Jackets Required

An historical treasure trove with COLOR examples of an art that today has been supplanted, in large part, with cookie cutter hackwork. The authors' informed commentaries are to-the-point and invite further exploration. I found it to be an elegantly designed and useful resource book.

A handsome book of 270 book jackets clearly showing the very wide range of styles publishers used to sell their wares. All the covers are shown complete with the designer's name in most cases, none of them are angled or overlapped, thankfully! A lovely feature is the use of still life photos of the book and the jacket complete, many of them with tears and creases on the jackets, looking as if they have just been rescued from a second-hand bookstore. These jackets are such a contrast to the covers shown in a book I recently reviewed, 'The Great American Paperback', a colorful collection of six hundred covers (annoyingly designed so that they nearly all overlapp each other) from the forties, fifties and sixties. These covers are extremely conservative in their design approach, a predictable painting with crude typography for the title. It was not until the mid-sixties that paperback publishers turned to eye-catching paintings and photography with intergrated typography. In contrast the covers in 'Jackets Required' are bursting with creativity, the chapter on non-fiction has some particularly striking designs. The back of the book has a portfolio of six designers including my favorites, Alvin Lustig and Paul Rand. There is a designer and title index, someting that was sadly missing from 'The Great American Paperback. Heller and Chwast have produced a super book that design students and fans of popular culture will enjoy for a long time. ***FOR AN INSIDE LOOK click 'customer images' under the cover.