Word: kleist
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Over half of the Harvard and Kleist collections are from England, where the book-jacket first emerged from its lowly dust-wrapper status. Originally used by London booksellers to keep their wares free from fog and grime, the book-jacket underwent a crucial metamorphosis when Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark came out in 1876. Snark's humble grey wrapper shouted critical praise for the two Alice books. As the first known jacket to carry advertisements, it was the ancestor of the modern commercial jacket. The English publisher who pioneered designs for fiction jackets was T. Fisher Unwin...
Inside the basement's cardboard coffins lies an incredible variety of artistic curios. Ranging from flamboyant pictorial designs to quiet calligraphy, most jackets in the Harvard and Kleist collections are from books of fiction, where jackets are commercially crucial. The jacket-designer's task is to capture in one visual moment the character of a book which may be several hundred pages long. Specialized books of non-fiction don't need eye-catching jackets, for scientific and scholarly works are usually purchased for their academic reputations. The jackets of such books must convey simply the competence of their contents through...
...Kleist characterizes jackt-design as primarily a commercial art. But as the reading public becomes more sophisticated, the jacket must appeal more by dignity and artistic merit than by sensationalism. By 1949, according to Kleist, enough worthy book-jacket art had appeared to warrant the first International Book-Jacket Exhibition, held in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Kleist himself staged exhibitions...
Cultivating his admiration for "elegant simplicity" in his personal collection. Kleist saves few American jackets, since they tend to be "cheaply commercial, with large letters, bold designs, and slick paper." Germany, with a long tradition in fine printing and book design, has made valuable contributions to jacket art, but recent jackets are increasingly American in style. Postwar jackets up to 1950 reveal Germany's sense of guilt for the Third Reich. Trying to forget the implications of the Gothic type-faces ordered by Hitler, German artists turned to whimsical designs with floral patterns and bright pastels...
...Kleist likes the "cool simplicity" and "clean typography" of Scandinavian jackets. Praising East European designs for their "unpretentious charm," he points to the "subtle and original" calligraphy of Czechoslovakian and Hungarian jackets. Poland has no competing publishing firms to vie for public favor with attractive jackets, but the State publishing monopoly nevertheless employs outstanding artists who have made Poland a leader in jacket design. Russian jackets, on the other hand, tend to be "stodgy and conventional." Kleist says that the lack of jackets on Chinese books is probably due to China's paper shortage...