Eighty Years of Book Cover Design

"The cliché that you can’t judge a book by its cover is wrong. You clearly can and all you need is a book of cover jackets to prove the nonsense of that phrase. Faber jackets have traditionally been very beautiful things because they’ve used a mixture of very good typographers and artists, as you see throughout this book, which itself has a beautiful jacket – a traditional Faber jacket but twice as big. If ever a publishing house had its own typeface, there are two that you can see. Penguin with Gill Sans, and Faber with Albertus. These were the classic early calling cards. Albertus was designed by a man called Berthold Wolpe and he really defined the look. You look through this Eighty Years book and there’s a huge amount of variation but what is clear is that the best jackets are artworks in themselves, and it’s clear how important type is in giving the reader a clue as to what might lie inside. It’s kind of an obvious point. I got this book, having written for Faber myself, and I was naturally devastated that they didn’t include a jacket designed for one of my books, but I have since forgiven them. This interview was first published in January 2011."