Judging a Designer by His CoversMuseumsBy LANCE ESPLUNDDecember 8, 2005If you love books, then you will inevitably buy some you may never read, just for their beautiful covers. But if you love book design, badly designed books, no matter how much you might want to read them,may never make it to the cash register. I am guilty on both counts, having purchased or passed over a number of books merely because of their jackets.Both categories include books designed by Chip Kidd, the celebrated novelist and jacket designer at Alfred A. Knopf, who is currently being honored with both a monograph (“Book One: Work: 1986-2006,” (Rizzoli, 400 pages,$65) - which he art directed and to which he contributed most of the writing) and a corresponding mid-career retrospective at Cooper Union’s Herb Lubalin Study Center of Design and Typography.The best book covers, like characters in a great novel, reveal themselves slowly, as they also enrich and open up their book’s content. A great book jacket’s metaphors interact and unfold along with those in the story, so that text and cover, working hand in hand, extend one another and are only fully experienced once the last page has been finished and, after closing the book, the cover’s richness has been revealed.It is then, when the whole package comes together,that we take full possession of the book, and that the book in turn, takes full possession of us. A badly designed or mediocre cover, which can do damage to a great book, does not allow for that level of engagement.Mr. Kidd, who is 41, is probably the hottest, hippest, and most sought-after book designer of his generation. He also happens to be working for Alfred A. Knopf, the most respected and sought-after American publisher of the last 100 years - a publishing house with the hands-down best track record of book designs. His may not be a household name, but almost everyone is familiar with some of the authors of the more than 800 books whose covers he has designed - Woody Allen, Martin Amis, John le Carre, John Updike, Jay McInerney, George Bush, Haruki Murakami, Philip Roth, Vaclav Havel, Katharine Hepburn, and Cormac Mc-Carthy. And anyone who frequents Barnes & Noble would recognize at least some of his work.The most well known of these include the oddly evil-yet-likable tyrannosaurus rex on Michael Crichton’s “Jurassic Park”(Alfred A. Knopf, 1990), which was also used in Steven Spielberg’s movie adaptation of the book. He designed both the nude, headless mannequin on David Sedaris’s “Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim” (Little, Brown, 2004) and the pair of white boxer shorts on the cover of Mr. Sedaris’s “Naked” (Little, Brown, 1997). In 1998, David Remnick called on Mr. Kidd redesign The New Yorker. Not all of his proposals stuck,but as a result,he introduced art and photography to illustrate the magazine’s fiction.Mr. Kidd can be enormously sensitive to texture, color, and typography. His best work is usually pared down to simple, beautiful, often ironic elements. For the cover of Paul Golding’s “The Abomination” (Alfred A. Knopf, 2000), the designer used a photograph of an upside-down stuffed animal (a bunny rabbit).With one leg fallen over and its floppy ears spread out on the floor, it is as comically sad and innocent as it is strangely tortuous and vertigo-inspiring.In Anthony Cronin’s “Samuel Beckett” (HarperCollins, 1997) Mr. Kidd floated a tiny, disembodied head of Beckett in a black field. The looming, lost-in-space head, as if on an invisible tether, is in perfect, existential tension with the book cover’s sans-serif typography.His design, with Barbara de Wilde, for Robert Musil’s two-volume masterpiece “The Man Without Qualities” (1995), is brilliant. A black-and-white portrait photograph of the author - his head somber, half in shadow, looking downward; his temples pressing against the books’ outer edges - spreads ominously across the spines of both volumes. This novel design ac knowledges the fact that books spend most of their lives on the shelf, and, therefore, their spines are often more memorable than their covers.That said, some of Mr. Kidd’s humorous, Pop Art-inspired, neon-colored designs are overdetermined and self-consciously trendy. Like the exhibition at Cooper Union - a relentless, densely packed collage of hundreds of book cover designs, mockups, and rejects; photographs, comic book imagery, rambling wall text, and authors’ letters - his book covers can be simultaneously fascinating, tiresome, and schizophrenic.Take the cover design for the Rizzolipublished “Book One” (a collaboration between Mr. Kidd and Mark Melnick): It is an enlarged photograph of thumbs and index fingers holding open a tiny book. It is a fabulous marriage of the outsized and undersized; image and object; eye chart and child’s primer. The book itself is an oversized, horizontal soft-cover book slipped inside a half-width, hardback cover (as if it had outgrown its jacket).The cover of “Book One” is innovative and eye-catching, but the book itself is difficult and annoying to use. Somewhere along the way, its clever design left function behind. Like Mr. Kidd’s least successful book covers - a wild mix of overactive typography, color, and image - “Book One” looks great on the coffee table, but its “lookat-me-design” comes at the expense of the book.Mr. Kidd may not be the best book designer out there. Many of his covers, though in some ways on the mark, rely more on puns, visually arresting, or beautiful juxtapositions, and analogies than on metaphors. But he is certainly the most visible and influential. For the last 20 years, he has had his finger on the pulse, and his fast-paced designs address the style and speed of our time.In both his writing and his book covers, Mr. Kidd is brutally honest. Design students will get an enormous amount from both the autobiographical book and the Cooper Union show, which include a number of very frank authors’ letters to the designer - criticism, praise, guidelines, interpretations - as well as Mr. Kidd’s musings, rejected designs, and his own student work.Other viewers can also get a lot from Mr. Kidd’s most successful book jackets, in which he demonstrates that books are personal objects that, even when their content stings us, are meant to be lived with. Many of Mr. Kidd’s book jackets shape and define how we think of ourselves in relationship to what we read. His designs, good and bad, are also some of the most lovable, fun, and fun-loving contemporary book covers out there.A mover, a shaker, and a child at heart (he is obsessed with Batman), Mr. Kidd is likable because his designs are sophisticated but he never takes himself too seriously. Mr. Kidd’s failures are often as interesting as his successes - together they shows his tireless sense of play and his wide range of approach to disparate subjects. They also epitomize an edgy, if not wonderfully neurotic, tongue-in-cheek irony and intensity that, like it or not, is at the heart of our era.Until February 4 (7 E. 7th Street at Third Avenue, 212-353-4200).

Thank you, anonymous commenter! I think I’ll do this again and hope my luck holds out.