BOOKJACKETS BY ALVIN LUSTIG
FOR NEW DIRECTIONS BOOKS
Alvin Lustig and James Laughlin
Alvin Lustig and James Laughlin: BOOKJACKETS BY ALVIN LUSTIG FOR NEW DIRECTIONS BOOKS. New York: Gotham Book Mart Press, 1947. First edition. Slim 8vo. Letterpressed card boards. White Plasti-comb binding. [iii] pp. + 19 bound-in dust-jacket panels with spines [New Classics (NC) nos. 2 - 14, 16 - 20, with no. 14 duplicated]. One small printer defect to Stein's Three Lives, otherwise a fine copy with only a faint trace of edgewear. Rare.
Plasti-comb bound booklet hand assembled in collaboration between New Directions and the Gotham Book Mart Press in 1947. Preface by New Directions Publisher James Laughlin and Statement by the Designer Alvin Lustig followed by 19 original dust jackets. The 19 jackets have been trimmed with three-sided bleeds and spine typography intact. Individual jackets trim sizes vary from 18.8 x 18.9 cm (7 3/8 x 7 7/16 in.) as issued.
The imperfect collation of this rare promotion point to the collaborative and hand-finished nature of this Art Book. Copies rarely appear in the trade and various Jacket combinations have been cataloged. This example is presented as issued by the Gotham Book Mart Press in 1947:
• Arthur Rimbaud: A Season in Hell [New Classics 2]
• Gertrude Stein: Three Lives [New Classics 3]
• E. M. Forster: The Longest Journey [New Classics 4]
• E. M. Forster: A Room with a View [New Classics 5]
• Henry James: The Spoils of Poynton [New Classics 6]
• Gustav Flaubert: Three Tales [New Classics 7]
• Evelyn Waugh: A Handful of Dust [New Classics 8]
• F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby [New Classics 9]
• Franz Kafka: Amerika [New Classics 10]
• Djuna Barnes: Nightwood [New Classics 11]
• Kenneth Patchen: Selected Poems [New Classics 12]
• James Joyce: Exiles [New Classics 13]
• Arthur Rimbaud: Illuminations [New Classics 14] x 2
• Alain Fournier: The Wanderer [New Classics 16]
• Charles Baudelaire: Flowers of Evil [New Classics 17]
• D. H. Lawrence: The Man Who Died [New Classics 18]
• D. H. Lawrence: Selected Poems [New Classics 19]
• Kay Boyle: Monday Night [New Classics 20]
Statement by the Designer Alvin Lustig: “The opportunity to design this series of book jackets was an unusual one. Rarely is the graphic designer given the chance to act upon what he considers his highest level upon a problem of serious intentions.
“In this case both factors were happily combined. The publisher, though of modest proportions, who has never swerved from an early established integrity, wanted to make as attractive as possible, an inexpensive reprint series representing the best of modern writing. There was no need to "design down" as there had been no "writing down" in the books selected. Still it was necessary to attract and hold the roving eye of the potential buyer. To do this, a series of symbols that could quickly summarize the spirit of each book, were established. The personal and subjective concept of each book was taken and the attempt was made to objectify and project it in visual form. Sometimes the symbols are quite obvious and taken from the subject itself. Others are more evasive and attempt to characterize the emotional content of the book. The jackets were always planned for maximum visual effectiveness when displayed together, as well as when shown singly against the confused background of the average bookstore.
“As the publishers remarks testify, the primary aim of reaching the audience was achieved. I hope too that the secondary aim, that of projecting a series of "public" symbols of higher than usual standards, was also achieved.”
Preface by James Laughlin: “It is obvious that the series of jacket designs which Alvin Lustig has made for my New Classics books is a constant pleasure to the eye. There is nothing in the book world today which compares with them for color, for variety, for life, for appeal to the intelligence. Again and again I find myself lining the books up just to gloat over them.
