George Salter's Book Jacket Designs, 1925–1940

Abstract

The paradigm of the reader as a poacher or intruder on the relationship between the author and text is integral to an interpretation of design in the history of modern book production. As described by the theoretical framework of theory, the meaning of the text depends on how an audience receives an objective formula of letters arranged on the page, and the jacket designer could be regarded either as an intruder or as a bridge between the author's intention and the audience's reception. Belonging at once to the interpretive level of the book and to the market forces that led to the production of its meaning as an objective text, the book jacket designer bridged the book and its audience by wrapping the object in an advertisement, targeting the mass market reader. Book jacket designers, then, interpreted the author for the reader: rather than poach meaning, the jacket designer drew attention to the practice of reading by visualizing the book's interior. With the rearrangement of type on the page, and with the introduction of breathing between the letters, the horizon of reception changed, as cultural historian Roger Chartier noted.1 The value of the book encompasses its literary and aesthetic nuance, but it also includes its more tangible surface appeal. Rather than a practice imposing on the readers' silent interaction with a literary narrative whose meaning is determined by poachers who steal interpretative elements for their own purposes, the jacket served to confine the space within which meaning was constructed. The importance of the jacket, as one trade journalist commented, had little to do with protecting the book. Rather, it accompanies the book on its long journey from publisher to reader. In the hands of the book agent, it presents the books to the bookseller, in the shop window to the buyer and, thus, is its own publicity agent. 2 George Salter was among the most prolific of the commercial designers who applied their talents to the promotion of books, and to the professionalization of the book jacket as a design specialization. Born in Bremen, Germany in 1897, Salter studied at the Municipal School of Arts and Crafts in Charlottenburg between 1919 and 1922, when he started work as a stage and costume designer, completing sets for one-hundred and twenty operas and more than two hundred plays in five years. In 1931, he taught commercial art in the Municipal Graphic Arts Academy in Berlin and, within two years, supervised ten instructors. Salter's stylistic 1 Roger Chartier, Cultural History: Between Practices and Representations (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 1-23. 2 Charles Rosner, The Art of the Book Jacket(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1954) xviii; Jackets Required. An Illustrated History of American Book Jacket Design 1920-1950 (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1995).