posted on 07 Aug 2023

Vintage Dystopia: design classics for the collector

Here at The Letterpress Project we never tire of promoting the physical book as an object of desire in its own right, regardless of author or content. Beautifully designed or sumptuously illustrated books are an artistic delight and a sensuous experience to handle. So, we’re always on the lookout for an individual cover or jacket that makes you go ‘wow’ or a book crammed with illustrations that makes you want to keep going back to them and searching out more and more detail. Sometimes we’re lucky and a whole series of books or new editions of existing publications will come along and set the pulse racing.

Elsewhere on this site I’ve written at some length about how the seeming threat of the electronic book has been beaten back by a publishing industry that knew it had to up its game if the paper book was going to survive. And, boy, has it done just that. In fact, it’s made books as objects of beauty in their own right such a force that not only has the electronic book settled back to being just another tool but has ensured that the sale of paper books has been more vibrant than it’s been for many years.

Key to this new age of book design have been publishing houses prepared to go out and find young talent who bring in new perspectives, or to work with established artists and designers who take a different or iconoclastic approach to their work.

In 2018, Vintage Books, under the guidance of their head of design, Suzanne Dean commissioned graphic artist, Noma Bar to provide illustrations for the jackets of three new hardback books that would constitute their ‘dystopian series’: George Orwell’s 1984, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale: and the result is sensational.

Born in Israel in 1973 but based in London since 2000, Bar’s experience in the world of graphic design and illustration is extensive – as his website tells us:

“Noma Bar (born in 1973) is a graphic designer, illustrator and artist. His work has appeared in many media publications including: Time Out London, BBC, Random House, The Observer, The Economist and Wallpaper*. Bar has illustrated over one hundred magazine covers, published over 550 illustrations and released three books of his work: Guess Who - The Many Faces of Noma Bar, Negative Space and Bittersweet a 680 page 5 volume monograph produced in a Limited Edition of 1000 published by Thames & Hudson.”

The jackets he helped produce for Vintage are special and not just because they are so immediately eye-catching. It must be a nightmare for any artist or illustrator to have to find a new and fresh approach to classics that already have a rich, illustrative heritage and, at the same time, find a way of giving them a sense of linked identity. Bar and Dean have done this in two ways: by keeping the central illustration very simple and evocative of the content and by the use of the stark colour contrasts provided by the juxtaposition of red, black and white.

Add to this the excellent decision to go for red page block ends and a paper jacket that has a chalky matt finish in a midnight black and you begin to see how the artistic whole hangs together.

The title and author are picked out in red and white on the spine but on the front cover the title and author is embossed into the black paper, allowing the title to stand slightly proud of the surface.

The back cover of each book includes a further simple image with a recognisable short quotation from the book itself. Peel off the jacket and underneath the boards are a deep red and are embossed with the cover design.

All in all, a beautiful set of three: desirable collectables now and likely to be even more desirable in the future.

 

Terry Potter

August 2023