Design Literacy

by Steven Heller

If I was born to do something,” states Paul Bacon, “it was to design book jackets.” And that’s exactly what he did for about fifty years. But not just any old jacket for any old book. Although he did his share of obscure titles, his jackets have adorned some of the most prestigious bestsellers of the second half of the twentieth century. In fact, Bacon can be said to have invented the bestseller jacket as we know it: His designs have been emblems for such eminent works as E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime, William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice, Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, James Cavell’s Shogun, and Robert Caro’s The Power Broker. And while each of these covers was distinctively designed, they all shared three traits that in the early sixties fused into something known as the “Big Book Look”: large title, large author’s name, small symbolic image.

  The “look” had its inception in 1956, when Bacon was commissioned by Simon & Schuster’s art director, Tom Bevin, to design the jacket for Compulsion by Meyer Levin, a roman à clef about two young men who systematically plan and carry out the cold-blooded murder of a young boy to see if they can get away with the crime. The publisher knew that the highly publicized real-life killing of Bobby Franks by Loeb and Leopold would popularize the novel, but was uncertain how to devise a jacket that would be suggestive without being lewd, and evoke a sense of mystery without resorting to clichés. Bacon sketched out a number of ideas until he came up with the rough, hand-scrawled word “Compulsion,” which he positioned at the top of the jacket, taking up a fifth of the space, while below it, an empty taupe rectangle bled off the field, and below that, at the bottom, was scrawled “a novel by Meyer Levin.” Sparse and dramatic—yet Bacon felt something was missing.

  That “something” became two small, nervously drawn figures printed in red, running on the vacant expanse upward toward the title. Although the cover calls to mind Saul Bass’s 1955 expressionistic film poster for The Man With The Golden Arm, it was more likely influenced by the jazz albums Bacon had designed starting in the late forties. Whatever the influences, the book became a huge bestseller and the jacket, displayed everywhere, caught the publishing industry’s attention.

  Other publishers lost no time contacting Bacon to request similar jackets for their potential bestsellers. But few of them really understood what made Compulsion so successful. Bacon remembers, “I’d get calls that started like this: ‘We have a book we’d like you to do, and it’s called Darkness on the Highway at High Noon, and it’s set in Tulsa, Oklahoma,’ or something like that, and I’d say, ‘Wait a minute; what you like about Compulsion is that big, powerful one-word title.’ But it’s hard to dissuade people from their titles. Nonetheless, I took the jobs, and I started to work for literally everybody.”

  Bacon estimates he designed about 6,500 jackets from the late forties through early 2000 for all the major houses—but most consistently for Simon & Schuster for over forty years. The Baconesque approach became pervasive throughout the trade book world, yet his signature style was not always instantly recognizable because Bacon characteristically subordinated ego to function. He explains: “I’d always tell myself, ‘You’re not the star of the show. The author took three and a half years to write the goddamn thing and the publisher is spending a fortune on it, so just back off.’” Robert Gottlieb, an editor at Simon & Schuster during the fifties and later editorial director at Knopf for twenty-one years who often worked with Bacon, comments, “He had a bestseller look but he came up with other looks as well, some of which helped books become bestsellers.”

  In fact, when you look at Bacon’s jackets en masse, you realize that you’re looking at a history of late twentieth-century commercial book cover design, a virtual legacy of eclectic lettering, illustration, and typography prior to the digital revolution. Bacon was, after all, a product of an era of hand-drawn lettering, handmade illustration, and type that was cut and pasted in order to achieve precise spacing. While this sounds archaic in a time when layered Photoshop imagery is the order of the day, Bacon’s work was appealing precisely for its handcrafted precision (as well as minor imperfections) and spot-on conceptual acuity that evoked the story rather than an isolated passage.

  Born in Ossining, New York, in 1923, Bacon grew up in Union Beach, New Jersey, attended Arts High School in Newark, and started his jacket career by accident in New York after he was discharged from the Marine Corps in 1946. Unable to get into the course he wanted at New York’s Art Students League, he took a job with the former promotion art director of Fortune, Hal Zamboni, who had started his own Bauhaus-influenced studio in Manhattan. Bacon was given a $30-a-week job making laborious scratchboard drawings of, among other mundane items, bottles of pills for advertisements. However, from doing such tasks he developed a better-than-average drawing style, along with a certain stylistic flair.