“What is quite as important: these jackets have enormously increased the sale of the New Classics Series. About eight books were in print before Lustig came into the picture. They were jacketed in a very conservative, "booky", way. Sales were pretty dreary. Then we brightened the books up with the Lustig covers. Immediately, they began to move. Stores which had been ordering one book at a time began ordering five books at a time. It was clear that the visual appeal was doing its work. Stores began devoting window displays to the books where before they had hidden them away on the shelves.
“It is perhaps not a very good thing that people should buy books by eye. In fact, it's a very bad thing. People should buy books for their literary merit. But since I have never published a book which I didn't consider a serious literary work - and never intend to - I have had no bad conscience about using Lustig to increase sales. His beautiful designs are helping to make a mass audience aware of high quality reading.”
James Laughlin contributed this essay to Print Magazine, Oct/Nov 1956: “The first jacket which Lustig did for a New Directions Book - the one for the 1941 edition of Henry Miller's Wisdom of the Heart- was quite unlike anything then in vogue, but it scarcely hinted at the extraordinary flowering which was to follow. It was rather stiff and severe - a non-representational construction made from little pieces of type metal chosen from the cases in the experimental printing shop he had set up in the hinter regions of a drugstore in Brentwood. A less fecund talent might have been content to work that vein for years, but not Lustig. A few months later, I remember, he was showing me how he made extraordinary forms by exposing raw film to different kinds of light in a friend's darkroom.
“Whatever the medium, he could make it do new things, make it extend itself under the prodding of his imagination. What the true nature of that imagination was I never fully understood until the last year, when he had lost his sight, and when, to our amazement, he not only continued to work, directing the eyes and hands of his wife and assistants as if they were his own, but produced some of his finest pieces, such as the final cover design for the magazine Perspectives USA.
“In the middle years, when opening each envelop from Lustig was a new excitement because the range of fresh invention seemed to have no limits, I had supposed that his gift was a purely visual faculty. Or, watching him play with a pencil on a drawing pad, I thought that he had some special magic in his hands. Only at the end, when I knew he could not see the forms evolving on paper, did I realize that his creative instinct was akin to that of the poet or composer. The forms took shape in his mind, drawn from a reservoir seemingly as inexhaustible as that of a Klee of Picasso.
“Lustig's solution of a book jacket problem was seldom a literary solution. He was no verbalizer; as a matter of fact, writing came hard to him. His method was to read a text and get the feel of the author's creative drive, then to restate it in his own graphic terms. Naturally these reformulations were most successful when there was an identity of interest, but it was remarkable how far he could go on alien ground. “In discussions of values in art the positiveness of his assertions occasionally suggested egotism; he would submit himself to it fully and with humility. I have heard people speak of the "Lustig style" but no one of them has been able to tell me, in fifty words or five hundred, what it was. Because each time, with each new book, there was a new creation. The only repetitions were those imposed by the physical media.
“I often wish that Lustig had chosen to be a painter. It is sad to think that so many of his designs must live in hiding on the sides of books on shelves. I would like to have his beautiful Mallarme crystal or his Nightwood abstraction on my living room wall. But he was compelled to work in the field he chose because he had had his great vision of a new realm of art, of a wider social role for art, which would bring it closer to each and every one of us, out of the museums into our homes and offices, closer to everything we use and see. He was not alone, of course, in this; he was, and is, part of a continuing and growing movement. His distinction lay in the intensity and the purity with which he dedicated his genius to his ideal vision.”
"By the time he died at the age of forty in 1955, [Lustig] had already introduced principles of Modern art to graphic design that have had a long-term influence on contemporary practice. He was in the vanguard of a relatively small group who fervently, indeed religiously, believed in the curative power of good design when applied to all aspects of American life. He was a generalist, and yet in the specific media in which he excelled he established standards that are viable today. <p>
"Lustig created monuments of ingenuity and objects of aesthetic pleasure. Whereas graphic design history is replete with artifacts that define certain disciplines and are also works of art, for a design to be so considered it must overcome the vicissitudes of fashion and be accepted as an integral part of the visual language." -- Steven Heller