Jesse Marinoff Reyes:
A Happy 90th Birthday remembrance to the Beat Generation icon and one of the great post-war American writers. The impact that Kerouac—and the Beats—had on both American literature and pop culture goes beyond what I can relate here and has already filled volumes of cultural criticism….
Some of the Dharma
Viking, 1997
Design: Gail Belenson
Photograph: (snapshot) The estate of Jack Kerouac
Art Director: Paul Buckley (b. 1965)
---Jack Kerouac---
An oversized jacket for Penguin’s hardcover trade imprint, Viking (née The Viking Press), I always thought my former colleague Belenson’s jazz album cover approach—Blue Note, Impulse!, Prestige, Verve, et. al.—was the way to go with cover packaging, and went that direction myself first on Diane di Prima’s Recollections of My Life as a Woman then on other Beat Generation packages. I thought especially sharp was her attention to nuance with a Tibetan-influenced color scheme, the subtle combination of blues used on “Jack” and “Kerouac,” and the use of typewriter ornamentation from Kerouac’s own manuscript layouts.
Jack Kerouac
Windblown World: The Journals of Jack Kerouac 1947-1954
Penguin Books, 2006
Design: Jesse Marinoff Reyes (b. 1961)
Photograph: Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997)/Corbis
Art Director: Paul Buckley (b. 1965)
I’ve done a handful of designs (and some illustrations) influenced by mid-1950s Saul Bass film titles–filtered through a gritty, postpunk lens. This is one of them.
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