SVA Archives

May 21, 2015

Milton Glaser’s Boris Vian

Milton Glaser’s watercolors for a French edition of Boris Vian’s I Spit On Your Graves.

August 14, 2014

Purple passages

James McMullan’s illustrations for Dutton’s paperback box set of The Alexandria Quartet, an ambitious mid-century novel tetralogy by Lawrence Durrell.

August 01, 2014

All together now

Shades of Yellow Submarine in Gian Carlo Menotti’s sci-fi opera for children Help, Help, The Globolinks!

December 15, 2013

Seth Siegelaub’s Xerox book

Our latest discovery—strongly recalling the original binder from Mel Bochner’s “Working Drawings…”— is a copy of Seth Siegelaub’s seminal Xerox Book.

November 03, 2013

Illustrator Jerome Martin

While going through the books myself, I was particularly taken with the three covers done by an illustrator I’d never heard of, Jerome Martin.

October 29, 2013

Heinz Edelmann for Klett-Cotta

Heinz Edelmann worked extensively with the Klett-Cotta press over the course of his career: we’ve collected some of his best jackets.

July 30, 2013

Allan Kaprow’s Words

Another lovely artifact appeared in the Archive unexpectedly last week: Allan Kaprow’s Words, from 1962.

July 28, 2013

Presenting… The James McMullan Collection

We recently finished organizing and describing the James McMullan Collection, which was donated by the acclaimed illustrator and designer last year.

July 12, 2013

He wanted to live in a world in which one could find “Gershwin playing all night in penthouses, while George Kaufman fired one-liners into the guests and Harpo scrambled eggs in their hats.” Milton Glaser’s cover, with its punchy color combined with austere but evocative line, seems neatly suited to such a world.

June 07, 2013

Borges by McMullan

James McMullan’s watercolor book jackets capture the spirit of Borges.

May 21, 2013

The new graphic art, 1959

Another recent addition from Ivan Chermayeff: the beautiful slipcased hardcover for The new graphic art, a trilingual history of the basis for the Swiss design style, compiled by Karl Gerstner and Markus Kutter in 1959.

March 16, 2013

The Cook

Milton Glaser created this 1965 book jacket for The Cook, a satirical horror novel about a mysterious chef, Conrad Venn, who seduces and manipulates the wealthy Hill and Vail families with food.

February 25, 2013

The surrealistic book covers of Heinz Edelmann

Heinz Edelmann’s book covers for Klett-Cotta.

February 03, 2013

Text clean and tight, some tearing

Early in his career, Tony Palladino specialized in book jackets—his style was always restrained, and oscillated between primitive torn-paper graphics and highly simplified visual ideas.

August 25, 2010

Color is for anything you want

This deceptively casual promotional piece typifies the whimsy and poignancy found in much of Tony Palladino’s work.

August 19, 2010

Keep it like a secret

In 1961, Ivan Chermayeff designed and illustrated Sandol Stoddard Warburg’s Keep it like a secret (Chermayeff and Warburg had previously collaborated on The Thinking Book in 1960). The charming title, with its childlike connotations, was later appropriated by the band Built to Spill for their 1999 album. Sadly, we only have the jacket, not the book itself, but I did discover another version of the jacket out there.

September 18, 2009

Another pitch from Palladino

About a decade before Tony devised his ‘guerilla marketing’ self-promotion campaign, the designer took a similarly witty but somewhat more traditional approach. Four versions of this card were printed, each in three colors on heavy stock, and sent to publishers without any additional pitch. Set simply with his address and isolating a single area of specialization, they relied on a single strong image to convey their point.