Painted for flat rate of $100, Francis Cugat’s cover art for The Great Gatsby has endured as one of—if not the—most famous book jackets of all time. And yet in his memoir, A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway recalls seeing F Scott Fitzgerald’s new novel for the first time. And he was not impressed:
“It had a garish dust jacket and I remember being embarrassed by the violence, bad taste and slippery look of it. It looked the book jacket for a book of bad science fiction. Scott told me not to be put off by it, that it had to do with a billboard along a highway in Long Island that was important in the story. He said he had liked the jacket and now he didn’t like it. I took it off to read the book.” 1
Certainly some things can only be left to personal taste. But it cannot be argued that Francis Cugat’s design for The Great Gatsby did not, like any good work of art, spark controversy, tantalize the reader with mystery, and leave an impression lasting longer than the life of its creator.
Cugat submitted his gouache painting in 1924, months before Fitzgerald had even finished his manuscript for The Great Gatsby. Months before even a title had been selected. In letters to his editor, Maxwell Perkins, Fitzgerald workshopped titles like Among the Ash Heaps and Millionaires, Gold-hatted Gatsby and Trimalchio in West Egg. But his desire for Cugat’s painting made him go for a shorter title, so as not to obscure the beautiful cover.2
A History of the Book Jacket
The 1920s were a transition period in the history of book jackets. By the Victorian era, publishers were beginning to recognize the marketing opportunities of an attractive book jacket. But it wasn’t until the 30s and 40s that collectors and publishers began to consider book jackets for their own artistic merit. In the 1920s, there was still that fact that most people treated a book jacket just like a human jacket. Sure, you’ll wear it for protection outdoors. But as soon as you get home, you’ll cast it aside like an ornery Hemingway. 3
The original painting that serves as the jacket design for The Great Gatsby is officially called “Celestial Eyes”. And though it was only meant to serve as marketing material, “Celestial Eyes” inspired Fitzgerald enough that he even worked the design into the story. In a letter to Perkins in the summer of 1924, Fitzgerald writes, “For Christ’s sake don’t give anyone that jacket you’re saving for me. I’ve written it into the book.”
Good Book Design Affects the Senses
In Marshall Lee’s Bookmaking, Lee describes two schools of thought on book design: The first, that designs should be economic, tasteful and neutral, serving only their practical functions. The second school of thought says that a book design’s job is to communicate the idea of the book. Lee says:
The books of the ‘neutral’ school are often poorly done but they’re rarely offensive. On the other hand, a clumsy or tasteless attempt to use the full range of graphic effects in a book can be monstrous. This isn’t an insignificant point, but the more important point is that a book produced by a skillful and sensitive designer can rise far above a work that aspires only to be neutral. 4
As with Hemingway’s impression of The Great Gatsby, bold design will always garner controversy. But a good book cover can also help attract readers and immerse them in ways that ‘neutral’ design can’t.
Chip Kidd, noted book designer at Alfred A Knopf, agrees that book design is more than just packaging. It is the first impression of the story contained within a book. “Once the book designer has read the text,” Kidd says, “then he has to be an interpreter and a translator.” 5
To Kidd, a good book design should set the mood, and establish the ethos of the story contained within it. As Marshall Lee says, “Don’t ignore the reader’s senses when the author’s thoughts are being transmitted through a physical book that can and does affect those senses.” A good designer will build a physical representation of the story contained within it. And they will bridge the gap between the reader and the text.
A Look in “Celestial Eyes”
Many assume the ‘celestial eyes’ of Cugat’s painting are reflected in Fitzgerald’s story through the billboard for Dr TJ Eckleburg. The billboard depicts large and ominous bespectacled eyes peering down on the characters of the book every time they enter Manhattan. It’s a garish advertisement for an optometrist that unsettles the story’s characters. But the tone of this billboard does not match the tone Cugat’s painting depicts.
But through some detective work into Fitzgerald’s letters and Cugat’s early sketches, Charles Scribner III speculates it is more likely that “Celestial Eyes” made its way into the text through Nick Carraway’s descriptions of his cousin, Daisy. Carraway describes her face as “sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth”.6 Much like the dust jacket depicts. And later on, Carraway also describes his cousin as a “girl whose disembodied face floated along the dark cornices and blinding signs”. 7 Carraway’s hazy descriptions of Daisy paired with the beautiful, ethereal face in “Celestial Eyes” inform her character and the motivating incidents of the story.
Chip Kidd says, “Mystery demands to be decoded. And when it’s done right, we really, really want to.” And it’s the mystery created by Cugat’s “Celestial Eyes” that Scribner notes is not “illustrative but symbolic, even iconic”. Hemingway may have found it “garish”. But Francis Cugat’s dusk jacket has served the novel it covers well. It has created enticing mystery, spark controversy and affected the senses of readers for almost a century.
- Hemingway, Ernest | Chapter 17: “Scott Fitzgerald” | A Moveable Feast | 1927
- Scribner III, Charles | “Celestial Eyes: From Metamorphosis to Masterpiece” | Princeton University Library Chronicle | Vol. 53 | No. 2 | 1992
- Snyman, Magdaleen | “The History of the Book Jacket in the 19th and Early 20th Century” | The Journal of Publishing Culture | Vol 4 | 2015
- Lee, Marshall | “Schools of Design” | Chapter 2: “Design and Production” | Bookmaking (3rd Edition) | 2004
- Kidd, Chip | “Designing books is no laughing matter. OK, it is.” | TED | 2012
- Fitzgerald, F Scott | Chapter 1 | The Great Gatsby | 1925
- Fitzgerald, F Scott | Chapter 4 | The Great Gatsby | 1925