This past weekend was the big annual church book sale in neighborhood, and I found some great books, including a mini-collection of mass market paperbacks from the 1960s about Latin America. I’m behind on my research on the longer form posts I’ve got in the works, so I’m just going to share these four books this week. All are written or edited by Western writers, and like the content, the covers display different outsider perspectives on the nature of Latin America in the 60s. And although none are specifically about Cuba, they were all published in the wake of the Cuban Revolution, and display an attempt to either communicate or capitalize on the fear of revolution from the South that spread through North America at the time.
First is the one on the right, the anthology Social Change in Latin America Today (Vintage, 1960). The cover is by veteran designer Paul Bacon, who has designed over 6,500 book covers! The type treatment does little for me, but I love the illustration. A map of South America (not exactly Latin America, but oh well…) is entirely composed of squiggly arrows, some spiraling inward, some shooting outward. It’s extremely simple, but the red, green, and black add some complexity, as well as possible political and social overtones. One can imagine the red sections, all with arrows spreading out, as the export of communism.
Today’s Latin America by Robert J. Alexander (Doubleday Anchor, 1962) has an even more austere cover, with the entire region represented by a single star. Once again color is the only signifier of social or political diversity, this time red, green, black, and blue. The colors and stars here are evocative of a national flag, or a combination of flags. While the multi-color star feels cohesive, the torn black and white field that the star is set on implies that not everything is quite so tightly held together. The cover was designed by Hiram Ash, who might be better known for his work on album covers, which often also feature large, flat color fields and shapes.
Michael Niedergang’s The Twenty Latin Americas (Penguin, 1971) has a much, much more neutral cover (anonymously designed), featuring a plexi-like cut-out of Latin America and a series of national flags. However abstract and open the previous covers, here there is literally nothing that implies any particular direction or opinion about the subject. It is completely clinical, and completely boring.
The final book is Latin America by William Lytle Schurz (Dutton, 1963). It is the stand-out both in its choice of color and imagery. The cover was designed by Isadore Seltzer, who I believe was connected to Push Pin Studios in the 1960s. Here she has scratched out a drawing of a Bolivian woman, recognizable by her bowler hat and multi-colored shawl. Her outfit fills up almost the entire cover, but she barely seems to full her wardrobe, with a small face and feet peeking out at the extremities. The dominant orange and solid saturation of pink and red give the cover a much warmer feel, and is the only one of the four that seems to capture some of the cultural affect of the region. I can’t help but feel it’s not a complete coincidence that the cover designed by a woman is the only one that actually represents Latin America as made of people, and not just abstract shapes and colors, and thus political concepts and avatars.
For 150 years Latin America has existed in the shadow of the United States, which seems to see it as largely a constellation of statistics, data, resources, and potential political upheavals. These covers do little to challenge that, and this seems like an example were Modernist drives towards abstraction and efficiency largely play into existing political abstractions.
(c) Justseeds: Blog – Read entire story here.