By Its Cover

By Ned Drew and Paul Sternberge

Book Overview

We all know we're not supposed to judge books by their covers, but the truth is that we do just that nearly every time we walk into a bookstore or pull a book off a tightly packed shelf. It's really not something we should be ashamed about, for it reinforces something we sincerely believe: design matters. At its best, book cover design is an art that transcends the publisher's commercial imperativesto reflect both an author's ideas and contemporary cultural values in a vital, intelligent, and beautiful way. In this groundbreaking and lavishly illustrated history, authors Ned Drew and Paul Sternberger establish American book cover design as a tradition of sophisticated, visual excellence that has put shape to our literary landscape. By Its Cover traces the story of the American book cover from its inception as a means of utilitarian protection for the book to its current status as an elaborately produced form of communication art. It is, at once, the intertwined story of American graphic design and American literature, and features the work of such legendary figures as Rockwell Kent, E. McKnight Kauffer, Paul Rand, Alvin Lustig, Rudy deHarak, and Roy Kuhlman along with more recent and contemporary innovators including Push Pin Studios, Chermayeff & Geismar, Karen Goldberg, Chip Kidd, and John Gall.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1568984979
• ISBN13: 9781568984971
• Release Date: October 2005
• Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 1.96 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 8.4" x 11.0"
• Age Range: 13 years and up
• Grade Range: Grade 8 to Postsecondary

Customer Reviews

excellent pictorial guide

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

Covers: cool and cultural

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.