For someone who professed not to know where he was going professionally, Gorey’s covers reveal a skillful and unique sense of composition.
For someone who professed not to know where he was going professionally, Gorey’s covers reveal a skillful and unique sense of composition. He created not only a strong identity for Anchor but also memorable icons for the books themselves, regardless of his opinion about their contents. Notable is his work for the Henry James novels published by Anchor, which Gorey insists was “all a mistake” because this is one author “whom I hate more than anybody else in the world except for Picasso. I’ve read everything of Henry James, some of it twice, and every time I do it I think, ‘Why am I doing this again? Why am I torturing myself?’ Everybody thought how sensitive I was to Henry James, and I thought, ‘Oh sure, kids.’ If it’s because I hate him so much, that’s probably true.”
Most of Gorey’s work was illustrative, but for a few books he designed only lettered covers (what he insists on calling “tacky hand-lettering”). One such was Kierkegaard’s Either/Or. The reason, he admitted, was fairly simple. “Was I planning to sit down and read Kierkegaard at that point? No, I wasn’t! And it wouldn’t have helped if I had, I’m sure. I probably would have been completely paralyzed.”
Gorey left Anchor in 1960 when Jason Epstein started the Looking-Glass Library with Celia Carroll. “The idea was that it was going to do for children’s books what Anchor had done for the parents,” he explains. “The books were not paperbacks but rather paper-over-boards, and it was really quite a good series. Well, the paper was perfectly dreadful, but, then, the paper for everything in those days was perfectly terrible.” Gorey illustrated a few books, including War of the Worlds (“the less said about those, the better”); he was both art director and an editor. The books conformed to Gorey’s taste in nineteenth-century British literature, including Spider’s Palace by Richard Hughes and Countess Kade by Charlotte M. Young. After two years the imprint folded and Gorey moved more into his own realms.
The drawings for his stories and books (many of which are anthologized in his three Amphigorey collections or archived at the Gotham Book Mart in New York City) are rooted in the visual language that developed while designing covers for Anchor/Doubleday. These covers are, therefore, artifacts from both a transitional period in paperback history and the formative years of Gorey’s unique career.
Portfolio
ALEXEY BRODOVITCH
Portfolio, published between 1949 and 1951, was the model of a twentieth-century graphic and industrial arts magazine. It elevated design and set the standard of magazine layout that few publications then or now could equal. “The format itself should be a graphic experience,” editor Frank Zachary explained. The hefty nine-by-twelve-inch periodical designed by Alexey Brodovitch (1898–1971) incorporated special inserts, including shopping bags, wallpaper, and three-dimensional glasses. And publisher George Rosenthal, Jr., spared no expense in buying the best paper and the best of everything else.
“Then we decided to sell advertising,” recalled Zachary. “Well, we hated the ads we got. So we said, ‘Hell, we’re not going to mar our beautiful magazine with crummy ads.’ We were terribly idealistic.” Void of such visual encumbrances, Portfolio was a hybrid, part book and part magazine. A subscription cost twelve dollars a year for four issues and a few thousand people subscribed. Rosenthal handled the finances, while Zachary developed the writers. He also collected all the photographs and illustrations for the stories.
Convention dictated that magazine covers be pictorial. But the first issue of Portfolio was like no other; it was type design, transparent process-color squares printed over the Portfolio logo which was dropped out of black. Like a main title for a motion picture, the cover introduced the cinematic interior. Brodovitch, the acclaimed art director for Harper’s Bazaar, who introduced the new photography to fashion magazines, paced his layouts as though they were storyboards for films. The key to success was dynamic juxtapositions: big and small, bold and quiet, type and pictorial. Brodovitch splayed comps out on the floor, mixing and matching, moving pages and entire stories around as needed.
