Harvard University Press Blog

Maurice Sendak, 1928-2012

Many of us at HUP were saddened this week by the death of author and illustrator Maurice Sendak. Among those most moved were editor Lindsay Waters and designer Jill Breitbarth, who remain grateful to Sendak for allowing our use of an illustration from his accompaniment to Joel Agee’s translation of Heinrich von Kleist’s Penthesilea on the cover of our 2004 book A New History of German Literature. Below, Waters and Breitbarth recall how we came to use Sendak’s work.

Lindsay Waters:

For me German culture came alive in the drawings and artwork of artists who fled to America before and after World War II, from the artists who made Little Golden Books, Stefan and George Salter, and the book designers and illustrators inspired by them. It was a style, a tone of dark forests where children get lost within seconds of losing sight of their parents, all of a sudden menaced by scary creatures. Maurice Sendak captured and developed this style to and beyond the point of vertigo. He went to the heart of what was scary in German culture, just as he’d journeyed to the heart of American darkness with Herman Melville.

Our New History of German Literature begins with a spell, an account of the very first document consisting of what is recognizably German language, something written on the back of a Latin manuscript which is held in the monastery at Fulda. The German literary tradition is enchanted. Who better to convey that complex history than Maurice Sendak, whose work helped so many to feel that chilling fright for the first time? So we approached him for permission to use one of the illustrations from his edition of Heinrich von Kleist’s plays. It was like a dream come true when he decided eventually that our book was a project he was willing to be a part of. The person who’d made German language culture come alive for me was going to help bring our epic, thousand-page account of that culture to the world.

 

Jill Breitbarth:

Lindsay was eager to use one of Sendak’s illustrations from Penthesilea by Heinrich von Kleist for the jacket of A New History of German Literature, and I was thrilled to make a go of it. Getting permission to use the piece involved lots of phone calls between our camp and Sendak’s assistants. At one point, when a little tweaking was necessary, Sendak wished to speak directly with me. I was nervous thinking I would be talking with Sendak. I was such a fan.

We covered the design issues quickly and went right into politics. Sendak bemoaned the recent re-election of George Bush, that the war in Iraq had ever started, and that so many people close to him were dying. His passions were real and he had no qualms about sharing them with a person he’d never met. Sendak was respectful, and I felt I was talking with an honest man, sensitive to history and emotions.

The Murty Classical Library of India Has Its Design

Designer Andrea Stranger observes that “most designers have a book fetish.”

She came by hers honestly: while a student at San Francisco’s Academy of Art University, she worked “less than part time” at the venerable Alexander Book Company. This past fall, her former employer there emailed to alert her to the contest we were holding to design the Murty Classical Library of India. Stranger took up the challenge, and you can see more of her elegant winning design over at the MCLI site. 

Stranger, who has done design work for clients as diverse as Kate Spade, financial services companies, and internet startups, has a broad interest in design—she says, “I’ll take pretty much any project you throw at me”—and relishes the creativity required to work in different arenas. Her primary objective is identifying a client’s needs.

In the case of the MCLI, which will present up-to-date English translations of classical works in languages ranging from Bengali and Kannada and Marathi to Persian, Sanskrit, Telugu, and Urdu, with the text in the appropriate regional script provided on the facing page, Stranger realized that the most important criteria were flexibility—MCLI required a design that could adequately represent diverse texts—and a look that honored both Western and Indian traditions.

She started by doing research on Indian visual culture, and shared some images from those and other inspirations with us to talk about how the design developed. 

 

 

Stranger saw the galley pictured at right while working at the Alexander Book Company. She was so struck by the text-driven cover that she read the book, and hung onto the galley, which she dug out from her parents’ basement for this photo. She says, “The simplicity of the design and materials stuck with me—and influenced the type-driven approach of the Murty design.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

Stranger says, “I looked at a lot of Indian architecture and found inspiration in the recurring shapes, color and intense use of pattern.” She passed along the image at right as an example.

 

 

 

 

 

When Stranger began researching Indian cultures for the project, she noticed that “the elephant is everywhere,” and realized that powerful cross-cultural associations with the animal, a symbol of wisdom, longevity, and strength in the West, made it “a worthy subject for logo exploration.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Textiles, like architecture, offered a lot of fodder for color usage and patterning.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“The Kannada language,” she told us, “served as inspiration for a concept that did not move forward, but the letterforms (like all Indian languages) reinforced the idea of an organic beauty that seemed present in every aspect of my research of Indian design.”

