Judging books by his covers
If you had told Peter Mendelsund a dozen years ago that he would one day release two books in tandem about his groundbreaking work in graphic design, he would have assumed you were kidding or that he was dreaming. But this week, the associate art director at Alfred A. Knopf publishes his first monograph of book jacket art, “Cover” (powerHouse: $60) and his illustrated “exploration into the phenomenology of reading,” “What We See When We Read” (Vintage: $16.95 paper).
Back then, Mendelsund was a full-time musician. Born and raised in Cambridge, Mass., he began a career as a concert pianist after studying philosophy and literature at Columbia University. He “stumbled into design” almost by accident, he said by phone last week, after a midcareer “existential crisis.” He realized that working as a fulltime musician — without health insurance and with a new baby daughter and a second in the works — wasn’t viable anymore.
Fortunately, through a family friend, Mendelsund got himself a meeting with book-cover guru and art director extraordinaire Chip Kidd, who, after looking over Mendelsund’s early work and seeing promise, decided to give him a shot as a junior designer. For the last 11 years, he has churned out so many eyecatching covers that he is now one of the best-known book designers in the field.
“Cover” includes around 300 of his book jacket designs, in various stages of completion; more telling, it offers a view into his “process,” including jacket sketches, rejects, mock-ups, as well as several essays and meditations by authors he’s worked with (including Ben Marcus, Tom McCarthy, James Gleick and Mark Danielewski).
“WWSWWR,” on the other hand, is a more experimental book, using text and images to help readers visualize, in their minds, the image of characters being described. Mendelsund, throughout this thoughtprovoking book, asks the lay reader to contemplate text in new ways.
Why did you decide to write these two books now?
A couple of years back, I had written a post for Jacket Mechanical, my blog, that was sort of the bones of “WWSWWR,” and it had gotten a really nice response from a wide variety of people.... Cut to a couple of years further down the line, and power-House had asked me to do the monograph, and I had said yes. Just as soon as I had inked that contract, I got this weird panic, like “Oh, God. I’m going to be the pretty-pictures monograph guy,” or “the book jacket guy” — which I love and I don’t mind being associated with, but it’s only just a part of who I am.... Then, looking back through my blog, I thought, “Hmm. I think I have more to say about this topic.” “Cover” is a great realtime visual counterpart to “What We See When We Read.” Were you intentionally going for a Marshall McLuhan-esque presentation on the latter?
The book itself — the idea stylistically, though not in terms of content — was, at first, a Marshall McLuhan-inspired presentation: Helvetica, black-and-white pictures, telegraphed messages. I had this whole image in my mind of how it would look. Also, because the monograph of my book jacket work was going to be a $60 book and full color, I was thinking in terms of complementary books that would be affordable and accessible. One would be big and expensive and colorful; the other would be small, black and white and for the everyman. You stumbled into design and had to learn quickly, on the job; as a result, you often had to ask your colleagues about basic things, like “What’s a pantone chip?” Do you think you would have found your way here had you gone to art school instead?
The truth is when you go to school to learn something, you’re on a dedicated trajectory. So that puts a certain kind of burden on you to succeed in that particular trajectory. One of the wonderful things about having sidestepped into design is that there was never any pressure for me to succeed. ... It’s not something I spent money to learn how to do. So I still kind of feel like I’m dabbling, and I think what’s great about that is you can maintain a certain kind of beginner’s mind when you’re working, which obviously, I think, makes for better work. You’re just fresher because you don’t have the anxiety of influence. There’s nothing really at stake. How much time do you spend on average reading versus designing or art directing?
I’ve always read voraciously since I was a child, no matter what I’ve called myself professionally. ... If I have any predominant anxiety in my life, it’s that I don’t have enough time to read in any given minute. I was just saying five minutes ago to a friend of mine — we were talking about something that I was reading this morning and all the followup reading I needed to do to properly understand the thing that I was reading and that sort of crazy, branching, forking tree of reading possibilities that I feel like is always stretching out in front of me. You can’t read it all, but I really want to.
Part of the idea of including visuals in “WWSWWR” was to leaven some of the seriousness of the writing. Where it gets dense, I was hoping the cartoonishness of the visuals are a way out. It serves as a foil — I’m hoping, anyway. I was writing sentences, where I was like, “Oh God, Peter. You’re so pretentious. No one is going to want to plow through this.” Hopefully the illustrations are a way in.... Was it hard to present in words but also by example your process visually?
It’s very frightening. I think that most designers like to uphold the myth that they sit down, inspiration strikes, they knock the thing out, and then they move on to the next. That’s like a kind of mythology in all the arts, actually — that the muse visits; the thing is made fully formed in your head, and then you translate it into your medium and then it’s done, feather in my cap. It’s obviously so much messier than that....
People assume the process is really about coming ever closer to this ideal book cover, and then you find the ideal book cover, you’re done; whereas, the more I do this, the more it turns out that what it’s really about is making all the possible book covers and choosing one kind of arbitrarily.... These things get chosen for any number of reasons, but it’s not that they represent the true heart of the book. There is no such cover.