Zachary planned the issues with Brodovitch at his office at Harper’s Bazaar. “We got along very well because I let him have his head,” Zachary recalled. “But he was no prima donna. He worked in the most fantastic way. For example, I would come in, say, at seven o’clock in the evening with the idea of how many pages we had for an issue, and how many would be devoted to each story. I would come back [the next day], and Holy Christ, there was this magnificent layout. He used the photostat machine like a note pad. He would get stats of every photo, often different sizes of the same piece, in tiny increments that might vary from a quarter inch to an inch, or from an inch to two inches, and so on. You would see him surrounded by all these stats. But as he put them down, my God, all of a sudden a spread materialized beautifully proportioned, everything in scale, with just the right amount of white space, type and picture mass. I learned so many nuances of art directing just from watching him.”
Portfolio premiered in late 1949 and lasted for only three issues. During this time, Zachary was also editor of Jazzways, a one-shot magazine on the folkways of jazz. The cover was designed by Paul Rand and among the interior photographers was Berenice Abbott. In addition Zachary and Rosenthal published paperback photo albums under the Zebra Books imprint. These were the first of their kind to present good photojournalistic portfolios for just twenty-five cents. The titles included Murder Incorporated, the first book on the Mafia; Life and Death in Hollywood, a pre–Kenneth Anger look at the foibles of the glitter capital; and Naked City, the first collection of pictures by famed New York street photographer Weegee. Each sold between 150,000 and 250,000 copies with all profits poured back into Portfolio.
The first issue of Portfolio was like no other … Like a main title for a motion picture, the cover introduced the cinematic interior.
The third and last issue of Portfolio was its most beautiful. To underscore Brodovitch’s concept of this magazine as analog to film, the cover for #3 was the image of a film strip. But the dream of an ad-less magazine had turned into a nightmare. Financial problems did not weaken Zachary’s resolve to publish (he even approached Henry Luce, publisher of Time and Life, to buy the magazine). But in 1951 the prime financial backer, George Rosenthal, Sr., decided to summarily kill Portfolio rather than incur further losses. Had it continued who knows what impact Portfolio would have had on magazines of the era. More than fifty years have passed and this special magazine is a landmark of design history.
Industrial Design
ALVIN LUSTIG
Adesign icon doesn’t come along every day. To be so considered it must not only transcend its function and stand the test of time, but also must represent the time in which it was produced. The cover of Industrial Design, Vol. 1, No. 1, February 1954, was not just the emblem of a new publishing venture, but a testament to one man’s modernism; one of the last works created by Alvin Lustig (1915–1955), who suffered an untimely death from diabetes in 1955 at the age of forty.
Despite failing vision, Lustig was deeply involved in the design of the first two and nominally with the third issues of the magazine as art editor, art director, and art consultant, respectively. He saw his role as the framer of ideas that were visual in nature. Although he never had the chance to develop his basic design concepts further, he left behind a modern design icon, the cover, and a format that continued to define the magazine for years after.
Industrial Design was the brainchild of publisher Charles Whitney, who also published the successful Interiors. In 1953 he was convinced by his friend and advisor George Nelson that the time was right to introduce a specialized periodical devoted to practitioners of this burgeoning field. Interiors already featured its own industrial design column that had evolved into a discrete section, which Whitney realized had commercial potential as a spin-off. Interiors was also so beautifully designed that Industrial Des
ign could have no less than the visual panache of a coffee table book/magazine, replete with foldouts and slipsheets, not unlike the legendary design magazine Portfolio, published between 1949 and 1951. To accomplish this an eminent art director was sought. This was the age of great magazine art directors—including Alexey Brodovitch, Alexander Liberman, Otto Storch, Cipe Pineles, and Alan Hurlburt—and Whitney fervently believed that a magazine’s design would be the deciding factor in its success. Hence Lustig was entrusted with considerable authority to design the magazine as he saw fit.
On the editorial side, however, Whitney decided to take a calculated risk by promoting two young Interiors associate editors to co-editors of Industrial Design. Jane Fisk (now Jane Thompson of the architectural firm Thompson and Wood in Cambridge) and Deborah Allen may have been inexperienced in the field of industrial design but nevertheless had a clear plan to introduce a distinctly journalistic sensibility into professional publishing that emphasized criticism and analysis rather than the puff pieces common to the genre. As it turned out, this became a point of philosophical contention between the designer and editors.
