Book jackets as intriguing as the text inside
[Covers, while Barbara Jones integrates the title of “The Unsophisticated Arts” into her illustration, a tenant of seamless graphic design.
Organized alphabetically by artist, “The Illustrated Dust Jacket” provides short biographies, and while it’s easy to flip through the book solely for the images, the discussion of the illustrators’ lives and work is worth a read. Susan Einzig was “one of the last children and teenagers to be brought out of Nazi Germany on the Kindertransport in the months running up to the outbreak of the Second World War” and went on to create dust jackets for children’s literature, including the Carnegie Medal-winning “Tom’s Midnight Garden.”
Milton Glaser was the first graphic designer to receive the National Medal of the Arts, presented by President Barack Obama in 2009. Glazer’s groovy cover art for Tom Wolfe’s “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test” is iconic, although not as instantly recognizable as his most famous design, the “I ♥NY” logo, which has been referenced and copied all over the world.
New York designer Arthur Hawkins Jr., who created roughly 1,500 dust jackets over the course of his career, was adept at capturing atmosphere and visual metaphor. A bookseller once told his son, “I bought more bad mysteries because your dad’s covers were so good!” Like the other artists in the “Illustrated Dust Jacket,” Hawkins knew what ultimately makes a great book cover: It makes you want to read what’s written inside.