Do Books Go To Heaven?

I usually read the Sunday New York Times with a lazy eye, dissecting the weddings and skimming the "Week in Review" before finally ending up at the Magazine. Sometimes the feature stories catch my attention, but this past week I was more intrigued by one of the magazine’s regular columns, Rob Walker's CONSUMED. His topic? Now that e-book sales are rising, and electronic readers are increasingly prevalent, we’re facing a culture in which the physical book , in its traditional context, might become obsolete. However, he says, don’t cart them to the dumpster just yet – there are many possibilities for reincarnation in other areas of life.

For me, this is a disturbing thesis, not least because I work in publishing and saying the word "e-book" is akin to uttering "Macbeth" in front of a troop of actors at rehearsal. As I've discussed on this blog before, I am very attached to my books; as tangible objects they are beautiful in their own way, but they also hold a deeper significance. Arranged on my shelves, they are anchors of memory, testaments to knowledge, milestones of my life. And so Rob Walker’s edict --"set aside any emotional attachment you may feel toward the reading of physical books; the truth is that creative uses for books that do not involve engaging with words on a page already abound" -- is deeply jarring.

However, I know that people’s feelings towards books qua books vary. In his article, Walker references Nicholson Baker’s New Yorker essay about books as physical objects (highly recommended reading), which traces their role as socio-cultural signifiers: “aspirational” people have been ordering books by the foot for centuries in order to fill their library shelves, so it’s not that much of a surprise that stacks of older books are sold as decorating accessories, their value based on what’s outside rather than in.

Though I don't agree with Walker's pronouncement that we're in a "post-book" culture (i.e., that attachment of any kind to physical books is démodé) I do think it is important to draw a distinction between the use of books as “props” – to reinforce an image – and the repurposing of them to perform some other function. Buying old books on eBay by the stack to enhance a décor theme, to impart a fabricated air of lived-in intellectualism, is not the same as taking one with a particularly beautiful cover, or with a title of specific significance, and repurposing it as a bag.

Perhaps this is an irrational view for me to hold, but I feel the latter is a more genuine and respectful afterlife; the book is being appreciated in and of itself as a physical object, and its symbolic representation is a reflection of its owner’s values. It is a celebration of books and what they add to our existence; carrying a book clutch suggests that you are a book lover who wants to outwardly manifest your interest. On the other hand, occupying the bookcases in your new sitting room with bundles of color-cordinated books you bought on Etsy is not quite the same. It sullies them by demanding their complicity in a falsehood; rather than celebrating them, it is using them as a means to achieve your own aggrandizement.

Having said this, I would still feel uncomfortable taking a hacksaw to a book in pursuit of a purse, or a bonsai planter, or a lamp, or one of the many other things people are making out of books these days. I must confess, though, that I am tempted to take a big stack and punch an awl through them all every time I go into McNally-Jackson and see the ceiling in their cafe. Wouldn't that just be awesome to have in your bedroom?

P.S. HAPPY FRIDAY THE 13th!

Ten Questions for Carol Carson

I don’t know about the rest of you, but as I much as I love a good story, I sometimes find myself loving books as physical objects in almost equal measure—the smell of the paper, the sound of a book spine being cracked, and, perhaps most importantly, the arresting and thought-provoking images on the jacket that ends up wrapped around a particular book. Sometimes I’ll be so taken by a particular jacket that calls to me from across a Barnes and Noble or the Community Bookstore in Park Slope that I’ll end up purchasing the book even if the jacket copy is relatively unpromising. When I first started working in book publishing, I was awed by our jacket design department’s stunning ability to find the perfect image, concept, or type for manuscript after manuscript. And, while I caught myself thinking of manuscripts as fully-realized stories or projects long before a jacket was finalized, I quickly learned that a good book jacket can take the reading experience to a new level.

I was thrilled, then, when Carol Carson, the legendary head of Knopf’s art department, agreed to answer a few questions about the art of jacket design. I hope you’ll be as intrigued by her answers as I was!

