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The Nympho and Other Maniacs. The Sun Is My Undoing. I Who Should Command All.
All three are book titles from the far-flung collection of the Institute Library on Chapel Street, and all three catch the eye through the sheer absurdity of their language.
In another part of the collection, the books Oil for the Lamps of China and The Ghost Book draw the gaze by virtue of their dazzling cover art. And then there are books like Never Fire First and Raising Demons that manage to do both.
“Cover Story: In Praise of the Exterior Surface” — up now at the Gallery Upstairs at the Institute Library now through June 1 — is pretty much exactly what the title suggests. It’s a tour through the most eye-catching book covers in the library’s large collection, and as the library reassumes regular hours, a way to reintroduce the place itself to the community around it.
“Founded before the Civil War, The Institute Library has, over the years, accumulated a surprising and often mysterious collection of fiction, biography, travel, history, drama, and poetry. Perusing the stacks during this Covid-19 pandemic has led to some happy discoveries too good not to share. This spring, why not present items from the library as art, thus opening selections from our collection to the digital realm for the first time? This exhibit―actual and virtual― takes some of our finest, funniest, and most intriguing book covers designed to tantalize and inspire,” Lewis wrote in the exhibit’s official press release.
The old cliche to not judge a book by its cover, Lewis continued, “smacks of the puritanical mistrust of the colorful, the beautiful, and the conspicuous, which favors the precision of word over the pleasures of image. Literacy is an elite, learned skill, unlike images, which may be appreciated by all who see. Our early ancestors and children both first express themselves through pictures. The egalitarian nature of images, the primacy, is thus potentially also uncivilized, wild. There is also the faint whiff of disdain: images are not to be trusted, flimflam, magic tricks, sleight of hand. Book covers are enticing con artists used to sell the text within.”
“Since rules are made to be broken, and being lectured about what not to do is essentially a challenge,” Lewis concludes, the exhibit presents “a smorgasbord of titles from our collection for you to frivolously, shallowly, pick your favorites.”
The idea for the exhibit was “something I’ve been thinking about for a long time,” Lewis said, especially as she found herself increasingly using books from the library as part of previous shows she has curated at the library. With the library reopening for regular hours on Tuesdays and Thursdays, she decided she “wanted something fun for spring — something fun, but not stupid.”
So she and gallery intern Ava Hathaway Hacker, along with the library’s manager Eva Geertz and others, began going through the library’s entire collection, looking for covers that caught their eyes. “It’s such a strange collection,” Lewis said of the Institute Library’s holdings. “It’s a work of art in itself.” As Lewis and Hathaway Hacker selected their titles, they amassed a pile of books that “annoyed everyone” in the library, Lewis said. Lewis made a point of not reading any of the books that she selected — they were to be judged only by their covers.
The exhibit was “bringing the library’s interior to the exterior,” Lewis said. “There’s a real inside-outside, outside-inside thing going on.” The pleasures of the exhibit were to began with its surface details — the “tactile nature” of the books themselves, Lewis said. With their fabric binding and their stamped typeface covers, “these are real labors of love. The thought and care that went into them — they’re meant to fit perfectly in your hand. Sort of like a smart phone.” She appreciated the way the book designs ranged from the elegant and ornate to the overtly kitschy.
Nonetheless, as Lewis and Hathaway Hacker began finalizing which books were to be part of the exhibit, Lewis noticed trends among the titles. Assumptions about manhood. Assumptions over womanhood. Sea voyages. Books about doctors. Adventure stories — particularly those of Jack London, whose books the Institute Library happens to have a particularly nice collection of. Lewis saw in the titles a series of organizing ideas, a way to arrange them to make a statement or two.
“This is as close as I’ve come to making my own work of art in here,” she said.
One overarching theme running through much of the collection — in Lewis’s view, reflecting the viewpoint of the Institute’s membership in the library’s heyday of amassing books many decades ago — is of “White dominance over the world,” and White male dominance at that. “There’s a lot of racism. There’s a lot of stuff that’s patently sexist.”
Should these titles be put on display? “I think it’s important to keep things,” Lewis said — and just as important to be able to see and confront them. The inherent, obvious racism and sexism in the titles is a double-edged sword. They can offend, certainly, but that we see them as obviously racist and sexist now is itself a source of hope. “To say there’s been no progress made is just not true,” Lewis said; many of the covers simply wouldn’t be published today in the forms that they appear in the show. That we find it offensive is a sign of that progress. And speaking of the sexist titles as a woman, she said, “they’re offensive,” but she can find them “funny, because I feel my power over them.”
Importantly, the great majority of the books in the exhibit are ones that have already fallen into obscurity, and their obvious problems make it easy to see why. Most of the books, Lewis said, “were never meant to be literature. They were meant to be entertaining,” with not necessarily a lot of “nutritional content.”
Notable exceptions include titles by Herman Melville, Louisa May Alcott, and P.G. Wodehouse, and perhaps most fun, a few works by Shirley Jackson, a horror and mystery writer who published books and stories throughout the 1950s, and whose star continues to rise with each passing year. The kitschiness of the covers of her books in the Institute Library reads as intentionally sarcastic even at the time of publication; it’s possible to imagine a book designer using the same cover now to illustrate Jackson’s dark, wicked takes on life in suburbia and the horrors of conformity. Jackson once described Life Among the Savages, published in 1952 (the Institute Library’s cover is the original one), as a “disrespectful memoir of my children,” its title meant even then as a pointed, curlicuing irony.
Thanks to support from the William Reese Company, the Institute Library will be able to present a digital, online version of the exhibit as well, through its website and through social media. As Lewis writes, “there is no more appropriately superficial place to get judgmental or to just click one’s preferences than social media. To that end, we are running this event as a social media beauty contest ― do you have a favorite? We crave your ‘likes’ and loves’ and will greedily count and tabulate until we have a winner. It’s spring, and the pandemic is over a year old. We need diversion. Let’s be frivolous and unapologetically revel in this unique collection.”
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“This whole place is a work of art,” Lewis said of the Institute Library — from the collection of books to the artwork and records to the building itself. “If we don’t enjoy it, what’s the point?”
“Cover Story” runs at the Institute Library, 847 Chapel St., through June 1. Visit the library’s website for hours and more information.
I love old books for the beauty and care that went into their covers and the quality of their paper for their pages. There's something about the smell and feel of old books, too. Some of my most favorite insides of old books have boring drab covers, and others have glorious covers over the most boring and dry contents.
I love that the library exhibit did a display of simply the covers, and doesn't believe in censoring books based on our current sensibilities, those who don't know their history, are doomed to repeat its mistakes. It's important that museums and libraries preserve our history so we can look back at things that are no longer accepted or are outdated, to understand the times in which they were accepted and part of everyday culture. Libraries and museums are exactly the spaces we should relegate these types of items to.