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

Milton Glaser’s watercolors for a French edition of Boris Vian’s I Spit On Your Graves.
James McMullan’s illustrations for Dutton’s paperback box set of The Alexandria Quartet, an ambitious mid-century novel tetralogy by Lawrence Durrell.
Shades of Yellow Submarine in Gian Carlo Menotti’s sci-fi opera for children Help, Help, The Globolinks!
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.
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.
Our latest discovery—strongly recalling the original binder from Mel Bochner’s “Working Drawings…”— is a copy of Seth Siegelaub’s seminal Xerox Book.
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.
Heinz Edelmann worked extensively with the Klett-Cotta press over the course of his career: we’ve collected some of his best jackets.
Another lovely artifact appeared in the Archive unexpectedly last week: Allan Kaprow’s Words, from 1962.
We recently finished organizing and describing the James McMullan Collection, which was donated by the acclaimed illustrator and designer last year.
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.
James McMullan’s watercolor book jackets capture the spirit of Borges.
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.
Heinz Edelmann’s book covers for Klett-Cotta.
This deceptively casual promotional piece typifies the whimsy and poignancy found in much of Tony Palladino’s work.
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.
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.
Flying after apparently-unoccupied parachute-like skirts at full sprint is a kind of perversion I guess.