A Book By Its Cover

Chip Kidd: Book One -- Work 1986-2006 by, unsurprisingly, Chip Kidd

One of the most annoying things that you as a customer can do to me as a bookseller is hand me a photocopy of the front cover of a book and expect me to locate the volume in question. Admittedly, with novels and most other books this works well enough -- but the people who usully arrive bearing photocopies are inevitably looking for some sort of math guide for their slow-to-learn fifth-grader, and tracking down precisely the right workbook is often an exercise in the worst sort of futility. Titles are rarely if ever listed the same way twice, authors are nonexistent, and publishers jealously guard their wares and only allow you to order directly from them via their pop-up-laden websites in garish primary colors. To all of it I say: ick.

Nevertheless, every time someone hands me a grainy black-and-white image from an old Hewlett-Packard -- or, that one time, an honest-to-God Xerox, which I'd thought were good and extinct in this day and age -- I can all but taste the hope and confidence: they believe implicitly that the cover of a book somehow encompasses that book's essential nature.

In fact, as anyone who works with books soon learns, there is quite a lot of information that is located elsewhere on a book -- say, on the inside jacket flap or on those crucial yet boring copyright leaves preceding the title page. Yet the cover remains the primary source of fascination and appeal -- the nexus of the current between author and reader.

This is where it pays as an author to have someone like Chip Kidd on your side.

Ever since stumbling over the puzzling and busy hardcover edition of The Cheese Monkeys back in the proverbial day, I have striven to be something close to a connoisseur of Kidd's work and book design generally. Once you start looking, you start noticing, and the more you notice, the more you see, until suddenly you have developed very strong views on, say, the design of many perennial book club darlings in earth tones with women's faces on the cover and the title dripping there in a syrupy cursive font. Mr. Kidd is one of those rare book designers who, shocking as it may sound, actually reads the book and only then attempts to distill it into an image that will hopefully draw the prospective reader's eye and cause the book in question to fly off the shelves.

And even rarer, his designs are not only eye-catching and unique: they are intelligent. They are mysterious. However attention-grabbing the image, it really only makes complete sense after the book has been read and understood. With Mr. Kidd's work, there exists a definite compulsion to find out What, exactly, Is Up.

So naturally, I was thrilled about a Chip Kidd retrospective of the past twenty years. I figured it would be a fun book to flip through. Oooo, pretty pictures! Snarky paragraphs!

What I wasn't expecting was to read the whole thing, cover to cover, obsessively flipping pages and analyzing images and laboriously deciphering the many bits of scribbled ephemera collected from authors, publishers, fellow designers, and various other members of the particular set to which Chip belongs. There's Updike, Chris Ware, Michael Crichton, and more others than I care to list here, who provide letters, photos, postcards, scribbled nonsense on cocktail napkins -- in short, all the things you feel are lusciously revealing about the artistic process, particularly when combined with the finished product.

I cannoy honestly say I understand the process any better than I did before -- certainly not as well as anyone who actually designs professionaly -- but I feel at least as though my brain has woken up and stretched a bit. My eyes, too. And you'll note that old saw about books and their covers doesn't say anything about judging the covers themselves, thank God. We've got to judge something.