Alvin Lustig

With his first book for New Directions, Alvin Lustig began a partnership that would revolutionize the art of book cover design. Between 1941 and 1952, Lustig produced one masterpiece after another — stylized, fragmented, some combining multiple photographs, others drawn by hand in glorious abstraction.Each cover displayed an artistic unity where even the book’s title and author became simply one integral part, joined together by Lustig’s unerring sense of composition and his exquisite sense of color. Gorgeous and radically original,these designs immediately caught the public eye and became an iconic part of New Directions’ history.