The Picasso of Dust Jacket Design

His name was Ted Kauffer.

From a story on Booktryst...

From 1928 through the early 1950s, Kauffer designed thirty-one dust jackets for the Modern Library, including: Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg Ohio; Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward; Arnold Bennett's The Old Wive's Tale; Boccaccio's Decameron; Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh; Cervantes' Don Quixote; Clausewitz's On War; Du Maurier's Rebecca; Falkner's Sanctuary, Light in August, and Go Down, Moses; Theophile Gautier's Mademoiselle de Maupin; Hammett's The Maltese Falcon; Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises; W.H. Hudson's Green Mansions; Huxley's Point Counter Point; Henry James' Portrait of a Lady; D,H. Lawrence's Women in Love; Maurois' Disraeli; Moby Dick; Palgrave's Golden Treasury; The Best of S.J. Perelman; Rabelais; Spaeth's Guide to Great Orchestral Music; Dracula; Sterne's Tristam Shandy and A Sentimental Journey; Arthur Symonds' Life of Michaelangelo; Thackeray's Henry Esmond; Richard Wright's Native Son; and Young's The Medici.

"In Kauffer's hands the poster (or the book jacket, which for him was a mini-poster) was designed to be interpreted rather than accepted at face value. In this regard he continually struggled with the paradox of how to meet his creative needs, his clients' commercial interests and his viewers' aesthetic preferences, all in a limited period of time. In a speech before the Royal Society of Arts in 1938 ...Kauffer candidly explained his methodology and resultant angst:

"When I leave my client's office, I am no longer considering what form my design or my scheme will take, but the urgent fact that I only have so much time in which to produce the finished article. I find this irritating, and am often overcome by a feeling of hopelessness about the whole business. On my way home I think, Will my client understand what I propose to do? Will he understand I may not give him an obvious, logical answer to his problem? Does he suppose I have magical powers, or does he believe that I can solve his sales problem as simply as one might add two and two together and make four?"