Life before Kidd ...

Michael Bierut has an interesting essay on Design Observer.com about the book cover designs of Freed Marcellino.

excerpt:

It's hard to remember now, after Chip Kidd, after Michael Ian Kaye, after Carin Goldberg, that there was a time when it was considered taboo to illustrate a novel with anything but plain type or an illustration: the fear was that people would wonder, if the subject was fictional, whom exactly the photograph was supposed to depict. So it fell upon Fred Marcellino, who combined the skill of a genre painter with the typographic sense of an upscale package designer, to create the look of quality fiction. A Marcellino cover was as loaded with allusion and metaphor as a della Francesca Annunciation.



This is one cover I remember vividly from my high school years. I always thought of that painting when I thought of the book that I had read. Before my memory was sullied by the Bruce Willis movie adaptation.