Alvin Lustig, who has previously been Coveted for his A Streetcar Named Desire cover, was probably the greatest book jacket designer of the Modernist era. He had an innate sensibility that allowed him to boil down the essence of a book into a few very simple shapes, along with an uncanny sense of how to place type in a way that both conveys information and creates visual tension. It’s the Holy Grail of design, this idea of not sacrificing a great layout in the service of having to actually, you know market. Take a look at his 1951 cover for Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha. The design is ludricrously abstract: it tells you nothing about the book, unless it’s about an amorphously shaped eyeball, or a birds’-eye view of an island in a river. Either of which it might be — I’ve blocked out all the Hesse I ever had to read, or felt compelled to read in my clove-cigarette-and-beret phase. To paraphrase Laurie Anderson, “Hermann Hesse, you are not my favorite author ... by a long shot.” But it’s hard to not want this book in my collection, simply because it’s almost impossibly beautiful. It’s one of those covers, though, that wouldn’t work if Lustig had had to blurb it up. He had one thing on his side: he was pre-blurb. “This book made me cry! And not in a good way!” — Michiko Kakutani. “The political, social and economic ramifications of this novel really make me want to vomit!” — Gore Vidal.  You see? Where would he put those? The best thing about Lustig’s covers is that New Directions let him do it his way, and they left him alone. They are little works of art, every one of them.