Book Cover, Selected Poems, 1946

In a relatively short period of time, Alvin Lustig, who died at the young age of forty, designed some of the most formidable book covers in American twentieth-century design. Among these are over eighty covers Lustig designed for New Directions from 1941 to 1955, including this cover of Selected Poems by Kenneth Patchen. The idea that a jacket had to directly reference its content no longer necessarily applied; book covers mixing symbols, text and color, appealed directly to potential buyers. Booksellers began paying attention to the visual appearance of books in the 1940s and 1950s, and created visual displays in their store windows and shop floors for merchandise that was now designed to be off of the shelves and be seen.