Chip Kidd: Book One – Work: 1986-2006
Chip Kidd is a god. In the world of book cover design, there is no equal. He is The Man.
And hard to believe, but he’s been at it for 20 years now – two decades of ace efforts chronicled in the beautiful and voluminous CHIP KIDD: BOOK ONE – WORK: 1986-2006, a coffee table book you won’t want to put on your coffee table, for fear of coffee or other errant beverages spilling on it. This is a book to treasure.
It is also one you will hold in your hands and think, “Oh, I’ll just thumb through this for a few minutes and come back to it later.” Yet this is impossible. You simply can’t. So captivating are Kidd’s designs, you’ll be surprised at how many great covers he’s been responsible for, how many old favorites you’d forgotten about, how many you didn’t know he did. Plus, the 400 pages aren’t merely captioned; there’s so much detail, you could call them annotated. This is welcome, because whereas other designs would be satisfied to just show their work off and call it a day, Kidd lets you know how the finished idea came to be, even admitting (and sometimes showing) his failures along the way.
He’s perhaps best known for JURASSIC PARK’s skeletal dinosaur design, which has become iconic thanks to its use promoting both the book and the film franchise. But he’s also reinvigorated classics (SIR GAWAIN & THE GREEN KNIGHT), bloodied up James Ellroy (WHITE JAZZ), and included the occasional die-cut when absolutely appropriate (THE MAN WHO ATE EVERYTHING). His CV is simply staggering: Anne Rice, Dennis Lehane, Dean Koontz, John Updike, Cormac McCarthy, Larry McMurtry, Martin Amis, John Gregory Dunne, Oliver Sacks, Katherine Dunn, John Le Carré, Philip Roth, David Sedaris, Augusten Burroughs – hell, even Joe Eszterhas and Boy George.
For my money, his cover of Jonathan Ames’ WHAT’S NOT TO LOVE? would be my favorite, if not for his foray into comics, with covers for BATMAN: THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS, SIN CITY, PEANUTS: THE ART OF CHARLES M. SCHULZ and his own non-fiction BATMAN COLLECTED, JACK COLE AND PLASTIC MAN and MYTHOLOGY: THE DC COMICS ART OF ALEX ROSS among them.
His talents also have put into use in other media, designing a Jon Spencer Blues Explosion album and a secret decoder watch for Swatch. But books are this man’s bread and butter, and he does them better than anyone else, as each page of WORK proves over and over. –Rod Lott