THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, May 7, 1995 TAG: 9505050500
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J3 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BILL RUEHLMANN
LENGTH: Medium: 89 lines
YOU CAN'T tell a book by its cover, but you might well buy one because of an arresting dust jacket.
Who could resist the bright yellow car, retreating down a black stripe of highway - destination Destiny - splitting the wrapper to John O'Hara's Appointment in Samarra (Grosset & Dunlap, 1934)?
Or the sharp white silhouette of the Spirit of St. Louis, soaring across the midnight blue of We (G.P. Putnam, 1930), Charles Lindbergh's account of his famous transatlantic flight?
Or the eponymous angel, staring out stricken from the spun shadows of Erle Stanley Gardner's The Case of the Black-Eyed Blonde (Grosset & Dunlap, 1944)?
Biblioblandishments.
An invention of English publisher Longmans & Co., the dust jacket emerged in 1833 as protection for a book's leather binding from the greasy London fog. Before that, volumes had been routinely sealed in cheap paper or unmarked cardboard, but such complete insulation inhibited browsing. Still, it did not dawn on anyone that literary hay could be made from employing these useful innovations as advertising space until the early 1900s.
That was when the blurb was born.
You know the drill: little testimonials that cry ``this (novel, biography, collection of essays) is the (finest, greatest, absolute tops) of (our time, all time, these cosmos).'' Then came the seductive flap synopsis, closely followed by the back-cover celebration of other titles by the same publisher. And, gloriously, the effulgent cover art that seemed to set the merchandise ablaze.
By 1933, the Depression was contributing to an appropriately gray American mood; but illustrator Helen Dryden, a contributor to Advertising Age, wrote: ``A bookseller's window is now one of the gayest sights, next to florists', these sad times afford.''
The proof is lovingly presented within the full-color pages of Jackets Required: An Illustrated History of American Book Jacket Design, 1920-1950 (Chronicle Books, 144 pp., $19.95). This is a spread-winged butterfly of a book. The authors are admirably equipped to share the excitement of a heretofore unappreciated art form: Steve Heller, a senior art director at The New York Times, is editor of the American Institute of Graphic Artists' Journal of Graphic Design; Seymour Chwast is a member of the Art Directors Hall of Fame.
To borrow the apt title of Laura Lou Brookman's 1934 Grosset & Dunlap novel, emblazoned in crimson and appointed with the soulful stare of a drop-dead redhead: Gorgeous.
Bright colors, stylized motifs, serpentine arabesques crawling and curling at the borders. ``A jacket,'' the writers note, ``must quickly evoke the aura of the book as it brands its title on the mind's eye.'' Those who immediately discard dust wrappers may be casting off nothing less than a 6-by-8-inch canvas, rife with life.
``The various images and typographic styles used to depict a book's content reveal more about marketing strategy than literary quality,'' the authors concede, ``yet when they are studied as examples of popular art, book jackets are signposts of a period's aesthetics.''
Adroit if neglected artists are celebrated here - S. McKnight Kauffer, William Addison Dwiggins, George Salter - fast free-lancers who performed at $75 and $150 a pop. Jackets Required takes us up to the 1950s, when paperbacks were on the upswing. ``Their covers,'' complain the authors, ``even for the classics, were crass.''
Yes - fabulously so, responds Lee Server, author of Over My Dead Body (Chronicle Books, 108 pp., $16.95).
``What we have here,'' he writes, ``are some paperback books, circa 1945-1955, remnants of a brief but gloriously subversive era in the history of American publishing. These cheap, pocket-sized editions came wrapped in lurid cover art and screaming headlines, hyping stories about crime, lust and violence. Casting a neonlike glow from wire racks in drugstores and bus depots across the nation, they conveyed an alluring collective vision of a corrupt and sensual world.''
Mickey Spillane, James M. Cain and the upwardly mobile John D. MacDonald. Blackboard Jungle, The Brass Cupcake, Hot Dames on Cold Slabs. Hard-boiled ops and half-baked cops.
Most of the sensational paperback writers fell out of fashion in the 1960s. But all that litters is not mold. Today, those titles have become collectible.
While current covers, absolved at last of fun and funk, look more like laminated marquees than exotic movie stills.
- MEMO: Bill Ruehlmann is a mass communication professor at Virginia Wesleyan
College. ILLUSTRATION: Jacket design by ALFRED MAURER
by CNB