If they had a choice the editors would have preferred an art director who, as Thompson explained, “would have been in the trenches with us,” a team player with journalistic instincts rather than a distant presence with a formalist sensibility. Because Lustig designed the initial dummy and subsequent two issues in his own studio and returned with the completed layouts to the editorial offices, he had made certain assumptions about the presentation of content that were often inconsistent with the editors’ vision. “We did not want the words to be gray space, we wanted them to have meaning,” recalled Thompson about wanting more spontaneous design responses to the material. But instead of being journalistically intuitive, Lustig imposed his formal preconceptions and designed the magazine as he would a book.
Blocks of text type were indeed used as gray matter to frame an abundance of precisely silhouetted photographs. But if there was a problem it was more in the editors’ minds than Lustig’s design. While it was not as journalistically paced as say, Life magazine, Industrial Design was respectfully, indeed elegantly neutral, allowing for a wide range of material to be presented without interference. Moreover, it was what Whitney wanted, so the editors reconciled themselves to building the magazine’s editorial reputation through informative features written by authors not previously associated with trade publishing.
Despite failing vision, Lustig was deeply involved in the design of the first two and nominally with the third issues of the magazine.
Thompson nevertheless hated the first cover with its tight grid and silhouetted photographs. Instead she wanted to disrupt the design purity with a few well-composed coverlines. She further favored a conceptual method of intersecting photography and text, resulting in an editorial idea, not a pure design. Lustig thought coverlines would sully the design and intersecting ideas would be too contrived. Years later, Thompson grudgingly admitted that maybe Lustig’s judgment was wiser: “He wanted to make a strong simple statement, which he believed (perhaps erroneously since Industrial Design did not have to compete on the newsstand) had to stand up against the covers of the elegant fashion magazines.” Lustig’s design set the standard for future covers, and his successor, Martin Rosensweig, continued to produce covers for a few years afterward that more rigidly adhered to the same formal practices.
Despite these creative tensions, the early issues of Industrial Design reveal a shift in the nature of professional publishing from a trade to cultural orientation that was in no small way underscored by Lustig’s classically modern design.
Holiday
FRANK ZACHARY
When it began in the 1930s, Holiday magazine was clean and orderly, but its layout was made with a cookie cutter. In 1955 Frank Zachary (b. 1919), former editor of Portfolio, who had learned art direction from Alexey Brodovitch, changed all that. Zachary began as photo editor, but when he worked with pictures he made layouts that were not just picture spreads in the conventional sense, but cinematic presentations in the Brodovitch tradition. Noting a dramatic difference, Holiday’s editor, Ted Patrick, offered Zachary the job of art director. “Jesus, Ted,” responded Zachary to the offer, “I’m okay, but why don’t you try to get Brodovitch? He’s the real master.” Zachary introduced Patrick to Brodovitch, but the two did not hit it off.
Zachary knew little about typography, but he did have experience laying out the pictures in Zebra Books—small thematic pictorial mass-market paperbacks—that taught him the importance of scale. He saw himself as a journalist, not a designer per se, more interested in using the photograph to tell the story than to prettify a page. “I learned the picture is the layout. If you have a great picture, you don’t embellish it with big type. You make it tight and sweet,” he said. Soon he developed a cadre of talented photographers who brought life to the magazine through thematic picture essays. Among them were Arnold Newman, Tom Hollyman, John Lewis Stage, Robert Phillips, Fred Maroon, and Slim Aarons, many of whom followed Zachary years later when he became editor-in-chief of Town and Country.
Photography was the heart of Holiday, illustration was its soul. Zachary rejected the prevailing sentimental illustrative approaches used in most American magazines; he eyed European artists, specifically from England and France, for their surrealistic comic vision. “Frank brought sophisticated illustration to American magazines,” recalled a colleague. “Other art directors brought powerful or clever images, but Frank brought an unprecedented sophistication. Of course it came from Europe since in the early 1950s there weren’t too many Americans practicing sophisticated pen work.”
