Wendell Minor: Art for the Written Word : Twenty-Five Years of Book Cover Art - Hardcover

Many readers will recognize the work of Minor with no notion of who he is. Minor's work appears on the covers of over 100 best-selling books, including ten by James Michner, seven by Larry McMurtry, and those of Ray Bradbury, Garrison Keillor, Toni Morrison, Martin Cruz Smith, Mary Higgins Clark, Paul Theroux, and many others. An amazingly prolific and versatile artist, he points to Edward Hopper, Rene Magritte, and Andrew Wyeth as antecedents. While David McCullough's excellent essay pulls the book together, this captivating retrospective uses the words (in letters, essays, and interviews) of authors and others in publishing to illuminate the relationship between their books and Minor's covers. John Hersey's comments about the cover of The Wall and Keillor's disappearing nipples anecdote are satisfying, but some comments (like Michner's condescending letter) could have been omitted. Recommended for libraries that want more focused depth than works such as Steven Heller and Seymour Chwast's Jacket Required: An Illustrated History of the American Book Jacket, 1920-1950 (LJ 5/1/95).?Daniel J. Lombardo, Jones Lib., Amherst, Mass.
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