 

 

 

You can see elements of each of these images in Stranger’s final design:

At the MCLI website you can view a slideshow of additional images of the design, and also read thoughts on Stranger’s work from MCLI General Editor Sheldon Pollock, design contest judges such as Peter Mendelsund, and Rohan Narayana Murty, whose endowment gift to Harvard funded the library’s creation.

We’re looking forward to seeing Stranger’s design in print on the first volumes of the Murty Classical Library of India in 2013, and we’re extremely grateful to her and to all of the other talented designers who submitted their work to the contest.

Editing The Image of the Black in Western Art

This month marks the publication of the second and third parts of Volume III of The Image of the Black in Western Art. As the fifth and sixth of an eventual ten books, these new releases put us past the halfway point in our work to complete this fascinating series, and so offer a nice occasion to reflect on the challenges that it presents. To that end, we invited HUP Production Editor Adriana Kirilova, one of the many people who have been dedicated to this project over the decades since its conception, to tell us a bit about her experience working on the books. Her piece is below.

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When two years ago my manager told me that I would be the production editor for The Image of the Black in Western Art series, I was thrilled to be a part of this monumental project. I remember thinking I wouldn’t have very much to do. The first four books were scheduled to come out in the fall of 2010, and three of them had been previously published as part of the first incarnation of the series. There was little new text to edit, and a media research company in London had been contracted to deliver the images. We just had to flow it all into the new design and redo the index. Easy as pie.

How naïve I was!

When Dominique de Menil first conceived of the Image of the Black project in the 1960s, she had assumed it wouldn’t take very long to complete it. She had not anticipated the astonishing wealth of material or the complexity of the iconography of blacks in Western art. Fifty years later, we found ourselves in a similar situation. Everyone at the Du Bois Institute and HUP was excited to renew the efforts to complete this monumental undertaking, but few of us were fully aware of its intricacies.

First and foremost, we had to contend with the passage of time. The very title of the series reflects how much has changed since the conception of this project. The Image of the Black in Western Art: the meaning of nearly all of those words has grown more complicated in the years that have passed. And, as we started to work, it became clear how much else had changed. There were references in the text to East Germany and West Germany, St. Petersburg was still Leningrad, Sri Lanka was still Ceylon.

Ensuring that the text accurately and consistently reflects today’s geopolitical map has been only one of the challenges, and not the biggest one by far. The real Herculean task has been locating all the art. Since the publication of the first edition, museums have disbanded, galleries have changed their names, manuscripts have moved from one library to another. Vases have disappeared. Inscriptions on tombstones have faded. Broken statuettes have been restored. Research from the past thirty years has shed new light on the dates and titles of artworks. Paintings that were previously accepted as the work of X are now believed to be by Y.

Producing these books sequentially would have been demanding. No book that includes 200 illustrations could ever be easy. Producing them in batches, as efficiencies in publishing demand, has come dangerously close to insanity. There are so many details to keep track of, and nothing is ever as straightforward as it seems. Even the most inconsequential decision becomes paramount when multiplied by ten books. Changes in one book usually necessitate changes in another. Many of our conversations about IBWA (our shorthand for the series) include the phrase “Wait, which volume are we talking about?” The six books that make up volumes I through III have more than 1,500 images total. To date, I have received about 4,700 emails about IBWA and I’ve sent about 3,800.

It’s hard to explain what it is that I do for this series. I’ve done some copyediting, a little proofreading, a lot of fact-checking. I also nag, beg, and bully everyone else on the team when the deadlines loom large in front of us. It’s a miracle my colleagues still talk to me.

The Stephen Jay Gould Mosaic

We’ve just released new paperback editions of a collection of Stephen Jay Gould’s most fascinating and introspective essays, with cover designs that reflect the unity of science to which Gould devoted his life and writing. By themselves, each cover contains an element out of context, tough to understand on its own. Together, the covers form an image that makes sense.

Here they are, arranged in order at our warehouse, ready to ship:

And then here, on display at Reiter’s Books in DC:

The books in this collection are some of Gould’s finest, all displaying his typical erudition, warmth, and whimsy. They include Dinosaur in a Haystack, Full House, Questioning the Millennium, Leonardo’s Mountain of Clams and Diet of Worms, The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister’s Pox, The Lying Stones of Marrakech, and I Have Landed.