  At the time, a friend’s father—who had written a book titled Chimp on My Shoulder, about venturing into Africa to round up monkeys for the Dennis Roosevelt Chimpanzee Farm in Florida—asked Bacon to do the illustrations. The witty, impressionistic drawings were, Bacon recalls, “pretty good for a novice”—good enough that the art director for E. P. Dutton, the book’s publisher, requested that he do the jacket, too. The jacket, a photograph with type, is “nothing to send to the Hall of Fame, but it got me started,” he says.

  But Bacon’s real passion was jazz, certified by his membership in the Newark Hot Club, a hyper-serious bunch of fans that included Alfred Lion and Frank Wolff, founders of the legendary Blue Note Records. Bacon had known the two before the war and soon started designing 10” album covers for their label. He simultaneously wrote record reviews for The Record Changer magazine, edited by Bill Grauer and Orrin Keepnews, who eventually started Riverside Records, for which Bacon also designed albums. Today, many jazz aficionados know Bacon exclusively for his contemporary-looking record sleeves.

  But record albums alone did not ensure a viable living, and during the early fifties, Tom Bevins at Simon & Schuster gave Bacon a quirky grouping of titles to work on, including an album of cartoons from Punch and some science fiction novels. It wasn’t until the Compulsion jacket, however, that Bacon realized that books were going to be his lifelong vocation. The S&S advertising people liked the idea of using an icon or a logo on a jacket as opposed to the conventional treatments of just type or literal illustration. And Bacon discovered he was good at “finding something that would be a synthesis graphically of what the story was about.” Moreover, since he had had no formal training in illustration, he felt free to explore in this realm. “I was not encumbered by having to work from models,” he says. “Many of the things I did, I just did strictly from memory and without any reference at all. Unless I needed something specific, like a German airplane or something—then I’d look it up. But it was very liberating to realize that I didn’t have to do something that looked like Norman Rockwell did it.”

  If he was decidedly not Rockwellian, neither was he a follower of the Modernist principles pioneered by Paul Rand, Alvin Lustig, and Leo Lionni, who imbued their work with theories of European art. While Bacon admired these designers, he points out that as the book covers they did were generally for “heady” works of criticism, analysis, and literature with small print runs, they could do virtually anything they wanted with little interference. His orientation, on the other hand, being resolutely commercial (heavy-hitter books with big runs), required that he navigate around sales and advertising people and countless others with numerous opinions.

  This he did—with the help of staunch supporters like Frank Metz, art director at Simon & Schuster for over forty years, and Harris Lewine, iconoclastic art director at Harcourt Brace and various other houses. Having editors as allies was also a plus; Robert Gottlieb, for example, when he was at Knopf, not only kept the merchandising people at bay, but kept authors at a distance too. According to Bacon, writers make literal suggestions that result in dumb illustrations. He recalls one occasion when Norman Ma
iler managed to get through to him. “Mailer was very diffident,” Bacon remembers. “He called me ‘Mr. Bacon.’ We both sort of bowed and scraped to each other. And it turned out that what he wanted—he actually loved the jacket—was to know if a very tiny postage stamp of his girlfriend could go somewhere on the front. As it turned out, there was no way it could hurt, so I said, ‘Sure, why not?’”

  Bacon didn’t do thumbnails or multiple sketches—just one iteration of any idea. But he was accommodating. “If people didn’t like something about a Cole Porter tune, he just tore it up,” he says. “And I did the same thing with the jackets.” For the 1961 publication of Joseph Heller’s classic Catch-22, he did as many as eleven versions. “I did a jacket that just said ‘Catch-22’ in very large lettering, and underneath, I can almost remember how [the subtitle Heller wrote] goes: ‘A novel wildly funny and dead serious about an Assyrian malingerer who recognized the odds.’ Gottlieb liked it but didn’t do it. Then I did one that had [the protagonist] Yossarian bull’s-ass naked, but with his back to you, saluting as a flight of planes went over. I liked that one. Then I did the finger. Then I did a couple of modifications of those. Then at some point I came up with the little guy that I tore out of a piece of paper, representing Yossarian in full flight from everything.” The finished jacket doesn’t conform to any of Bacon’s other book jackets, but it became a true icon, which makes it a typical Bacon after all.