Have you always been a book lover, or was it originally the artistic aspect of the profession that drew you to it? Luckily, my parents bought a lot of books for us. You have to start early. I still have a book of Poems of Childhood with illustrations by Maxfield Parrish. Then I went on to the great orange binding biographies in the school library. So reading has always been a big part of my life—unless I was drawing!

Are there any book designers whose work inspired you when you first started in this line of work? Louise Fili and Carin Goldberg for sure. And earlier designers like Dwiggins, George Salter, E. McKnight Kauffer, and Paul Rand.

Are there any particular sources you look to for inspiration when you feel “stuck” on a design? Love the Czech typography from the 20s and 30s. German type in the latter 19th c. Old scrapbooks, random art on the internet.

Are there any images you hold very close to your heart that you hope to one day use for a book jacket that you’re kind of hanging on to for the perfect manuscript match? I have a great photograph by Victor Schrager of a small plaster of Paris deer head with blue glass eyes that I tried to use years ago that was rejected. Perhaps he has a second life awaiting him. And I found a 1930s scrapbook of movie star postcards that are lovely.

If you had to guess, how many book jackets would you say you’ve designed over the years? Feels like millions but actually it’s close to a thousand (not counting the multiple versions that are so popular these days).

Do you have a favorite jacket that you’ve designed? Joan Didion’s last book, The Year of Magical Thinking, and some poetry, W. S. di Piero’s Chinese Apples. And a few of the Alice Munro jackets. Maybe the oldest one at Knopf was Scott Bradfield’s The History of Luminous Motion that Barbara and I worked on.

Do you have a favorite jacket designed by someone else? Still think that the first Donna Tartt book that we published is pretty smashing. The Secret History designed by Barbara de Wilde and Chip Kidd. Peter Mendelsund’s A Monster’s Notes by Laurie Sheck. All my designers have done great work.

I know there are many variations of the beloved Knopf borzoi icon that appears on all Knopf books. How many different options are there? Over a hundred and fifty.

Do you have a favorite? Paul Rand’s stick Borzoi is a good one. But the Dwiggins dogs are classic.

Did you always want to be a jacket designer? It’s a great job. Just wanted to make things, collages, paintings, etc. Maybe I’ll get back to it one day if that’s not too big a cliché

Musings on (What's Been) Lost

Maybe that subject will drive some traffic this way!

A few weeks ago, when I was starting to think about my week of blogging, I had very definite plans for today. I had hoped to live-blog this conference, the first hosted by C19, a new society for nineteenth-century Americanist scholars. Some people whose work I really admire will be speaking today, including Patricia Crain (author of The Story of A, which I read as an undergraduate), Samuel Otter (whose new book, Philadelphia Stories, I’ll be reviewing for July), and Brenda Wineapple (who wrote White Heat, a very good book about Emily Dickinson, and a biography of Hawthorne that I hear is also a fine read). Not to mention a host of other scholars and writers over the course of the weekend—again including, but not limited to, Thomas Augst, John Bryant, John Stauffer, Wyn Kelley, Wai Chee Dimock, Meredith McGill, Hester Blum, Laura Wexler, and Bryan Waterman (that’s in chronological order). Suffice it to say that it sounds like a very fun conference, and I’d love to be there.

Unfortunately, because I’m not from the East Coast, I didn’t realize that Penn State—which is hosting the conference—isn’t in Philadelphia. I had planned to make at least a day trip, but on Tuesday night I found out that the school is actually in central Pennsylvania, a five-hour drive from New York. So this post will not in fact be a live-blogged literary conference, but that is a theme I plan to return to in the future. Be on the lookout in coming months for a post about another, probably less exciting conference.

