Who knew book designers can be so funny? Not I. “The Art of Book” lecture at the 92nd Y last week was most entertaining. The topic of the lecture is a bit misleading. The ‘art’ or ‘design’ of a book is much more than just the cover - there is also the design of the content. The choice of paper, font, layout of the actual content of a book is just as important, considering that most of us who read spend a lot of time with the book open.

This was a night of big-shots. Michael Bierut of Pentagram was the moderator of the lecture. He introduced the first presenter, Milton Glaser, with a story about himself as a mere 14-year-old being taken aback by the beautiful typography, layout, and illustration of the Signet Classic Shakespeare series (which is designed and illustrated by Glaser). I think Mr. Bierut also made some reference to Proust (Marcel, Madeleine…)*. Mr. Glaser came on stage and showed slides of his work. I know of Glaser as an illustrator, and never knew that he designed book covers. The most interesting cover shown was his illustration for Nabokov’s Pnin - the author wrote Glaser a two-page letter describing how to draw the face that was on the cover.** He also showed us a series of covers for Herman Hesse, whose work “you can only read up until the age of 19″. Some of the audience laughed, either approving Mr. Glaser’s below-the-waist punch, or just laughing real loud to make sure their neighbors know that they’ve heard of the famous German philosopher/writer.

Bierut came back on stage to introduce the second presenter. He told us that if you see someone at a bookstore who keeps on picking up books and flipping to look at the back cover and flap, it means that the person is a designer (because he/she is looking for the cover artist - that’s how he discovered Chip Kidd). Hmm. But isn’t reading the back cover and flap a normal behavior for anyone curious to find out more about a book? I guess only designers are curious people. Chip Kidd came on stage and his talk was hilarious. I was laughing my ass off, sometimes at the expense of the author - Updike who “studied typography briefly in college” (which is “distressing” to a big-time designer like Mr. Kidd), and Cormac McCarthy who suggested two pictures that didn’t quite work for his cover (how preposterous of an author to suggest pictures for his own book!). There’s nothing better than jokes on famous authors. The best joke came at the end, when Kidd put up a slide that said, “Book Design 101, Lesson One. Don’t ever, ever do this”. He went on to explain that his professor taught the class to either spell out ‘apple’, or put a picture of an apple on the cover, but never to put both on the cover. And he shows this picture (on the left):

When Kidd said that, I was thinking about his cover design for Murakami’s Wind-up Bird Chronicles and his Batman Collected (shown above). Hmm. I guess rules are made to be broken. Oh whatever, we all had a good laugh at the expense of the designer of Left Wing of a Bird.

Bierut introduced the last presenter of the evening, Dave Eggers, who got the loudest applause. Eggers didn’t talk so much about the design as much as the process of designing and making the books - how and why he chose certain material, binding, etc. McSweeney’s Issue 7, which was comprised of seven booklets between cardboard covers, all tied together with a rubber band. I remember that issue - I had it for a while and wondered where the heck did they get the thick rubber band from (it was really thick). Eggers explained how during that time there was the anthrax scare, and their printer rep had to take home the rubber bands (which had white powder on them) and wash it in his washing machine (and the rubber band came out extra dark). For another issue of McSweeney’s (I think issue 15), they had to print 20,000 copies on cloth and because of deadline had to use whatever was available at their Iceland printer - and ended up having 3 versions of that issue (blue, brown, and yellow).

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(I had a recorder with me and took in the entire Eggers presentation…)

Eggers, as a writer and the boss of his own publishing house, offers a very different point of view of book cover design. He’s limited by what he knows (an old version of Quark) and what he has (2 fonts?), but he has the freedom of not working for a marketing and editorial team. Not to take anything away from what Eggers has accomplished, but in a way, his job is easier - he’s an artist who only needs to care about his own vision; where as a designer needs to interpret each book, each author and think how to portray that book and speak to that particular audience. A good book cover designer’s portfolio will display a variety of styles - each suited for a particular book; an artist designer can survive with one style. That said, I think McSweeney’s Quarterly is great and beautiful and incredibly fun (even though I don’t get most of the stories…). But the latest issue of McSweeney’s is unusually tame (Eggers gave us a preview of the next issue, which is bound by magnet - yes you read it right).

The lecture was followed by an interesting Q&A session. More on that later.

By the way - Chip Kidd once interviewed Milton Glaser for the Believer, which is a literary magazine owned by Dave Eggers’ McSweeney’s.

* I think it was Walker Evans who claimed that he’s inspired by Flaubert, and then after Evans died, his biographer couldn’t find any proof of him ever owning a book by the French author. That totally made the famous photographer look like an ass. This is totally unrelated of course, I’m sure Mr. Bierut has read In Search of Lost Time from cover to cover, and his reference is not to make him sound more intelligent than us commoners, and that he only made that reference because, well, that really was the analogy that popped into his head at that moment.
** “For the first and last time in his career, Nabokov was delighted to see his vision for a book cover nearly met by reality.”