So much of Gould’s work was dedicated to showing why a more accurate way of understanding our world is to look at a given subject within its own context, and not as the progress of an average value or single thing. These new covers, then, are intended to highlight the complexity of context, to demonstrate how much more we understand when we stop trying to look at things in isolation.

Our thanks to Sam Potts for the great design. And, if you all see a little room to grow in that mosaic, you’re not wrong. More to come!

Announcing the Murty Classical Library of India Design Contest

In 2013 we’ll be releasing the first books of The Murty Classical Library of India, a new series intended to present the literary cultures of India to a global readership in an unprecedented manner. The Murty Classical Library of India (MCLI), established in 2010 through an endowment gift from Rohan Narayana Murty and the Murty family of Bangalore, India, will provide new English-language translations of works written in Bangla, Hindi, Pali, Panjabi, Persian, Sanskrit, Tamil, and other Indic languages, with the original text on the facing page.

A new series needs a new look, and the MCLI presents unique design challenges. We need to get it right. So, today we’re very excited to invite submissions of designs for the Murty Classical Library of India. Harvard University Press Executive Editor-at-Large Sharmila Sen noted, “Because the Murty family founded the MCLI in order to bring the rich literary heritage of India to the entire world, it is especially fitting that we issue an open invitation to generate a design for this landmark series.”

The designer of the winning series logo, logotype, and jacket design will receive 10,000 USD and jacket credit on all books in the series. Designs may be submitted between September 1 and December 1, 2011. Residents of, and design firms based in, the United States of America, the United Kingdom, and India are eligible to enter. Design specifications and contest rules are posted here.

On its establishment last year, Harvard Professor of Economics and Philosophy Amartya Sen expressed his appreciation for the MCLI. “There are few intellectual gaps in the world that are as glaring as the abysmal ignorance of Indian classics in the Western world. It is wonderful that the Murty Classical Library of India is taking up the challenge of filling this gap, through a new commitment of the Harvard University Press, backed by the discerning enthusiasm of the Murty family, and the excellent leadership of Sheldon Pollock — an outstanding Sanskritist and classical scholar. This will be a big contribution to advancing global understanding that is so much needed in the world today.”

We’re accepting design submissions through December 1st. All details are available via the MCLI website, www.murtylibrary.com

Please help us spread the word.

In Praise of Design, Regional Edition

As publishers, we keep company in various overlapping circles of the book business. One community with which we’ve had a long relationship is the Bookbuilders of Boston organization, which brings together people involved in book publishing and manufacturing throughout New England. Last night the group held its 54th annual New England Book Show, at which we were thrilled to see a number of our books recognized for their excellence in design and production.

In the category of illustrated general trade books, our annotated edition of Pride and Prejudice, and the relaunched Image of the Black in Western Art series were both highlighted for their overall design and production, from jacket to layout:

In the reference category, The Classical Tradition got a nod for its overall design:

 

The following were all recognized as outstanding jackets in the general trade category, including a “best in category” award to our old sheepish pal:

 

New Edition of the World-Renowned Washington Haggadah

After the Bible, the Passover haggadah is the most widely read classic text in the Jewish tradition. Among the countless editions that have been published, few are as exquisite as the Washington Haggadah, which was created in Germany in the 15th Century by the artist and scribe Joel ben Simeon. One of ten surviving Hebrew manuscripts that bear Joel ben Simeon’s signature, the Washington Haggadah resides in the Library of Congress, where it has long been considered a centerpiece of the Hebraic Section collections.

Though a beautiful work of art, the Washington Haggadah was, of course, intended to be used at the seder table, as indicated by wine stains on the parchment. So that this document can be both widely appreciated and used as intended, we have worked with the Library of Congress to produce a beautiful new full-color facsimile edition of the codex.

The image below, depicting an entire family balanced on the back of a donkey, is typical of the enchanting, sometimes-mysterious images that illuminate the pages of the Washington Haggadah.

A selection of additional images from the volume can be viewed online here.

In addition to its faithful, right-to-left reproduction of the original manuscript, our new edition includes introductions and commentary from the scholars David Stern and Katrin Kogman-Appel. In their hands, the manuscript reveals the contours of an evolving Passover ritual; the nature of European Jewish life in the 15th century; and the practice of religious and secular art in the early modern era. This edition also includes a translation of the text, along with notes on the illustrations.