Luckily, I still have something to write about on what I’m deciding to call Academic Thursdays. (All right, it will probably just be this one Academic Thursday.) This morning on the train I read Lawrence Biemiller’s recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, “Should Your New Buildings Look Old?” In it, he discusses the phenomenon of univerities commissioning buildings in the predominant campus style. Sometimes it works. More often it doesn’t, as at the University of Virginia: “a 366,000-square-foot basketball arena with a 1,500-space parking garage has no business whatsoever pretending to look like Monticello.”

I responded to the article because I, while not trained in architecture, love the unique place-ness of university campuses. I’m always alert to their differences when I visit. And some of those differences aren’t architectural, as Biemiller notes: “What is it about the design of my campus that I like? It might be the architecture of the buildings, but chances are that it's actually something that's harder to put a finger on—the interplay of buildings, trees, open spaces, views, and other elements . . . On the best campuses, the specific architectural vocabulary is often secondary—what matters is how the elements come together.” When I visited the University of Mississippi two years ago, I discovered in wandering the campus a confederate cemetery. Stanford boasts a mausoleum, home to Leland Stanford, Jr., and his family, and in the middle of some of the Main Quad's Richardsonian arches are little hearts. Both of those campuses are large and spread out; Columbia, in contrast, feels like the singularity at the moment of the Big Bang. All the materials of any Ivy League campus are there—the library, the various neoclassical buildings—but there’s so much less space between them. These are the elements, and they’re the strange things that make any campus stand out.

You can see one of the Stanford hearts on the third column from the left:



Ultimately, Biemiller argues against maintaining—or attempting to maintain—one architectural aesthetic on a university campus. It’s intellectually dishonest, he writes, when one architect is asked to reproduce not merely a style but the work of one other, specific architect or group of architects. (At, for example, Yale, with its elaborate and extravagant residential colleges designed by James Gamble Rogers.) It’s expensive. (Those buildings at Yale cost $2 million to build in the 1920s, Biemiller reports, and in 2007 Princeton paid $136 million to build a Collegiate Gothic residential college.) And it fails to keep the buildings in dialogue with one another, something at which Bowdoin College has apparently been very successful.

You might ask what all this has to do with books. Well, I’ve been thinking about tradition and design in publishing as well. Yesterday I attended a memorial service for Nina Bourne, a much-admired and long-established (she worked in publishing for seventy years) copywriter and advertiser, first at Simon & Schuster and then at Knopf. At the door we were given folders that contained a survey of Nina’s finest ad work, including pieces from the campaigns for Eloise and Catch-22. They were breathtaking. They were funny, they were sharp, they were irreverent—but best of all, they were just so full of text. In Nina’s time at Knopf, she perfected a style that The New York Times characterized thus: “large, clean, heavily bordered ads in black and white, with minimal copy used to create maximum impact.” Knopf still uses that style. It’s effective, it’s straightforward, and it’s smart. But I was filled with some longing. There was a real writerly flair in these ads. You could see Nina flexing her muscle behind them, and you could see wit.

Nina's ad for Catch-22:



To create such an ad now might reflect Biemiller’s argument about intellectual honesty and maintaining a contemporary aesthetic. Does anyone today want to read an ad that is mostly text, one that forms its own story and its own narrative? Would it look hopelessly dated, as much so as that UVA basketball arena, next to the minimalist, sparser ads that you find in papers today? Would it fail to read on its own terms, for its own virtues, instead seeming as much like a move of nostalgia as, say, publishing a book now with a jacket like this one?



(This might interest, by the way: comic books as mid-century paperbacks.)

Our company’s lobby is lined with such books as the above, and again, every time I see them, I’m filled with a wistfulness. There are many, many beautiful jackets designed every year, of course. But there’s something about the stark graphics, the purposeful lettering, and the more roughly hewn paper on jackets like the above that speaks to me. And I’m not sure it’s something we could return to, or really dabble in, today.

In his article, Biemiller warns against hewing too closely to an outdated aesthetic, and against the rigidity it brings with it. But the question I’d like to leave you with is the opposite: what if dedication to a contemporary aesthetic has brought with it an equal amount of rigidity? How do you reclaim what’s been lost?