George F. What?

Larger image here.

Does this monstrosity exist in real life? I’m sure it can be encountered in Northern Virginia yard sales; in moisture-ruined piles of hardcovers in Southern summer houses; knocked to the floors of garages after small earthquakes in Orange County. Small-town librarians sigh as they find it in yet another box of donated books; the pile is not as high as the donated Micheners, true, but it’s high enough.

The serifs on the “T”s remind me of nothing so much as the shoulder pads on a woman’s business suit of the time.

It offends my eyes, too–and the missing ‘i’ is clearly a typo corrected later–but it’s worth pointing out that this cover is very deliberate. Note the way that the designer has positioned letters like the ‘TA’ and the ‘RA’ in ‘STATECRAFT’, or the ‘WHA’ and the ‘VERN’ and the ‘MEN’ in the subtitle, or the fact that the ‘FT’ in both ‘STATECRAFT’ and ‘SOULCRAFT’ are positioned exactly the same way, for examples. There was scalable type (photo and I think also digital) by 1983, so it’s not as if the designer was constrained in his/her choice of type size by what the printer had lying around the shop floor and had to squeeze the characters together–and you’d never be able to make this cover with cold or hot metal type anyway. And I don’t have time to rummage around for other specimens this morning, but my own fuzzy recollection is that this cover is well within the orbit of other serious nonfiction book cover designs at the time.

Further argument, I suppose, for Jan Tschichold’s dictum that dust jackets are meant to be thrown out once you’ve brought the book home.

No DTP in 1982, yet. (Not long thereafter, though.) And no doubt the designer was trying for some ‘historical’ or ‘classical’ look, though it doesn’t line up with any period of printing history I remember, ‘classical’ or otherwise.

Yes I meant a modern computer-set face intended simultaneously to look VERY NOW letter by letter yet somehow remind you by its organisation on the page of a baroque ornateness — but of course you’re right, it’s probably too early to be inspired by genuine DTP bad-kerning artefacts (though it really does look like them, to me: the rubbish italics also remind me of bad computer-printing artefacts).

This post and comments are what I come here for. A thread on 1980s typographic enormities. Book jackets, as well as most magazine titles, were and are often drawn by hand. However, this cover smacks of the letter by letter photographic headline machines common in that era. Although there were indeed no common DTP programs out there, most phototype machines could spew out such atrocities if you carefully or unartfully commanded space reductions between characters. The motto was, “if one can kern, one must kern.” And how pleasant to be reminded of Jan Tschichold.

They had to change the cover

You see, the 1984 edition was by George F. Will, but that author has since died and been replaced in his many TV appearances by a computer generated simulacrum, George F. Wii. You get George F. WII if you capitalize all of the letters of the last name, which I agree is an odd style choice, but is the only thing at all unusual about the cover design. You don’t want to raise misleading expectations about the content with your cover, so a cover that has WII crowding out everything else is probably about right.

If this sounds far-fetched on first consideration, consider further. Have you ever seen this George F. Wii other than on the TV? Hmm? Even allowing him his chosen, one could conjecture, his only possible, setting, his TV appearance on talk shows, does he really seem quite fully human even in this setting? Hmmm? Sure, you could chalk up part of that to the dehumanoidizing effect that TV talk show appearance has even on probable actual humans and human0ids, but I don’t think that rationalization can quite stretch to cover George F. Wii.

When I was in the book business, copies of one of our math books started showing up in stores with the title misspelled on the cover–Trigernometry. It turned out that the copies were from a pirated edition. Somebody had gotten a hold of print overruns of the insides of the book and slapped a new cover on them. This sort of thing is commoner than you’d expect. It’s very easy for somebody at the printer to leave the press running just a few minutes longer.

The publisher, (who may have used Google’s scan) reproduces the cover typo at the “Browse Inside” link. I also notice that the misspelled version has a yellow title and white subtitle, while the corrected one is all white type. Biblio.com associates the corrected spelling with the 1997 reprint, so perhaps the hardcover really did ship with the misspelling.

Like someone in comments above, I read it as “Wii”. Kind of jarring to try to put the guy into the context of motion-sensing games. Then I thought of his baseball obsession, and I found myself thinking about throwing pitches at a dunk tank target.

That game might be worthwhile if there’s an especially satisfying splash! involved.

I see the hand of a catastrophically misguided Herb Lubalin wannabe. In the 1960s and 70s, when photosetting had made this kind of thing newly possible, competent versions of crunched-up type looked daring and new. By 1982 this is a cliche as well as an ugly, ugly thing. Maybe the designer decided to leave out the i so as to get the kerning even tighter.

This is no typo. Mr Will is well-known for his rants against a certain current US President for excessive use of first-person singular pronouns, and, being himself a self-effacing sort of chap, Mr Will decided to set an example by reducing their use.

Didn’t somebody just scan this into a bitmap, play with it on Paint, and accidentally tap the “paint bucket”, set to background color, over the i? Ah, but then they’ve have to fill in the dot of the i too. Never mind.

Or else it was intentional.

The only thing Will said that I ever agreed with was, “The American people are conservative. They want to conserve the New Deal.”