Remebering the Rembrandt of Pulp: James Avati

 #theRembrandtofPulp

Paula Rabinowitz, ‘American pulp : how paperbacks brought modernism to Main Street’, 2014:

"....Only months before, Victor Weybright, publisher of the NAL, had been contacted by J. D. Salinger, who requested that the paperback cover of The Catcher in the Rye not be flamboyant. He did not want Holden’s face to appear, as he was meant to be a stand-in; rather, he saw the park bench and the carousel as significant settings. This scene was deemed “a charming one” by cover illustrator James Avati in a memo to Weybright responding to Salinger’s idea. In recounting this to Salinger, Weybright explained that it “would look like a cross between the New Yorker covers and a juvenile book rather than like a substantial modern novel.” Avati’s memo praised the subtlety of Salinger’s vision for a cover that hides Holden’s face because he is not physically described in the novel, but explained that Salinger’s concept “appeals strongly to those of us who have read the story … Perhaps it might sell.” However, Avati explicated what a paperback cover is supposed to do—sell books—and described his idea: “Let us show him [Holden] coming down Broadway or Forty-Second Street expressing his pained reaction to people who LIKE movies, etc. He is very much a definable personality, a foil to the crowd. And the crowd in its varied normality and the theatre background, exciting, suggestive, provide lures which will attract a very broad audience of readers.” This notorious cover ultimately led Salinger to insist on his own design, plain geometric shapes, for the cover of Nine Stories and the uniform color field of his future books. James Avati knew what his job was: to attract “a very broad audience of readers” and “lure” them to buy books...."

Artist: James Avati, 1953