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Metaphor and suggestion as well as large-scale, hard-sell graphics can be used on the front of a book to compell readers to pick it up and buy it. A contemporary bookshop is a commercial gallery of poster design writ small, from the rote to the revolutionary.
The dust jacket wrapped around a hardcover book initially was conceived as a plain protective package to be thrown away after purchase. The paperback, launched as a popular medium in the mid-nineteenth century, used woodcut illustrations to mobilize its cover as a sales tool.1 Familiar styles of illustration and typography can identify a book's genre and intended audience, from calligraphic pink-and-purple romances for women to spiky black-and-red thrillers for men. Publishers with higher literary ambitions have sometimes invited designers to create experimental covers and jackets, as seen in the work that Alvin Lustig produced in the 1940s and 1950s for New Directions Books in New York.
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Book Jackets by Alvin Lustig |