  Bacon designed most of the jackets for Heller’s other books, an association that Heller once commented on: “The coverage of my life as an author, from Catch-22 to Closing Time thirty-three years later, may be unique in publishing; in my case, Paul Bacon did it for me, and I’ve been lucky and glad!”

  The cover for Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) was also characteristically uncharacteristic. Though the vast majority of Bacon’s covers are built on some conceptual idea or image, this one consisted solely of pure type against a yellow background; no fancy touches, except for the swash capitals in the title and author’s name. Asked why he avoided his signature conceptual image, Bacon says it was because of the difficulty in portraying the book’s most prominent element: masturbation. But also, “In color, it was just so simple and raw,” and this was one of the things “I started to do for books like Sophie’s Choice that were strictly lettering covers, which in some ways I suppose was a coward’s way out. But it just seemed appropriate for these enormously complicated books.” Given the epic plots of Sophie’s Choice and Ragtime, Bacon felt that attempting to do anything other than a solution that proclaimed, “Important book—read it!” would not work. “I guess that’s kind of a dumb thing to say, but it was at the back of my mind,” he admits.

  Ragtime, with its Victorian sheet music–inspired, hand-lettered title, was not only symbolically astute; it also indelibly evoked the book’s character. About his increasing use of illustrated lettering, Bacon explains that he didn’t try to be “too accurate in a time sense” and did not, as a rule, go after a face that was used during the period of the story. He simply would write the title and author’s name out to see what they looked like in upper-and lowercase and in caps, and then see if there was some interesting feature, like a double consonant, that could be manipulated. “I did all that stuff by hand and I wonder why I didn’t go crazy,” he comments. E. L. Doctorow himself says of the Ragtime cover, “I believe it’s a classic of book jacket design—simple and immensely evocative at the same time.”

  No trend follower, Bacon confides that he did what seemed feasible at the time. “I had a feeling for the art directors and the editors of a given house,” he says. “If they had certain prejudices or if they were going to be resistant to something I had in mind, I wouldn’t waste my time with it, even if I thought it was fundamentally good.” Yet he was so highly regarded that editors often would just send him a manuscript with the mandate to “figure it out” for himself. Except that every so often, Bacon would get a note saying, “Please, no swastika,”—this because he had been justifiably dubbed “King of the Swastika,” having done many books about World War II that incorporated the Nazi emblem.

  To Bacon, a successful jacket is one that the reader makes sense of. “If after you’ve read the book, you then look at the jacket and say, ‘I wonder why he did that,’ that doesn’t make it for me,” he states. These days, ambiguity is much more frequent in book jackets, which may explain why Bacon’s past and recent work seem dated to some. While the “Big Book Look” is not precisely obsolete, it is no longer a design code for readers, who today are drawn to fragmented and vague pictorial jackets with skewed type.

  Time and fashion have changed, and Bacon has officially retired from the book jacket business, though he still gets calls for assignments. He has returned to designing his first passion, jazz albums. “I certainly believe that anything in the arts is a track meet, and when you run 10 flat and somebody else can run 9.8, your day is done. To some extent, that happened to me,” he admits, adding, “I still like the last things I designed—they’re good—but they’re not competitive in that multigrained way that the things being done now are.” There’s another reason, too. “I was seventy-eight last December—I’m too goddamn old,” Bacon says. “But I’m lucky, in one sense. I got phased out by myself and by publishing at the same time.”

  Blues Project

  VICTOR MOSCOSO

  Victor Moscoso’s psychedelic Blues Project poster is as illegible today as it was in 1967 when it, and scores of other vibrating rock posters advertising the San Francisco rock scene, first appeared. It is also as electrifying. Moscoso’s posters did for graphic design what bands like the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and Big Brother and the Holding Company did for rock music: turned up the juice and broke all the rules.

