The book covers featured in the posters designed for HBW’s 42 Books / 42 Years exhibit aim to situate historically significant African American novels among the various historical periods during which the texts were published. The posters also work to trace the development in book cover design since the nineteenth century.
For example, the cover for the first edition of Frances Harper’s 1892 novel Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted is a text-based design reflecting the dominant printing methods in the late 1800s.This cover showcases highly stylized, gold-lettering physically stamped onto a brown hardcover book. In contrast, the cover of Iola Leroy featured in the 42x42 exhibit is the 2020 edition published by Read & Co. Classics, a small independent UK publishing house committed to the restoration of out-of-print works and recovery of forgotten voices. The later cover illustrates the titular shadows undergirding the novel’s plot about the antebellum South. The cover of Paule Marshall’s 1959 novel Brown Girl, Brownstones presents a Brooklyn, New York street scene active with people as viewed from above.
This apparently hand-drawn illustration reflects the importance of representational realism in book cover design at the time of the novel’s publication. The cover also depicts the novel’s dynamic urban setting with characteristic stooped row housing. Together the community and signature architecture reflect the importance of Caribbean migration during the Depression and WWII eras, as well as the Great Migration of Black Southern migrants, to Northern urban centers in American history.
Other book covers selected for the exhibit’s posters include more recent cover design trends. For example, the cover for the 2018 edition of Fran Ross’ novel Oreo, which is originally published in 1974, visually stretches the black-and-white text of the book’s title and sets it against a highly vibrant color field. The result is a text-based design similar to that for the first edition of Iola Leroy, but one that transforms the title text into a nearly abstract, though still uniform, series of shapes. Similarly, the cover for Ayobami Adebayo’s novel Stay With Me, which has had several book cover designs since its 2017 publication, emphasizes striking pastoral shapes and color swatches in contrast to a stark white text title design.
These late twentieth-century and twenty-first-century covers employ strong colors to attract readers’ attention from the bookshelves. They also reflect contemporary trends in book cover design specific to our digital moment. Undoubtedly, book cover design will evolve further as the distribution of mass market paperbacks continues to decline.
David Miller and Ayesha Hardison
David James Miller, PhD, has worked with the History of Black Writing for many years as a designer, and as Coordinator of Information and Design. He is also a poet and publisher. He is the author of SITE (forthcoming, Antiphony Press), CANT (Black Radish Books), and the chapbooks In a Landscape, FOLD, As Sequence, and Facts & Other Objects. His writing has been featured in bethh, Posit Journal, jubilat, Touch the Donkey, Jacket2, and elsewhere. He is founding editor of Elis Press and SET, an occasional journal of innovative writing.
