THE MODERN LIBRARY

Opposite and above: Invisible Man, 1952, Ralph Ellison’s award winning debut novel which focusses on the social and intellectual issues faced by African Americans in the early twentieth century. The eye is one of Kauffer’s repertoire of visual symbols that includes hands, clouds and stars.

THE MODERN LIBRARY –RANDOM HOUSE

In 1917, two young men from immigrant families took on the might of the conservative family-run American publishing establishment. Albert Boni and Horace Liveright believed that ‘good’ literature would be read by the masses if priced suitably.

Naming their Greenwich Village based company The Modern

Library, they began to publish reprints, initially largely of European classics, of authors with an edge, such as Ibsen, Wilde and Nietsche. Although their venture proved a success they were ill-matched as partners, Boni a quiet bookseller, Liveright a foppish chancer, and it was the latter who took over the firm. However he soon found himself in financial trouble and was relieved when he sold out to

Donald Klopfer and Bennett Cerf in 1925. Klopfer and Cerf were both bibliophiles and businessmen, and, treating their reprints as commodities, set about using every which way to hype and distribute their burgeoning list, by the late 1920s consisting of well over a hundred titles. The slogan ‘The World’s Best Books’ was a considerable pull and with mail-order,

1940

Opposite: 1946 (detail) 1940

1940 1941

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1940 1941

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1951 1948

Opposite: Unpublished design for Famous Ghost Stories edited by Bennett Cerf, 1944, (from the Cooper Hewitt collection).

Opposite: Exile, 1949, and above the revised and ‘more legible’ design, 1953.

PANTHEON

Kauffer appears to have started designing covers for Pantheon in about 1943, the publishing company then only recently started in 1942 in New York, by Kurt Wolff and his wife

Helen. Kurt had previously had a publishing house of some repute in Germany in the 1920s, which had become known for its cultivation of young writers and for the outstanding design of its books. He had been the first to publish Franz Kafka. The couple, exiling themselves to France in the 1930s, arrived in New York in 1941. Although Kurt had been out of publishing for some years, they decided, against all odds, to restart a publishing business, concentrating on ‘quality’ translations of

European texts. Running Pantheon on a shoestring, they were helped by an arrangement with the Mellon family to publish its

Bollingen Series of books (named after C.G. Jung’s Swiss home) on cultural matters, including works by and about the psychoanalyst Jung. Kauffer was to provide covers both for the translations and for books within the Bollingen Series. His first cover in 1943 was for Man the Measure by Erich Kahler, after which there appears to have been a gap before Death of Virgil by Hermann Broch, in 1945, which carried a fairly conventional cover showing the poet carrying a laurel wreath. Later Kauffer designed jackets using photography and photomontage such as with the translation

1917 Look! We Have Come Through D.H. Lawrence Chatto & Windus

1923 Woman a Vindication Anthony Ludovici Constable

1925 Expressionism Hermann Bahr Henderson 1921 Eminent Victorians Lytton Strachey Chatto & Windus

1924 The Art of the Poster E. McKnight Kauffer Cecil Palmer

1925 Meditations of a Profane Man by ‘h’ H. Saunders Cecil Palmer 1922 Noel Gilbert Cannan Martin Secker

1924 Books and Characters Lytton Strachey Chatto & Windus

1925 That Fool of a Woman Millicent Sutherland Putnam 1923 The Chapbook Magazine, ed. Harold Monro The Poetry Bookshop

1924 Queen Victoria Lytton Strachey Chatto & Windus

1926 Benito Cereno Herman Melville Nonesuch Press 1923 Commercial Art Magazine The Studio Ltd.

1924 TheWeekend book: a sociable anthology Nonesuch Press

1927 England Reclaimed Osbert Sitwell Duckworth 1923 Seven Plays Gilbert Cannan Martin Secker

1925 The Clio L.H. Myers G.P. Putnam

1927 Journey of the Magi T.S. Eliot Faber & Gwyer

1927 TheModern Movement in Art R.H. Wilenski Faber & Gwyer

1928 Babel John Cournos Victor Gollancz

1928 Diary of a Communist Schoolboy Nikolai Ognyov Victor Gollancz 1927 Pilgrims Ethel Mannin Jarrolds

1928 BBC Handbook BBC

1928 Dinners Long and Short A.H. Adair Victor Gollancz 1927 Radio Times Programme magazine BBC

1928 The Bleston Mystery Robert Milward Kennedy Victor Gollancz

1928 The Four Tragedies of Hemworth Lord Ernest Hamilton Victor Gollancz

1927 Shaken by the Wind Ray Strachey Macmillan

1928 Brook Evans Susan Glaspell Victor Gollancz

1928 The Golem Gustav Meyrink Victor Gollancz 1928 2LO A Detective Story Walter S. Masterman Victor Gollancz

1928 The Case with nine solutions J.J. Connington Victor Gollancz

1928 The Green Toad Walter Masterman Victor Gollancz 1928 A Song for Simeon T.S. Eliot Faber & Gwyer

1928 Departure Roland Dorgeles Victor Gollancz

1928 The Island of Captain Sparrow S. Fowler Wright Victor Gollancz