Lo-lee-ta: An Interview with John Bertram

One of the most interesting design books out this year is Lolita: The Story of a Cover Girl, edited by John Bertram and Yuri Leving, published by Print Books. It's a fascinating  examination of the history of design approaches to this brilliant and problematic Nabokov novel, and it also contains numerous new covers designed for the book, which demonstrate just how many ways there are to visualise a book.

John Bertram was kind enough to talk to me about the how and the why of the book's creation. Click on any image for much larger versions, with artist/designer credits. (For a full list of the designers involved, and their websites, see here.)

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CAUSTIC COVER CRITIC: Your own work is very much in the field of design, but as an architect. How did you come to co-create a book about book design? 

JOHN BERTRAM: I’ve always had an interest in graphic design and at one point even worked briefly for a graphic designer. I’ve been an avid reader all of my life, and drawn as well to illustrated books, book covers and all sorts of printed ephemera. In 2009 I started Venus Febriculosa, a website devoted in part to the confluence of art and literature, the natural source of which is the book cover. Lolita was the subject of the first cover contest that I sponsored after which I was contacted by Marco Sonzogni, Lecturer at Victoria University of Wellington, who suggested the idea of working together on a book about Lolita covers. Marco became a collaborator on a several Venus Febriculosa contests (among them Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, and Tadeusz Borowski’s This Way for the Gas Ladies and Gentlemen), out of which came two other books, including This Way, that became the precursor of and the template for the Lolita book.

My conception from the very beginning was a book that merged the scholarly with graphic design. In early 2010 I was invited by Yuri Leving, Chair of the Department of Russian Studies at Dalhousie University, and author and editor of numerous books about Nabokov, to contribute an article about the contest to the Nabokov Online Journal, of which he was founding editor. Later Yuri suggested including my article in a book he was editing. At a certain point, the book that Yuri was planning and the book that I was planning merged into one.

CAUSTIC COVER CRITIC: Which was most interesting for you in creating The Story of a Cover Girl—the history of Lolita designs, or the untapped possibilities still to be explored?

JOHN BERTRAM: Although there is undoubtedly more to explore either way, I think it’s a finite exercise. I don’t think there will be a sequel to The Story of a Cover Girl, although I am sure new designers will always enjoy the challenge of Lolita.  When I first began commissioning designers, I found myself anticipating the arrival of each new cover, waiting for the perfect cover. But, of course, the premise of this book is that the perfect cover is an impossibility and that is a credit to the novel and to Nabokov.

CAUSTIC COVER CRITIC: Your book proves that Lolita lends itself to numerous effective cover designs. Do you think that many other classic novels would do the same? Could a volume of similar heft and variety be created for, say, Great Expectations or Ulysses.

JOHN BERTRAM: Well, I would say that Lolita is ideal for an exercise of this sort because it’s fairly unique in a number of ways that I’d like to quickly delineate. One: Vladimir Nabokov was a gifted and exacting writer, obsessed with the right word at all costs, and I think it’s important to honor that. There’s not a random or casual word in the entire novel. Two: Lolita is difficult to pin down. To borrow some terminology from Dieter E. Zimmer’s essay, is it a tragedy, a comedy, a social satire? Is it about a painful love affair or transgression of social mores? Three: The book comes with baggage that is usually very misleading or just plain false. The fact is, Dolores Haze is not sexually predatory, she does not have precocious sexual appetites, and she is not perverse. Although the word Lolita has come to mean all of those things, Lolita is, really, a normal twelve-year old girl. Four: There are clearly ethical considerations in treating a novel that deals with child rape. It’s important that we not ‘collude in exploitation’ to use Ellen Pifer’s phrase. Five: Humbert Humbert is the narrator, so there is the question of how much of what he is saying is the truth and this is the subject of many debates in Nabokov circles. Six: Lastly, Nabokov is on record with his own ideas about what should and should not be on Lolita’s cover and, again, these are worth paying attention to.

All of that being said, I think there are many books that could successfully be addressed in this way. Before we decided upon The Name of the Rose for our second cover contest, we entertained a variety of titles, including Ulysses and Finnegans Wake by James Joyce, The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka, Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett, The Wasteland  by T.S. Eliot, A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess and Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. The Name of the Rose contest was extremely successful. The novel has a lot of interesting components: an ambiguous title, unusual visual richness, literary depth, symbolism. It’s an international best-seller that has been translated into dozens of languages and, like Lolita, made into a film. And it is, paradoxically, both a rather breezy page-turner of a ‘murder mystery’ and at the same time a book of historical complexity and erudition that addresses some obscure points of faith, doctrinal squabbles and the state of the early 14^th century Christian church.

Of course, my dream is to edit a similar book about the Bollingen Series, an unparalleled publishing endeavor undertaken by Paul Mellon’s first wife Mary Conover Mellon.

