COVER CHARGE
There’s a small exhibit at the Morgan Library of literary documents from the collection of Carter Burden. It includes first editions, galleys, manuscripts, handwritten letters, and an aerogram, all related to canonical twentieth-century novels. It’s really a love song to books, assembled at a time when so many of us read and write mostly on screens, and have stopped reading and writing seriously (that is, for anything more than information) at all. It’s humbling to walk through the gallery and recall what was required to produce a book in times before the computer: the rounds of drafting, typing, printing, revising and proofreading. Now these steps, and maybe even the act of writing itself, have become frictionless, requiring little physical exertion.
The exhibit also serves as an excellent survey of book cover artwork. There is The Great Gatsby, with a sly, smiling face in the night sky over East Egg, an image that’s kooky and glamorous, and that remains in use today. There is the The Sun Also Rises, with a muse in toga and sandals, a romantic figure at odds with the book’s bluntly contemporary narrative and syntax. And there is Light in August, with a small house on a hill rendered in a deco style that disguises the complex, broken language and souls of the story.
The most audacious cover on display is the one for Saul Bellow’s Herzog. It gives us a heroic, Motherwell-like cloud of black paint hovering on a blank, peacock blue field. It’s the kind of action painting one would find hanging in a Manhattan psychiatrist’s office in the early 60’s, when the book was first published, and also the kind of ink blot test he might administer. The image speaks to masculine bravado and the tumult of personal desire, themes appropriate to Bellow’s dense, textured writing and to the novel itself. The graphic is economic, and uses just three colors, one type face, and one figure. It’s simple and symphonic.