Lolita - The Story of a Cover Girl: Vladimir Nabokov's Novel in Art and Design

by John Bertram, Yuri Leving

Overview

What should Lolita look like? The question has dogged book-cover designers since 1955, when Lolita was first published in a plain green wrapper. The heroine of Vladimir Nabokov's classic novel has often been shown as a teenage seductress in heart-shaped glasses--a deceptive image that misreads the book but has seeped deep into our cultural life, from fashion to film.

Lolita - The Story of a Cover Girl: Vladimir Nabokov's Novel in Art and Design reconsiders the cover of Lolita. Eighty renowned graphic designers and illustrators (including Paula Scher, Jessica Hische, Jessica Helfand, and Peter Mendelsund) offer their own takes on the book's jacket, while graphic-design critics and Nabokov scholars survey more than half a century of Lolita covers. You'll also find thoughtful essays from such design luminaries as Mary Gaitskill, Debbie Millman, Michael Bierut, Peter Mendelsund, Jessica Helfand, Alice Twemlow, Johanna Drucker, Leland de la Durantaye, Ellen Pifer, and Stephen Blackwell.

Through the lenses of design and literature, Lolita - The Story of a Cover Girl tells the strange design history of one of the most important novels of the 20th century--and offers a new way for thinking visually about difficult books. You'll never look at Lolita the same way again.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781440329883
Publisher:	Adams Media
Publication date:	07/19/2013
Sold by:	SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:	eBook
Pages:	256
File size:	78 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

An Adams Media author.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments 8

Preface: Pictures of Lo Mary Gaitskill 10

Introduction: Colorful Misunderstandings, Graphic Misinterpretations John Bertram Yuri Leving 14

Part I Lolita, Art and Design

1 Questions and Answers John Gall in discussion with John Bertram 22

2 Fictions Peter Mendelsund 26

3 Reflections on Covers Commissioned for the Lolita Book Cover Project Alice Twemlow 34

4 Cover Story Barbara Bloom 40

5 Passion and Perception: The Visual in the Portrayal of Lolita in Nabokov, Kubrick, and Stern 52

Women's Design + Research Unit: Siân Cook and Teal Triggs

Part II Reinventing Lolita

6 A Gallery of 80 Newly Commissioned Lolita Covers 62

Part III Images, Paratexts, and Publishers

7 Uncovering Lolita Ellen Pifer 144

8 Dyeing Lolita: Nymphet in the Paratext Duncan White 152

9 How to Think in Images, or Vladimir Nabokov's Art of the Image Leland de la Durantaye 160

10 Dolly as Cover Girl Dieter E. Zimmer 166

11 Selling Concubines: Who Is the Face of the Russian Lolita? Yuri Leving 178

12 Paperback Nabokov Paul Maliszewski 208

13 Nabokov and His Industry Stephen H. Blackwell 230

Contributors 240

Index 246

Editorial Reviews

"The sexualized vision of Lolita perpetuated by popular culture has very little to do with the text of Nabokov's novel, in which Lolita is not a teen-aged seductress but a sexually abused twelve-year-old girl. Lolita—The Story of a Cover Girl: Vladimir Nabokov's Novel in Art and Design challenges this prevailing misrepresentation with essays by book designers, artists, and Nabokov scholars, and a preface by Mary Gaitskill that considers the problem of capturing Nabokov's psychologically complex story in a single image. The book's centerpiece is the Lolita Book Cover Project, for which the co-editor John Bertram, an architect based in Los Angeles, commissioned designers to create new covers for the book." —The New Yorker

"Gorgeous" —BuzzFeed

"Stunning" —The Huffington Post

"The book presents the most exhaustive and dimensional topography of Lolita's cultural landscape examined through the lens of design and visual communication.... Lolita: The Story of a Cover Girl is a rare gem at the intersection of lust for literature and lust for design." —Maria Popova, Brain Pickings

From the Publisher