CAUSTIC COVER CRITIC:  Is the sexual nature of the book part of its design appeal--many of the covers you show are clever visual puns on sex, genitalia and the like. Do you think the gap between what everyone knows the book is about, and what you can actually show on a book cover, helps inspire the designers?

JOHN BERTRAM: I do think that the sexual nature of the book is clearly part of its design appeal (as well as media appeal!). Whether this is fortunate or unfortunate is hard to say, but I’m certainly aware that no other book would likely garner the interest that this one has. There are many people who feel that Nabokov’s Pale Fire is superior in every way to Lolita, but it’s difficult to imagine a scenario in which a book on Pale Fire would be the subject of so much attention. I also can’t imagine drumming up much interest for my Bollingen Series book (although I know it would be brilliant). I would love to be proven wrong about this.

CAUSTIC COVER CRITIC:  The Story of a Cover Girl is notable for being a book about visual design with no pictorial elements on the cover itself. What led to this decision?

JOHN BERTRAM: When Michael Silverberg, our incredible editor at Print, suggested that Sulki & Min design the cover I was overjoyed. They had designed a wonderful cover for Tadeusz Borowski’s This Way for the Gas Ladies and Gentlemen which was included in the book This Way, and I had no doubt that they would bring their customary intelligence and insight to this cover. They were pretty much given free reign, so whatever conceptions we had about the cover were sort of irrelevant. It was completely their idea to include the Nabokov quote on the cover. Originally, they had designed a white cover with black text, a reference to another Nabokov quote in which he is willing to settle for ‘an immaculate white jacket…with LOLITA in bold black lettering’ but I think the publishers felt that it was too austere. Enter Pantone 7488, a color that references (albeit in a brighter shade that really pops!) the original Lolita cover published by Olympia Press.

CAUSTIC COVER CRITIC: To violently change direction—if you could resurrect any neglected book and push it on everybody you met, what would it be?

JOHN BERTRAM: Well, I suppose you can’t really call The Rings of Saturn a neglected book, but I am constantly surprised at the number of people who have never read W.G. Sebald. However, the one book I have pushed on people (and this is before Jeffrey Eugenides rescued it from the ashes of obscurity) is Second Skin, the criminally underrated 1964 novel by John Hawkes. Just incredible.

CAUSTIC COVER CRITIC: Thank you, Mr Bertram!

Describing the story and tone within one or two inches: An interview with Andrea Uva

Some publishers have not let the advent of ebooks kill their design instincts. Open Road Integrated Media publish a lot of digital-format books, and have the rights to the backlists of a lot of great writers, both “literary” and in various genres. I talked to Andrea C. Uva, Art Director at Open Road, about the unique challenges and possibilities of ebook cover design.

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CAUSTIC COVER CRITIC: I’d imagine browsers in bookshops can stumble on a physical book serendipitously a lot more easily than they can an ebook, which is often something they need to seek out to find. Does this mean the challenge of cover design for ebooks is different?

ANDREA C. UVA: Yes, browsers in a bookstore are much more of a captive audience. Even if a person goes straight to an employee to request a book, he or she still must pass through tables and shelves before arriving at the book’s location, and there will be many more titles all around. On an ebook website, one simply types in the book title or author name and up pops the title. That system creates a lot less exposure. The digital platform means that viewers are exposed to fewer book covers than they would be in a bookstore, but that playing field is leveled because all ebooks are presented on an e-tailer site at almost the same size. Print-production marketing tricks like spot gloss, matte finishes, embossing, gold foil, hardcover opulence, etc., are lost on the digital platform. The reader can’t even tell how “thick” their ebook is, another clue that would give a sense of value from one book to the next. This means that ebook cover designers need to make covers that are appealing and call to the reader from the “shelf” without any additional dressings, and at a very small size. Most ebooks are displayed at about one to two inches high on an ebook retailer site. This means that in order to sell our books, titles must be made as large as possible to be readable at thumbnail size. Ebook covers are not a place for subtle art, either. The concept must be clear at a small size and not obstruct the type. It is much more difficult to be evocative within these parameters. 

Cover by Mauricio Diaz

Covers by Michel Vrana

CAUSTIC COVER CRITIC: A lot of the Open Road covers use lovely, rich colours that glow on a computer screen in a way that a non-backlit printed cover cannot do (such as the beautiful popping colours on Pete Hautman's ‘Drawing Dead’). Is the “screen-ness” of images and designs a factor in OR covers, or do you think the books would have the same look if destined for printed form?