  During the mid-1960s San Francisco was the vortex of the counterculture. The hippies prevailed, hallucinogenic drugs were plentiful, and rock and roll knew no bounds. Brooklyn-raised, Spanish-born Victor Moscoso (b. 1939) stumbled into this milieu and became a defining force in the distinctly American design genre known as the psychedelic poster. Characterized by illegible typefaces, vibrating colors, and antique illustrations, psychedelia was a rebellious visual language created to communicate with an exclusive community. Within a year, however, it was usurped by entrepreneurs who turned it into a trendy commercial style that appealed to a new market of youthful consumers. Before ceding the field to the so-called culture vultures, Moscoso created some of the most emblematic images of the 1960s, of which the Blues Project poster is one classic.

  Most of the more than sixty posters Moscoso designed during a frenetic eight months in 1967 rejected publicity photos in favor of found images. For the Blues Project poster he used a vintage photograph of a nude Salomé. Following her contour, he hand-lettered the concert information in a typeface that Moscoso called Psychedelic Playbill (an adaptation of a Victorian woodtype). Because he drew the letters out of negative space (whiting out all the areas between the bodies of the letterforms rather than drawing them directly), they look as if they have been carved onto the page. The figure was printed in bright orange against an acid green background; the lettering was printed in process blue. The slightly off-register trapping gave the letters a three-dimensional look in addition to the vibrating sensation produced by the juxtaposition of similar chromatic values.

  The Blues Project poster defined a Moscoso style. Other leading contemporary poster artists, including Wes Wilson, Rick Griffin, and the team of Mouse and Kelly, had distinct visual personalities, but Moscoso’s use of vibrating color was the most emblematic of the group. His brand of chromatic vibration was surprisingly derived from strict modern principles. Moscoso was schooled at Cooper Union in New York and Yale in New Haven before migrating west, and he credited his Yale professor Joseph Albers, a master of modernism, for this key discovery. Likening Albers’s famous Color Aid paper exercises to the futility of learning algebra in high school, Moscoso admitted that color theory drove him crazy, but ultimately
proved to be an invaluable resource. “Albers’s impact really didn’t show until the psychedelic poster … when I found myself in a situation where all I had to do was reach back to my dusty shelf, so to speak, and pull out what I had learned.”

  Compared to rock posters by Rick Griffin and Mouse and Kelly, each of whom practiced an obsessively precisionist, macabre comic style, Moscoso was a master of simplicity. Despite what appeared to be layers of graphic complexity, his visuals were strategically composed and purposefully designed. While being stoned may have added to the enjoyment of the Blues Project poster, the design was not drug-induced chaos. Moscoso was a highly disciplined rebel. He consciously rejected all the rules he learned during his time at college when he admired Paul Rand, won a cash prize for designing a roman alphabet based on the Trajan inscription, and rendered Chancery Cursive and Caslon from memory just for kicks. But the Blues Project poster was indicative of a complete understanding of balance, proportion, and color. The poster may not directly conform to any modernist theory, but it was influenced by contemporary design thinking.

  San Francisco was the vortex of the counterculture. The hippies prevailed, hallucinogenic drugs were plentiful, and rock and roll knew no bounds.

  Moscoso’s first rock poster for The Family Dog dance hall, a picture of a gargoyle on the top of Notre Dame with psychedelic type overprinting the image, was an admitted flop. “I had seven years of college—I could have been a doctor,” he said about the process of self-reevaluation that resulted in a creative epiphany. He realized that none of the self-taught poster artists were encumbered by the rules of good design, so Moscoso reversed everything he had formally learned. The rule that a poster should transmit a message simply and quickly became how long can you engage the viewer in reading the poster? Five, ten, twenty minutes? “Don’t use vibrating colors” became “use them whenever you can and irritate the eyes as much as you can.” “Lettering should always be legible” was changed to “disguise the lettering as much as possible and make it as difficult as possible to read.” Moscoso called this “a world turned upside down.” But by acting on these ideas he created a body of work that altered the language of a generation.