A rare poster by Oskar Altherr
For more about the extraordinary story of Oskar Altherr, click the links below.
Part one
https://mikedempsey.typepad.com/graphic_journey_blog/2010/02/mountain-man-part-one.html
Part two
https://mikedempsey.typepad.com/graphic_journey_blog/2010/03/mountain-man-part-two-.html
Part three
https://mikedempsey.typepad.com/graphic_journey_blog/2010/04/mountain-man-part-3.html
All those in creative areas start by being inspired by others in their particular discipline, and their early work often replicates those they admire. The essence of AI is doing precisely that, minus the emotional dimension. It absorbs entire histories of existing work, and when given the necessary 'prompt,' it will produce something along the lines of whoever the prompter has suggested. The AI will then, in seconds, spew out as many variations of the prompt fed as you want.
Long before AI and the digital world, this kind of thing has been happening for decades in the book cover landscape. As a 19-year-old desperate to design an actual book cover, I visited bookshops to check out the new arrivals, zoom in on bad ones, read the essence of the story, and later, at home at the kitchen table would create my reimaginings of those covers I disliked, all hand made back in those analogue days of the 1960s. The results of my efforts were added to a little A4 folder with others, hoping to show them to anyone in publishing who would afford me their time.
Today, young and not-so-young graduates show their reimagined covers on Instagram for all to see and hopefully to garner a commission. Hundreds of established cover designers post all their published covers online, often including outtakes. There are also an increasing number of online directories like I Need a Book Cover with portfolios of cover designers around the globe. And there are oddballs like me who share their interest in the discipline. With all this work displayed 24/7, it's no wonder there is a plethora of inspiration, imitation, and downright copying on an industrial scale that has nothing to do with AI but flesh-and-blood designers behaving like the thing they fear. The two covers shown took my attention to the above topic. The notable US designer Peter Mendelsund published his unused 2008 cover design (on the left) when the book's title changed to 'Girl With the Dragon Tattoo'. (On the right) In 2017, this cover appeared in the UK as published by Vintage. Coincidence or inspiration? This similarity is one example of thousands of covers these days that closely follow others to become a 'trend.' The downside of this open-source sharing is that every cover designer has to have a variety of trends in their armour. Consequently, the once-recognised 'individuality' of a designer has virtually disappeared.
This book of 103 poems by Jill Bialosky reveals personal and historical traumas and how we search for understanding and meaning in their wake. The cover image is a perfect metaphor for time, and the cut negative space housing the title. It was designed by John Gall for Knopf in 2020.
For me, a cover can be as quietly beautiful as this one from Hungarian publisher Jelenkor. Sadly, I have no idea who designed it, and you are unlikely to find it in a UK bookshop. But having looked at some of Jelenkor's publications, they don't appear to treat their readers as incapable of accepting a cover that isn't shouting and plastered in every square inch with sales copy. Kék (Blue) 2023.
In 1967, I worked for a few years at an American design consultancy that had arrived from Cincinnati in the early sixties to set up in "Swinging London", as it was then known. Also, by then, I was regularly getting freelance book cover design work from several London-based publishers. So, I was feeling chipper, having just married and purchased my first house. While browsing covers in Hatchards, my go-to bookshop, just five minutes away from the consultancy, I became transfixed by the cover shown with its enlarged rail ticket and punched hole revealing the die-stamped author and title on the black binding case. Nicholas Thirkell designed it, and I knew he was working at Macmillan as their art director. I have never been backwards about approaching designers whose work I admired, so I made a b-line for Thirkell, a quinicental public school gentleman, tall, quietly spoken, modest and difficult to fathom. He became another publishing client, and just a year later, in 1968, I left the American design consultancy and became the art director of William Heinemann based in Queens Street Mayfair and later on to William Collins (Fontana). It became a wonderful decade in the publishing world. Nineteen years after that original meeting with Nicholas in the 1960s, he became a partner in my consultancy, Carroll, Dempsey & Thirkell (CDT), in 1986. He sadly died in 2022.
I walked into my local bookshop yesterday and was struck by this book on the table amid the multitude of screaming covers surrounding it. It shone like a beacon. There's no book jacket, just tiny black typography blocked onto a cloth binding case. How can this be, I thought. It turned out Rubin hooked up with Pentagram's Paula Scher Hon RDI. He said, "Paula's gravitas as a designer helped keep the corporate representatives at bay and willing to take risks...' and went on ...' no quotes, descriptions or any other marketing material printed in the book or on the cover. You'll be hard-pressed to find another book by a mainstream publisher for a general audience with these allowances made". It has been a great success. There you go. Canongate Books 2023.
Covers can sometimes be a total surprise. In 1997, I commissioned Fernando Gutiérrez RDI to design the book and cover for, 'The Commercials Book'. My only stipulation was not to use any of the director's work featured. He unearthed this fantastic photograph by Oliviero Toscani and presented it as the cover. It's all about looking and seeing the potential. Published by D&AD.
A simple but beautiful way of expressing a city suffocating the life out of a woman. Cover by New York-based designer Paul Sahre for W. W. Norton & Company (2019).
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