 

 

ANDREA C. UVA: Ebooks are designed to be RGB, whereas print books are CMYK. (RGB is red-green-blue, and CMYK is cyan-magenta-yellow-black). This separations process is a plus for ebooks, because RGB colors, and the way they are lit on screen, produce rich colors that appear more pure than CMYK, mostly because the color black is not an ingredient in the process. It means that ebooks have less opportunity for the more subtle color transitions that you get with CMYK, but the RGB process is good for brights and contrasting color. The books would be similar in print, but the colors would appear slightly grayer, unless we decided to use special features like printing with a fifth color, which means that we overlay a pure ink of a particular color in addition to the CMYK that creates the rest of the book. When you see a very strong neon on a page where the rest of the colors look more muted, that is typically a fifth-color process.

Covers by Connie Gabbert

CAUSTIC COVER CRITIC: I’ve noticed that very few OR covers feature the sort of blurbs and “from the author-of”s that feature on many book covers. What's the rationale behind this?

ANDREA C. UVA: Ebooks offer the opportunity to feature a blurb of selling text next to the cover, which serves as a digital back cover or inside jacket flap. This means that information that would normally go on a print cover, like quotes or blurbs, can live right next to the book and still make it to the reader. Print book covers have a lot more room for this type of information because the reader is looking from inches away, and doesn’t need the cover type to be large. On an ebook, anything below about a twenty-four-point font can get lost in thumbnail size, and a very small-set quote or blurb mostly clutters an ebook cover and covers up the art rather than enhancing the book. For that reason, we do our best to streamline the amount of text on an ebook cover, reserving quotes, praise, and other info to the metadata that runs alongside it on the retailer site. 

Covers by Angela Goddard

CAUSTIC COVER CRITIC: A huge selection of OR books are backlist titles, often the complete or near-complete works of certain authors. What informs the design of a set of linked covers (say the Fred Kaplan or Fay Weldon backlists)? What can or can't you do, compared to working on a cover for a book that has no design connections with other titles by that author?

ANDREA C. UVA: Open Road has been breaking that convention from the beginning, and we’re very proud of the progress we’ve made in this area. In the past, book covers that shared the same author were designed one at a time, sometimes years apart depending on the books’ publication schedules, and according to the aesthetic sensibility of the particular year or era in which they were written. This results in a very disjointed backlist from an author, and designing a book according to the type and image design trends of the year in which the designer is working doesn’t always best serve the book or the author. Since we at Open Road consider ourselves a digital marketing company as much as a digital publisher, creating a unified marketing front for a collection of books by an author is a priority. We approach our authors as traditional marketing companies approach brands, and the way that manifests itself in the design is that the author’s name becomes their logo, and the look of one of their books becomes the look of their entire list. Though many of the books in a particular author’s backlist might not share the same characters, settings, or story details, they are connected by their writer, and that is what we draw upon when we create a redesigned backlist that unifies the titles visually. Within those parameters, there is lots of room to use imagery to differentiate time, place, and other details that set the books apart. 

Covers by Angela Goddard

Covers by Angela Goddard

CAUSTIC COVER CRITIC: What's your own design background? How did you come to working with ebooks in particular?

ANDREA C. UVA: I have a background that is split between graphic design and conceptual art. I have been designing and typesetting books, magazines, and newspapers on computers in some form since 1996, but my career in publishing began in 2003 at Simon & Schuster in New York City. At this time, ebooks were not a player. My design career in terms of books has been mostly print. I worked for a book packager that allowed me to design book covers for many publishers, including Harper Collins, Little, Brown and Company, Scholastic, Simon & Schuster, Penguin, and Sourcebooks, and I gained a broad understanding of cover-design aesthetics and how they vary from publisher to publisher. I also have experience in web design, and ebook covers are the merger of the more commercial print-book design with the technical aspects of web design. Coming to it from a conceptual education background has been integral in solving the particular challenge that ebook covers provide: describing the story and tone within a thumbnail parameter of one to two inches and presenting it in a way that the viewer can easily see and understand.

CAUSTIC COVER CRITIC: Ignoring budgetary constraints, publishing rights, and any other annoying details--is there a book you'd kill to have the chance to design a cover for?

ANDREA C. UVA: That’s a great question! Iconic books and iconic covers tend to grow organically. Very few bestsellers come out knowing they are destined for fame. This is why the iconic book art for many of our most beloved titles isn’t always the most clear, or even the best designed, but after time and the sales of many editions, they take on a life of their own. Look at Twilight, for example, or The Great Gatsby. To answer your question, I think it would be difficult to come at a book that is so well known and means so much to so many people and try to slap one cover on it that would meet everyone’s expectations. I would much prefer to work on an unknown book that becomes a best-loved classic, and have that original cover that I designed live on in infamy. To me that seems more true to the spirit of the book and to art than to try to rebrand a blockbuster title to suit the needs of everyone. If I had to name a book to redesign, it would probably be Les Misérables, as I think there is an opportunity for a graphic treatment that is referential to the plight of the characters.

CAUSTIC COVER CRITIC: Thank you, Ms Uva!