“As we spend more of our reading time in digital, disembodied, notional environments where texts lack differentiation, and may easily leach into one another unconstrained,” Mendelsund contends, “covers (and physical books in general) remain part of an anxious cultural effort to corral and contain the boundless.”īut covers also perform the exact opposite function.
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These days, as physical books compete with ebooks and audiobooks, covers perform a different protective function, which is really a feat of partitioning and resistance. 1 The rise of the paperback in the late 1930s introduced a new platform or material support for the cover image, and it also established the conditions for the emergence of what Louis Menand has called “a distinctive mid-century art form” 2 -the striking, often lurid, pulp-paperback cover. But this wrapping paper, as Ned Drew and Paul Sternberger have shown, soon became a site of ambitious and lavish design. Before the turn of the 20th century-when bindings, rather than jackets, typically carried decorative elements-the jacket functioned both as a barrier to scuffing and sun damage and as a kind of wrapping paper, concealing the artistic gift within. First of all, he notes, a cover is a “skin,” a “membrane,” and a “safeguard” that protects the book, but the mode of protection has changed over the years. A book cover is whatever it does it’s a composite object with multiple functions. What is a book cover? At one point in Cover, Mendelsund answers this question taxonomically. Within a few years, perhaps seeking a better detail to carry the metaphoric weight of the book, Bantam discontinued Biggs’s cover, replacing it with an image that includes an official photograph of a mushroom cloud. The task of the translator, as he defines it in his recent monograph Cover, is to select a “unique textual detail that, as the subject matter for a book jacket, can support the metaphoric weight of the entire book.” In Biggs’s Hiroshima cover, metaphor slides over into metonymy: by some dubious logic of substitution, as six Japanese survivors become two white ones, an actual act of war becomes merely a possible one. Knopf, such misrepresentation would register as a failure of “translation.” Mendelsund is himself a leading designer of book covers, and “translation” is one of his preferred terms for the process whereby he imagines those covers into being.
![harold halma photograph of capote harold halma photograph of capote](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2017/09/15/fashion/15MS-ASHBERY2/15MS-ASHBERY2-jumbo.jpg)
Biggs’s cover misrepresents Hersey’s restrained account of America’s bombing of a Japanese city by depicting this event as “a garish nightmare of American annihilation.”įor Peter Mendelsund, Associate Art Director at the publishing house Alfred A. As he says, in a note that sits just before the copyright page, he was trying to be universal: “I just drew two perfectly ordinary people-like you or me-and had them portray alarm, anxiety, and yet wild hope for survival as they run from man-made disaster in a big city––a city like yours or mine.” Still, as Paula Rabinowitz points out in American Pulp, her capacious and vibrant study of the pulp paperback revolution in the United States, Biggs’s analogical reasoning denies the specificity of the image that he created. The cover artist, Geoffrey Biggs, wasn’t trying to be deceptive.
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They are young, white, and stylish: she epitomizes New Look fashion in her loafers and gathered skirt, he sports pleated cuffs and a fitted trench coat––the same type of coat that Holden Caulfield dons on the cover of the notorious 1953 Signet/NAL paperback of The Catcher in the Rye.īantam Book No. In this image, two people, not Japanese, are fleeing an explosion just beyond the frame. 404, its cover implied a different setting. But two years later, when Hiroshima was republished in paperback as Bantam Book No. Originally published in the August 31, 1946, issue of the New Yorker, it recounts what the magazine’s editors called, in a statement to readers of the issue, “the almost complete obliteration of a city by one atomic bomb.” Within a few months it was brought out as a hardback book, with a subdued, text-based cover. John Hersey’s Hiroshima takes place, as one might expect, in Hiroshima.