April 16, 2007 — Volume 101, Issue 23

Judge a book by its cover

Designer John Gall visits campus

 

Pillbox | Patrick Gage Kelley

 

They’re simple: facts that we are meant to read, take in, think about. Books published in 2006: 180,000. Books that have really nice covers (according to the American Institute of Graphic Arts): 50. Books covered in human flesh in the Harvard Library: two. Jumping off that fact, he begins, “So, I design book covers.”

 

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Another story he tells begins with the idea of reprinting each of Vladimir Nabokov’s novels for the 50th anniversary of Lolita. Three years after the original proposal — and after Gall had designed the entire set, each disguised as a specimen box (alluding to Nabokov’s collections of butterflies), the entire idea was thrown out; the publisher would only be reprinting Lolita.

Following this setback, he then “retrenched” and came up with a Lolita cover that he calls one of his favorite designs of all time: all the text classically boxed in the lower third of the cover, and the rest taken up by perfect, porcelain lips, rotated 90° counterclockwise. But he says, “After a day or so everyone started to get a little queasy looking at it, myself included.”

So they took out the twist, and put the face on straight — a cover that was later described by the New York Post as Lolita’s “raciest cover yet.”

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