In celebration of the publication of this facsimile edition, the Library of Congress has lent the Washington Haggadah to New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, where it is on display through June 26th within the context of the museum’s permanent medieval collection. Peggy Pearlstein, Head of the Hebraic Section of the Library’s African and Middle Eastern Division says of the loan: “Like the new facsimile edition itself, this unprecedented loan is a wonderful opportunity for us to share the crown jewel of the Library's Hebraic Section collections with a wider audience, and to make the public aware of the richness of the Library's holdings in this field.” Its presentation inaugurates a series of loans planned for the next several years, each of which will focus on a single, illuminated medieval Hebrew manuscript.

Design Across The Pond

Recently the folks at Flavorwire laid out a side-by-side comparison of US and UK book jackets, prompting our friends down the road at the Harvard Book Store to ask “Why are British book covers always so much cooler?”

To that we say “Ouch.” And respectfully offer some side-by-sides of our own, just off the tops of our heads.  HUP on the left, UK editions on the right.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So, US versus UK book design...

We like our side of the pond just fine on that front.  

In fact, we liked that sheep design up there enough to make a little slideshow about it last year:

 

Show Us Your Loebs!

Earlier this year the Home & Garden section of the New York Times ran a story on books as interior design elements. The piece spotlighted a creator of decorative “book solutions” who helps clients fill their shelves with that certain je ne sais livre. Need 2,000 cream-colored leatherbound books to fill your library? There are specialists to help. Not so picky? Books-by-the-foot apparently account for 5% of sales at the Strand in New York.

The rise of these purely aesthetic bespoke libraries is perhaps a slightly unsettling comment on the book’s continued utility, or maybe it’s just a tad silly. But, hey, books are beautiful. We know that. A book collection’s varying colors, shapes, and sizes never fail to amount to a visually stunning collage that can also serve as a three-dimensional map of the collector’s intellectual path. But, as with the collection of 2,000 cream-colored leatherbound books for an equity manager’s “gentleman’s library,” sometimes uniformity can make an even more arresting visual statement than variety. We know that, too, thanks to the Loeb Classical Library, the 100th anniversary of which we’re celebrating this year. These little volumes of facing page translations enrobe Ancient Greek in green and Latin in red, setting a now iconic color palette for the classics.

It’s long been lore here that Martha Stewart herself is fond of decorating with Loeb volumes, particularly the reds. A couple of years back we also spotted the stack of Loeb volumes in this Pottery Barn ad: 

Beyond such decorative appointments, though, the Loebs also get pride of place in some beautiful libraries and bookstores the world over. They’re great and useful books, after all!

Here they are, with what also appears to be the I Tatti Renaissance Library, in Georgetown University’s Riggs Library, courtesy of a photo set compiled awhile back by Curious Expeditions:

Here they are, beautifully lit, in the newly created Lanier Theological Library in Houston:

A Peek Inside our Pride and Prejudice

There’s no two ways about it: gift book season is upon us. ‘Tis the time for lush stacks of beautifully illustrated almanacs, glossy art books, lush boxed sets, impenetrable cookbooks, and smart new editions of old favorites. Well, we’ve got one of those last, and if you’ve been paying attention it’s not news by now: we’re quite pleased with our annotated edition of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, edited by Patricia Meyer Spacks.

We think it’s a book well-worth gifting, so we’ve put together a little something to try to simulate that feeling of flipping through a beautiful book and realizing who it’d be perfect for. And we have the book’s designer and acquiring editor to talk us through it. For Graciela Galup, the designer, part of the challenge in working on the cover for this book was in figuring out how a Harvard University Press edition of Pride and Prejudice would be different from all of the other editions already out there. Our books manage to stand out, she says, without straying from a classic, subtle style.  Which is why this image to the right may work fine for Android Karenina, but didn’t quite cut it for us (just a little too racy, even without the robotics).

So, take a look at the video for a peek inside our Pride and Prejudice. It may just be the perfect gift for your favorite romantic, history buff, Austenite, Victorianist, or plain old book-lover. Or maybe it’s a little something for yourself? You deserve it.

 

  

(Image above right: The Kiss by G. Baldry (19th century) Simon Carter Gallery, Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK/ The Bridgeman Art Library)