, Seymour Chwast, there was never any heavy-handed art direction. “I used three different techniques for each of the three covers I did for Ed Hamilton. As far as I can recall he didn’t direct the idea or the style. One was done with colored pencils on chip board, another was a woodcut, and the third was painted, each appropriate for the books and the content of my design.” Actually Chwast did four covers (how soon they forget), and his 1962 cover for Loren Eiseley’s The Immense Journey was so unlike Chwast’s typical approaches back then it might be mistaken for an André François (who also did at least one cover).
The artists were in many cases a who’s who of the day, but just as many are just who? Among covers by Austin Briggs (Murder for Profit by William Bolitho); Ronald Searle (Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome); Jacob Landau (The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis); Leo and Diane Dillon (The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers); Jacqui Morgan (Wickford Point by John P. Marquand); Paul Hogarth (The Horse’s Mouth by Joyce Cary); Norman Green (Three Who Made a Revolution by Bertram D. Wolfe); Alexey Brodovitch (The Doctor and the Devils by Dylan Thomas); and many more, there were names like Jerome Martin, Burt Groedel, Attilio Salemme, and Louis di Valentine, who have disappeared from the history of design and illustration.
Hamilton was eclectic, seemingly allowing the books to kind of choose their own artists, and then enabling the artists to follow the appropriate style or mannerism.
