Edited by John Bertram and Yuri Leving
256 pages, softcover, $30, published by Print Books/F+W Media, fwmedia.com
Fifty-eight years after Lolita was first published, Vladimir Nabokov’s most famous novel remains firmly in the public consciousness, but more often for its misunderstood subject than for its masterful and dazzling prose, write John Bertram and Yuri Leving in their introduction to Lolita: The Story of a Cover Girl. Among others who have obsessed on this book about obsession, the two maintain, “there has never been a book whose covers have gotten it so reliably wrong.”
The tragic story of a childhood lost to the perversions of a pedophile, Lolita, the novel, appears to suffer an objectification similar to Lolita, the girl, thanks in no small part to a poster promoting Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 film adaption, which portrays Humbert’s “nymphet” as a lollipop-sucking soft-core porn star.
To remedy the situation, Bertram commissioned 80 renowned graphic designers and illus-trators to thoughtfully reimagine the Lolita cover, “free from the marketing constraints of needing to actually sell books.” This may sound as if an all-star cast was assembled to carry a sub-par plot, but readers will soon realize there’s much more here than a beautiful gallery of work stylized by top talents like Jessica Hische and Paula Scher. Flipping through the redesigned covers, a diverse set of sensitive approaches that aspire to do the novel justice, it slowly becomes apparent why no one will ever succeed, and what a challenging task book cover design actually is.
The cover designer’s conundrum is explored further in a Q & A with John Gall, along with essays by Barbara Bloom, Dieter E. Zimmer, Peter Mendelsund, Alice Twemlow and others. Book covers are among the purest spaces remaining for designers, often with few parameters beyond mention of author and title, notes Twemlow. Yet with that freedom comes tremendous responsibility. Creating a worthy “portal through which readers enter a novel’s world, encounter its characters and weigh its meanings,” as Twemlow describes it, requires diligent study of both audience and author. Contributors consider the difficult questions against the most delicate of subjects throughout Lolita: The Story of a Cover Girl. Designers of any such “portals” to substantial creative works, from film posters and album covers to that most coveted of commissions—the book jacket—can learn much from this case study. —Robin Alyse Doyle
