My afternoon with Chip Kidd...

I am fond of saying--stop me if you've heard this one before--I don't judge a book by its cover, I judge it by the photo of the author on the back flap. And sometimes I do. I've picked up a smart looking book, read the front flap, turned to the inside back to see a face so foreign and remote from what I THINK the author should look like, and promptly dropped that book back onto the stack like the proverbial hot potato.

I know. I'm shallow like that.

But being a designer (at least in one point in my career path) has made me appreciate great cover design and there are book designers and then there is Chip Kidd. It's like that. There's no comparison. And despite what everyone wants to tell you, that you can't judge a book by its cover, you really, really can (although, metaphorically, if it means people, I don't recommend it). Covers almost always make me want to buy a book, although if I succumbed to that impulse, I'd be homeless. There's a lot of great cover design out there.

I spent most of a weekend afternoon lounging in my reclaimed chair (it's a long story) by the window, reading the new monograph (that's a fancy word for a book about one artist) Chip Kidd Work 1986-2006 Book One. It's a 400-page behemoth of a book that has just about all of Kidd's design work for Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House.

I first became aware of Chip Kidd BEFORE his career took a comic turn. No, I don't mean ha-ha funny, I mean comic books. It may have been his designs for James Ellroy's books, starting with White Jazz; it may have been Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park, which carried over into the Spielberg movie of the same name. I know I was aware of him, but I didn't become a real fan until he released the incredible Batman Collected, his paen to all Bat-things, in 1996. This led to the Batman: Animated book, the designs for Chronicle Books' 60th anniversary books on Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman, all written by Les Daniels, the wonderful Plastic Man book wrapped around Art Spiegleman's New Yorker article, and one of my all-time favorite books: Peanuts The Art of Charles M. Schulz. This was a book so nice, I bought it twice, in both hardbound and paperback. Kidd also did the great Mythology: The DC Comics Art of Alex Ross, also recently re-released in paperback with 32 new pages (damn them), like the paperback edition of Peanuts. Kidd's love of comics is clear in all these projects, and about 28 pages of this Book One is devoted to them. His love of comics grew into his editorship at Pantheon, helping guide their new graphic novels division. Pantheon has quickly become the prestige mainstream publisher of GNs with books like Jimmy Corrigan, Ice Haven and Perseopolis.

There are 2 amazing things about Book One: How many jackets Kidd has designed in 20 years (over 800) and how many of them are memorable to me. I was stunned by looking at book after book on page after page and realizing I had seen them before, remembered them, and never realized they were by Kidd. (Even the new book I looked at today at Borders, Philip Marlowe's Guide to Life by Raymond Chandler, had a cover designed by him.) There are some design dogs in here, but not many, and even those are adoptable. Kidd and the "curator"-designer, Mark Melnick, wisely chose not to include EVERYTHING, but I have to tell you...if this isn't EVERYTHING, how much is left? This is a dense, heavy read, with tons of art and jacket covers and great annotation by Kidd. Amazon has it listed at 304 pages, but it's 400, and every page is a grabber.

Note that there are 2 versions of this book, the pricey "hardbound," and the much more economical paperback. The only difference I can discern is that on the HB, the left half flaps on the front and back are hardcover, and man...is that a mistake. I first saw this book at The Strand in NYC a month or so ago, and the pages had already started to curl up against that hardback section. I got the paperback version, both for monetary reasons, and because I think--I HOPE--it will stand up longer. This is a book to delve into again and again. I don't do a lot of design work anymore, but I do appreciate good design and Chip's work is an inspiration.

I look forward to Book Two in 2026.

Comments

[kieran]

Teriffic post - i went to the opening last night - check out my pics and musings:

http://fromthecabin.blogspot.com/

[M_eHart]

Thanks for the review -- I have a friend I'm considering getting this for, and it sounds like the trade paperback is the way to go...

And glad to see you're continuing to enjoy the Queen and Country novels... okay, there's a little bit of an assumption there, but ... :)