How Do You Solve a Book Cover Like Lolita?

The New Yorker interviewed John Bertram, a Los Angeles architect and co-editor of a new book called Lolita: The Story of a Cover Girl: Vladimir Nabokov’s Novel in Art and Design, about the difficulties involved in designing a book cover for this very particular book. There’s a gallery of 185 attempts from 37 countries over the past 56 years, and the New Yorker interview comes with a slideshow of 17 newly commissioned takes (this one! oh my days), but perhaps the essence of Lolita will remain elusive:

Mary Gaitskill writes in her introductory essay that no cover could ever succeed in fully expressing the “impossible, infernal combinations” of love and cruelty contained in “Lolita.” Having seen the richness and diversity of the Cover Project results, do you agree with her?

Absolutely. Although there are many covers here that I love, a complete picture is really only achieved through seeing the covers in aggregate and, for me, the joy of this endeavor lies in never being forced to choose a single cover to represent the novel.

Bertram also talks about the way that the visualization of Lolita has overpowered her reality in the text, which to me seems like an echo of the process that happens within Humbert Humbert’s own head:

Many of the covers guilty of misrepresenting Lolita as a teen seductress feature images from Hollywood movie adaptations of the book — Kubrick’s 1962 version, starring Sue Lyon, and Adrian Lyne’s 1997 one. Are those films primarily to blame for the sexualization of Lolita?

As is argued in several of the book’s essays, the promotional image of Sue Lyon in the heart-shaped sunglasses, taken by photographer Bert Stern, is easily the most significant culprit in this regard, much more so than the Kubrick film itself (significantly, neither the sunglasses nor the lollipop ever appears in the film), or the later film by Adrian Lyne. Once this image became associated with “Lolita” — and it’s important to remember that, in the film, Lolita is sixteen years old, not twelve — it really didn’t matter that it was a terribly inaccurate portrait. It became the image of Lolita, and it was ubiquitous. There are other factors that have contributed to the incorrect reading, from the book’s initial publication in Olympia Press’s Traveller’s Series (essentially, a collection of dirty books), to Kubrick’s startlingly unfaithful adaptation. At the heart of all of this seems to be the desire to make the sexual aspect of the novel more palatable.

[TNY]