Photography was the heart of Holiday, illustration was its soul.
Through Holiday, the artists Ronald Searle, Andre François, Roland Topor, Domenico Gnoli, George Guisti, and Edward Gorey (one of the few native Americans) were given latitude to develop their own picture essays and portfolios. Zachary avoided the reigning stars—“that would be too easy,” he argued—but rather discovered his own galaxy. In most cases the artists transformed themselves in this environment. “Frank gave me a lot of firsts,” recalled Ronald Searle. “From around 1959 to 1969 he gave me all the space one could dream of, the chance to fill it with color, the freedom to travel, and what proved to be the last of the great venues for reportage. Off to Alaska! Cover all of Canada! Bring me ten pages on the dirty bits of Hamburg! No expense spared. The years of travel for Frank gave me experience that cannot be bought. There was only one problem, he always called me ‘Arnold’ instead of Ronald. Then he probably always called [photographer] Arnold Newman ‘Ronald,’ so it balanced out.”
Zachary developed what he called “environmental portraiture,” common in contemporary magazines but unique in the early 1950s. “I would say to a photographer, ‘If a guy is a multimillionaire painter, I want to see a whole lot of his paintings in the background and on top of that I want to see his castle in the background, too.’ A photographer just couldn’t walk in and take a picture of a subject; he had to assemble the components of the subject’s life,” explains Zachary. An example of environmental portraiture is a photograph for a special issue of Holiday on New York City showing highways and parks czar and power-broker Robert Moses standing omnipotently on a red girder over the East River. The shot illustrates Zachary’s willingness to expend a tremendous amount of effort to photograph one perfect image. That is what defined his remarkable art direction.
Vogue
ALEXANDER LIBERMAN
For Alexander Liberman (1912–1999), the Russian-born art director of Vogue and later editorial director of Condé Nast from 1942 to 1995, design was a means. Making elegant layouts was never an end. Nor was it his métier. “Elegance was [Alexey] Brodovitch’s strong point,” Liberman exclaimed in the authorized biography Alex: The Life of Alexander Liberman (Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), “The page looked very attractive. But in a way, it seemed to me that Brodovitch was serving the same purpose that [M. F.] Agha [
art director of Vogue] had served, which was to make the magazine attractive to women—not interesting to women.” Liberman wanted to break the design obsession, “so I defended a more journalistic approach—rougher lettering, no white space, crowded pages, messier layouts.” Some of the more elegant layouts in Vogue throughout the 1950s (the ones that are celebrated in the Art Directors Club annuals) were either designed by his associate Pricilla Peck or produced in spite of himself because Vogue’s editor-in-chief, Edna Chase, was not interested in messy layouts. “He was tilting at windmills,” argued biographers Dodie Kazanjian and Calvin Tompkins about his preference for tabloid-styled typography.
Liberman became a layout man in 1933 for VU, the illustrated French weekly, where he worked with photojournalists such as André Kertész, Robert Capa, and Brassaï. They had not yet become the great photographers or as Liberman said: “There was no cult of photography at that time.” But with them he learned how to effectively lay out tension-packed visual essays. In 1940 Lucien Vogel, the creator of VU, had come to America to work with Condé Nast and urged the publisher to bring Liberman to America as well. Upon arriving he did layouts for Vogue (at fifty dollars a week), until one day Agha unceremoniously fired him. “That was on Friday,” Liberman recalled. “On Monday Condé Nast asked to see me, not knowing I had been fired. I brought my gold medal [which he received for an exhibition design in the Paris World’s Fair of 1937], and we talked.” At the time Nast was fighting against the clichés of fashion presentation, such as obscure typography and strange handwritten titles. Nast admired the newly started Life magazine and wanted Vogue to be more modern, in fact, more like a newsmagazine. “So when he learned from Vogel that I had been involved with a newsmagazine he was very excited …” continued Liberman. “He said ‘a man like you must be on Vogue.’ He asked Agha to come in and said ‘I want Liberman on Vogue.’ Since Condé was an absolute monarch, Agha never told him he had fired me.”
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