Going Cover to Cover with Chip Kidd
By James Norton

Vladimir Nabokov was a lepidopterist. Benjamin Disraeli was the prime minister of England. Steve Martin is an actor and comedian.

Novelists with serious second professions are exceptional — for each one who happens to be a world-class mathematician or sculptor, you'll find 10 who know nothing beyond fiction, publishing or journalism. But as difficult as it may be to balance fiction with another serious career, it can pay big dividends when it comes time to write. The result can be books drenched with the nuance of the author's other, non-literary life.

For first-time novelist Chip Kidd, a career in visual art serves as the wellspring for his new book, "The Cheese Monkeys." It's a bit of an understatement to say the author's day job is doing graphic design.

Kidd, whose stunning book-jacket designs have graced the likes of "Jurassic Park" and "American Rhapsody," strides like an inky colossus among contemporary book-cover designers, earning plaudits throughout the graphic design community for his ability to create evocative and stunningly direct images in a variety of styles. But as artistic as his cover design has been, it's still packaging. In effect, Kidd and designers like him take content provided by others and give it form — form that represents the essential qualities of the book in question — and delivers a stab of imagery to consumers that says "buy me!"

Serving as the face for the creations of others can, however, get a bit old.

"Graphic design is a service industry," says Kidd. "And graphic designers get frustrated with that after a while, and I can't blame them. At some point, I just decided I didn't want to be doing the covers anymore. I definitely felt that graphic design hadn't really been addressed in fiction before. And maybe it shouldn't be, but I thought 'at least I'll give it a shot.'"

"The Cheese Monkeys" is more than an idle attempt. The book, which centers on two bright, unconventional students weathering a graphic-design course at a major Mid-Atlantic university in the 1950s, is a firestorm. The personalities of its three main characters collide, combine, clash and tear each other apart, using graphic design as the fuel for their varied expressions of interpersonal passion, contempt for society and artistic questioning. The book is unstinting in its willingness to seriously mess around with the basic principles of communication — what is good graphic design? How can an image speak with clarity and power? And what sort of work ethic does a graphic designer need to get beyond survival, and grow?

It's also funny. Very funny.

In the hands of the wrong person, much of Kidd's more serious subject matter could have turned from gold to lead. But his characters keep it bright and shiny. The observant, overawed freshman known as Happy, the bracingly cynical Himillsy Dodd (imagine Dorothy Parker as an undergrad) and the angry, brilliant teacher Winter Sorbeck spend much of "The Cheese Monkeys" expounding on and arguing about using images to communicate, a topic near and dear to the heart of their creator.

"Between [Winter] and Himillsy, it's pretty much me shouting from a stump," says Kidd. "But I also wanted to hopefully present things that they had to say not as necessarily gospel, but — Winter's not right all the time, Himillsy's not right all the time, neither is Happy — everything's up for debate. And I think that's what makes for intelligent discourse ... or however you want to say it."

Much of the book's discourse comes by way of Sorbeck's bizarrely challenging class assignments for Art 127: Introduction to Graphic Design. In one case, Sorbeck buses the students out of town on a cold day, gives them sheets of poster board and markers, and tells them to design signs that will make cars pick them up so they can hitchhike home. The faster they're picked up, the better the grade. And if their design skills fail, freezing in the countryside will make getting an "F" seem inconsequential indeed — this is not a book that could be comfortably set in the 1990s.

"In today's age of campus political correctness, there's no way Winter would get away with the stuff he gets away with, which he definitely needs to, to make the book interesting," says Kidd. "And I thought it was good that it occurred before the construction of Pop Art because that just confuses everything. And it's not that it's not worthy of discussion, but it just calls too much into question."

Setting "The Cheese Monkeys" in the 1950s had another thing going for it: It allowed Kidd to transcend some literary conventions.

"Frankly, I liked the idea of writing a novel about college students that didn't have the words 'fuck' or 'cool' in it," he says. "Not because I'm a prude, but because they've become such a cliché."

"The Cheese Monkeys" dodges clichés like oil companies dodge federal income tax. What begins as a wacky-but-conventional coming-of-age struggle at a big, faceless university quickly becomes a book that rips into the source code of Kidd's fascinations: visual art, complicated human relationships and the dastardly trade of teaching. Throughout the book, Sorbeck takes teaching both more lightly and more seriously than any fictional instructor since Professor Henry Higgins. Kidd's fascination with the mechanics of teaching — and the sublime art of teaching well — springs from experience.

"I taught for six years at the School of Visual Arts in New York," says Kidd. "I sort of had a loathe/hate relationship with [teaching]. I had a lot of conflicting opinions about it, frankly. I would like it a lot for about the first month, and then by February I was just asking myself 'why on Earth did I agree to do this?' And then by May something strange would happen: All the kids would totally get their acts together and produce a really great portfolio. It really happened like that every year. So every year I would reluctantly agree to do it again."

After years of work, however, Kidd burned out on the experience.

"The regular teaching thing became too much like community service, as though I'd been caught drunk driving, and I had to give back. But I had a lot of really good kids, and you walk into any bookstore today and you'll see one or two book covers by somebody that I taught. So that's nice."

The cover of the "The Cheese Monkeys" is Kidd's project, however, and it boasts a design many books would proudly be judged by. The cover slips off to reveal a second design rendered in pictograms. Chris Ware contributed typography. Text dances delicately along the top and bottom edges and the sides of the pages. And the book's text runs from endpaper to endpaper — it's laid out perfectly. But this didn't come without sacrifice.

"[My publishers] knew what they were getting into with all of this, and they've been really supportive," says Kidd. "The only real ... not bone of contention ... but sort of at the eleventh hour ... they said 'the numbers just aren't working on this, something has to go.' And so I ultimately had to take a lower royalty in order to get the printed endpapers.

"But you know, that was really important to me. It wasn't a big deal, it was just something that had to be dealt with and I said 'OK, I'll take a hit to the royalty and we'll go with the printed endpapers.' It was all paginated out perfectly. So all of a sudden if you can't go with the endpapers it would just screw everything up, for one, but more importantly at the end of the book, the kids are just kind of spat out into the world — and I wanted the reader to be sort of spat out of the book at the end of it, too. So it really goes all the way to the end, and you close the cover, and that's it."

E-mail James Norton at jrnorton@flakmag.com.