Vladimir Nabokov’s 1955 novel, Lolita, has intrigued and outraged readers for decades. And over the years, book designers have had no picnic coming up with a suitable—but also marketable—book cover.
Chip Kidd, one of America’s most famous book designers, said this during a TED Talk on book design:
My job was to ask this question: ‘What do stories look like?’ … They all need to look like something. They all need a face. Why? To give you a first impression of what you’re about to get into. 1
The problem with designing Lolita is that “what you’re about to get into” is at the same time disturbing, poetic, absurd, grounded, tragic and disgusting. How do you give that a face?
Misunderstanding Lolita
Part of the problem stems from the public’s misconceptions of the title character. Often when people think of Lolita, they think of the jailbait seductress with come-hither eyes sucking on her lollipop from Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 film adaptation. Kubrick’s Lolita was even aged-up to get by the sensors and make audiences feel a little less icky.
But this has given much of the public the wrong idea about who Lolita is and what this story is actually about. Just a few years ago, a British department store got in trouble for naming a girls’ bedroom set after the character!2
If you’ve only seen the movie poster, you might think Lolita was a kitchy erotic love story. But only readers of the novel realize Lolita‘s title character is really just a mixed-up, orphaned, 12-year-old American schoolgirl forced to drop out of middle school, wander the country, and provide sexual companionship for a narcissistic Frenchman in his 30s whom she is financially and legally dependent on.
What makes Lolita so difficult to wrap your head around (never mind wrap a cover around) is that to describe the plot is to retell a horror story. But when you actually start to read it, you are hoodwinked by the beauty of the language. And it’s not long until Nabokov’s subversive corruption of the reader takes hold and makes you laugh at the absurd—almost Looney Tunes like—pursuits of the narrator, Humbert Humbert. In the end you start to question your own morality when you begin to feel…sympathy?…for the terrible, terrible protagonist.
‘Lolita: The Story of a Cover Girl’
I guess a picture is worth a thousand words, but how do you design a cover for that? In 2009, John Bertram, himself a designer, decided to hold a contest to “re-cover” Lolita. 3 Cover designs range from subtly disturbing to grossly inappropriate. The contest was so successful, it’s being turned into a book, Lolita: The Story of a Cover Girl.4
Accurately capturing the contents of this book is a careful balancing act. But I think the above cover, designed by Jamie Keenan, provides perfect representation of the text. 5
At first glance, the book cover is elegant and beautifully crafted. The subject itself is domestic and feminine. But when you pull back, you see that the framing—the ‘gaze’ of the viewer—creates something sinister out of something innocent. Then if you pull back even further—if you allow yourself to put the framing of subject on equal ground as the subject itself—you see that the whole package is at the same time disturbing and…well…kind of funny in dark sort of way.
- Kidd, Chip | “Designing books is no laughing matter. OK, it is.” | TED | 2012
- “Woolworths withdraws ‘Lolita’ bed” | BBC News | 2008
- Bertram, John | “lolita cover contest results!” | venus febriculosa | 2009
- Bertram, John and Leving, Yuri | Lolita: The Story of a Cover Girl | 2013
- Keenan, Jamie |”Lolita by Vladmir Nabokov” | 2009