Customer Reviews

By Its Cover: Modern American Book Cover Design

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The two authors have written a first class study of the dust jacket and presented it in an elegantly designed paperback, too. From my experience this sort of title is heavy with cover images with lightweight copy or even just captions but here Drew and Sternberger have really researched their subject and produced what might well be the standard book on the subject. The review starts in the thirties from the craft movement oriented designs through the modernism of the forties, fifties and sixties to the post-modern late eighties, nineties and the start of this century. The covers are mostly placed with their relevant text so it is easy to follow the authors' comments about each designer.

I'm old enough to remember seeing plenty of these sixties covers in bookshops (my favorites were Rudy De Harak, Roy Kuhlman, Paul Bacon and the brilliant Herb Lubalin and considering how influential he was I'm surprised he only gets one cover) and I certainly appreciated the modernist creativity of the past decades rather than contemporary market-driven covers whose design owes so much to the liberating effect of computer technology.

As well as an interesting read the book is elegantly designed (though with perhaps just a bit too much white space for my taste) with the covers presented as cutouts with a subtle drop-shadow. Nicely several of the older titles are second-hand copies that betray well read handling. A minor annoyance is the footnote numbers printed in tiny type and in blue, nearly impossible to read in a domestic lighting environment. Actually all the notes in the back could easily have been placed on the relevant pages, there is that much white space around.

The perfect complement to 'By its Cover' is 'Jackets Required' (ISBN 0811803961) by Steven Heller and Seymour Chwast, hundreds of covers presented in a handsome looking large size paperback. Both books celebrate some wonderful dust jacket creativity.

***FOR AN INSIDE LOOK click 'customer images' under the cover.

Excellent well illustrated history of Dj design, the text was a bit up itself, but still informative.