Lo. Lee. Ta.

Today I went to The Field and picked wild flowers and pressed them within the pages of my artbook. It isn't as glamorous as it seems. I killed alot of bugs.

That isn't important. What I'm concerned about today is Lolita. I'm reading the book currently and I'm really enjoying it. Vladimir spent years perfecting it and you can tell this from the prose. It is some of the best prose I've ever read. The imagery and allusion is perfection.

You probably aren't surprised to hear that I first learned about the book on Tumblr. Tumblr is crazy about Lolita. The scan of the first page of the book has 10 000+ notes but alot of those notes are from people who've never read the book and have interpreted it as a 'love story' because of past novel covers and old films.

In reality, it is about a man who is sexually obsessed with a child. It is beautiful not because of the so-called 'romance' between the characters of Humbert and little Haze but because of how the controversial story has been pieced together in such a way which causes one to think Humbert's actions are okay because he spends so much time convincing himself they are O.K. So read Lolita. Just think about it, please. Because there is a serious problem about what most people think of Lolita. I'll rant more about it at a later date.

If you want to see more covers than I've shown below, visit http://www.dezimmer.net/Covering%20Lolita/LoCov.html

Past covers:

Among the problems Nabokov’s Lolita poses for the book designer, probably the thorniest is the popular misconception of the title character. She’s chronically miscast as a teenage sexpot—just witness the dozens of soft-core covers over the years. “We are talking about a novel which has child rape at its core,” says John Bertram, an architect and blogger who, three years ago, sponsored a Lolita cover competition asking designers to do better.
Now the contest is being turned into a book, Lolita: Story of a Cover Girl, due out in June and coedited by Yuri Leving, with essays on historical cover treatments along with new versions by 60 well-known designers, two-thirds of them women: Barbara deWilde, Jessica Helfand, Peter Mendelsund, and Jennifer Daniel, to name a few. They don’t shy away from frank sexuality, but they add layers of darkness and complication. And like Jamie Keenan’s cover—a claustrophobic room that morphs into a girl in her underwear—they provoke without asking readers to abdicate their responsibility.

—Michael Sliverberg



to see Silverberg's full article go to http://imprint.printmag.com/illustration/recovering-lolita/




newer contest covers: