Matt Curtius’s cover illustration for first novel #ifyouleaveme for. It seems to be particularly favored for vaguely momentous occasions: Judy Blume’s first adult novel in 17 years, Richard Flanagan and Leif Enger’s first books in a decade, Marilynne Robinson essay collections destined, as ever, for prestigious honors with long names. Also: Crystal Hana Kim’s novel If You Leave Me (HarperCollins), Tim Kreider’s essay collection I Wrote This Book Because I Love You (Simon & Schuster), and Mieke Eerkens’s memoir All Ships Follow Me (Picador). It’s fitting, then, that Blair also used Lydian (in red with a drop highlight) for the cover of Judy Blume’s deeply morbid 2015 novel In the Unlikely Event, which is about three plane crashes and, sort of unfortunately, romantic love as the main protective barrier between individuals and the horrors of fate.īlair’s influence radiated outward quickly, crossing publishing houses and genres: Lydian is used on Andrew Martin’s fiction debut Early Work, released by Farrar, Strauss & Giroux last year, as well as Qing Li’s Forest Bathing, a guide to using trees to make you healthier, published by Penguin Random House. This collection of essays is just too jam-packed with great stuff to summarize in a caption.Ī post shared by Reading in Style on at 11:56am PDT It uses black Lydian Bold for the type, set against geometric shapes in bright, trendy colors, combining for a look that’s somehow both super-serious and incredibly whimsical, like Martha Stewart die-cutting elements for a funeral invitation. (Candy stores are also good but not when they dwell too much on chocolate!) Bookstores are Lydian hotbeds.įor example, whether or not you’ve read it, you’ve very possibly seen the cover for Against Everything, a widely acclaimed 2016 collection of essays by n+1 founder Mark Greif, which was designed by Pantheon Books art director and Knopf associate art director Kelly Blair and is also pretty enough to sit at the top of Instagram feeds and near the front of basically any bookstore. Most of where I turn is bookstores, not because I’m supremely literate but because I love rows of repeating, colorful things. In the wake of the site’s demise, I’ve been seeing Lydian everywhere I turn.
We used the font to convey what we thought of as a highbrow tackiness, or an approachable snarkiness, but sometimes bickered about whether it was “too witchy.” NBC Where it is: My first intimate interaction with new-wave Lydian was last year, when I worked briefly at the now-defunct digital magazine Damn Joan. In the 1960s and ’70s, it appeared in the credits for Lucille Ball’s The Lucy Show and Here’s Lucy, but mostly it faded from popular culture for decades until reappearing briefly, first on the cover Patti Smith’s 1992 memoir Woolgathering and, more importantly, in 1994, in the credits for NBC’s Friends. Russo’s This Yielding Flesh (which was subtitled, somewhat incredibly, “She flung herself into a man’s arms to save herself from an unnatural life”). In addition to dozens of Nancy Drew titles, Lydian was used on a variety of pulp novels throughout the 1950s - including paperback romances like Paul V. Lydian Bold was chosen as its title font, jump-starting a decade of the font as a go-to for commercial fiction. But in 1946, artist Rudy Nappi was hired by Nancy Drew publisher Grosset & Dunlap and art director Ted Tedesco to redesign the series’ cover with a dust jacket that was covered all the way around - with a bigger illustration and a more striking overall design. During the war, serialized novels like The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew had super-simple covers with plain white spines and were published on cheap paper, in keeping with the patriotic austerity of the time.
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