Pynchon Covers

Covering Planetary Pynchon – Tore Rye Andersen

September 7, 2023 by Tore Rye Andersen 1 Comment

by Tore Rye Andersen

Gravity’s Rainbow (1973)
Illustration: Marc Getter

The Pynchon Wiki features a great little article by Linda Getter on her husband Marc Getter, the artist behind the striking dust-jacket of the first edition of Gravity’s Rainbow. According to Linda, Marc “loved the idea of a single image being responsible for communicating the essence of a book.” This is a lot to ask of a cover illustration, especially when the book it adorns is as complex as Gravity’s Rainbow, where rockets, dodoes, and pigs intermingle, and where excruciatingly beautiful landscape descriptions and vulgar sex scenes appear side by side with cartoonish tales of the future and pointed political satire. Even though it can be discussed whether Getter’s image communicates the essence of Pynchon’s masterpiece, the cover is certainly iconic. The vibrant colors (which are notoriously prone to fading) make the jacket pop, and the three-dimensional blue letters of the title and the sharp black silhouette of the London townhouses form an arresting contrast to the soft, airbrushed orange and yellow sky.

I recently published the monograph Planetary Pynchon: History, Modernity, and the Anthropocene (Cambridge University Press, 2023). The book is in many ways a life’s work, a summation of thirty years of deep fascination with and research on Pynchon’s work. As part of this fascination, I have written quite a few articles throughout the years on the paratexts of Pynchon’s novels, including analyses of the covers of V., The Crying of Lot 49, Gravity’s Rainbow, and Inherent Vice. While the paratextual dimension is not central to my new book, my interest in book design made the task of choosing just the right cover image for my book a daunting one.

Briefly told, my book argues that Pynchon’s three largest novels — Gravity’s Rainbow, Mason & Dixon, and Against the Day — can profitably be read as a trilogy, or one large megatext, which presents a coherent world-historical account of how the emergence and global spread of European modernity and resultant phenomena such as industrialization, capitalism, and colonialism have threatened and often eradicated alternative worldviews, peoples, and other lifeforms, all with disastrous consequences for the planet. In other words, Pynchon’s global novels show how the rise of modernity led to the current age of the Anthropocene.
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Footnotes[+]

Footnotes
↑1	On the 1975 first edition of the French translation of the novel (incongruously titled Rainbow), the anonymous row of townhouses has been replaced with a more recognizable skyline that includes St. Paul’s Cathedral and Tower Bridge.

Interview with Raquel Jaramillo, aka R.J. Palacio, Designer of the Mason & Dixon Dust Jacket

November 25, 2020 by TPmaster 6 Comments

Raquel Jaramillo, 2020 – With a small selection of the many books she’s art-directed

At this point, Raquel Jaramillo is probably better known under her nom de plume R.J. Palacio, under which pen name she has written a number of successful children’s novels, including Wonder (2012) which was a best-seller.

Ms. Jaramillo lives in New York City with her husband, two sons, and two dogs. For more than twenty-five years, she was an art director and graphic designer, designing book jackets for other people’s books while waiting for the right time in her life to start writing her own novels. But a chance encounter several years ago with an extraordinary child in front of an ice cream store made her realize that the right time to write that novel had finally come. Wonder was her first novel (no, she did not design the cover). She has since written several other books in the Wonder-themed universe, including her latest, a graphic novel that she wrote and illustrated titled White Bird. She is currently working on her latest novel, to be published sometime in 2021.

Last year, I worked up the nerve to reach out to Ms. Jaramillo to see if she’d be open to being interviewed about her experience designing the dust jacket for Thomas Pynchon’s 1997 novel Mason & Dixon. After not hearing back from her for nearly a year I’d pretty much lost hope. Then, out of the blue, she responded to my original email, explaining that it had gotten buried in her inbox and she’d just discovered it. Fortunately, she was happy to talk about her Mason & Dixon experience!

Her talent and intuition, and collaboration with Pynchon, resulted in the perfect dust jacket for one of Pynchon’s finest novels. And she’s a lovely person, to boot!
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Ismar David — Graphic Artist and Cover Illustrator of Thomas Pynchon’s V.

January 31, 2019 by TPmaster 4 Comments

Ismar David, Berlin, ca. 1930,
from The Work of Ismar David
RIT Cary Graphic Arts Press (2005)

Although Ismar David (1910–1996) had been a respected calligrapher and illustrator beginning in the early 1930s, many became familiar with his work when he designed the dust jacket for Thomas Pynchon’s first novel V., published by Lippincott in March 1963.

Considered one of the few graphic designers, illustrators, and calligraphers of international reputation, David was a German-born graphic artist who practiced the first third of his professional career in Jerusalem and the remainder in New York City. He is noted for his brilliant work in Hebrew and Latin calligraphy, lettering, and type design, as well as for his distinctive linear style of illustration. David liked to say that the hand is the most marvelous tool if properly trained, and his own handwork supports this conviction. [1]

In order to track down David’s design mockups for V., I first contacted Helen Brandshaft who manages the Ismar David Electronic Archive (IDEA). She directed me to the Cary Collection at Rochester Institute of Technology, which houses Ismar’s “archive,” including artwork and correspondence. As Ms. Brandshaft said: “In those days the artist who did the jacket submitted dummies of the jacket design for the publisher to see and choose from. These are astoundingly exact paintings of the jacket design. The printed jacket was usually made from color separated art. That means the artist specified colors and created black and white images for each color.”

The finding aid for the collection showed that the artwork for V. was in Box 33, folder 578 and included “dust jacket, cover dummies, lettering”. Ms. Brandshaft thought I might see ideas for the cover that were rejected by the publisher.

In our email exchanges Ms. Brandshaft, who worked with Ismar David for many years, commented: “Ismar did tell me that the jacket was considered pretty radical for its time. It certainly is unusual in terms of his style.”

This is quite true. Most all of Ismar David’s designs for books (and in other contexts), with the exception of V., utilize elements reminiscent of Hebrew texts and calligraphy, with stark line-sketch illustrations.
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Penguin’s Movie Tie-in Cover for Pynchon’s Inherent Vice book

October 30, 2014 by TPmaster Leave a Comment

When Paul Thomas Anderson’s adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice hits the theaters — in December, 2014 — Penguin Books, Pynchon’s publisher, will be ready with a movie-tie-in cover for the paperback edition of the novel.

While it retains the neon text treatment of the original cover, the surf-shop imagery (created by Darshan Zenith) is replaced with the neon-infused face of Joaquin Phoenix (as Doc Sportello), with characters and imagery from the movie — à la Klaus Voorman’s illustration for the cover of the Beatles’ classic mid-60s LP Revolver — tangled in Phoenix’s hair. Pretty cool….

Covering Planetary Pynchon – Tore Rye Andersen

Interview with Raquel Jaramillo, aka R.J. Palacio, Designer of the Mason & Dixon Dust Jacket

Ismar David — Graphic Artist and Cover Illustrator of Thomas Pynchon’s V.

Penguin’s Movie Tie-in Cover for Pynchon’s Inherent Vice book

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