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Mary by Vladimir Nabokov5/20/2023 The book’s centerpiece is the Lolita Book Cover Project, for which Bertram, an architect based in Los Angeles, commissioned designers to create new covers for the book. A new book, “ Lolita: The Story of a Cover Girl: Vladimir Nabokov’s Novel in Art and Design,” edited by John Bertram and Yuri Leving, challenges this prevailing misrepresentation with essays by book designers, artists, and Nabokov scholars, and a preface by Mary Gaitskill that considers the problem of capturing Nabokov’s psychologically complex story in a single image. In the decades since, “Lolita” has become closely associated with certain images, most indelibly the nymphet in red, heart-shaped sunglasses on the poster for Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 movie adaptation, which many book versions have reproduced.īut the sexualized vision of Lolita perpetuated by popular culture has very little to do with the text of Nabokov’s novel, in which Lolita is not a teen-aged seductress but a sexually abused twelve-year-old girl. Designing a cover for a controversial novel is always a fraught endeavor, but few novels come with as much visual baggage as “Lolita.” Nabokov’s daring story has confounded book designers from the beginning: the cover of the first edition, published in 1955, was solid green.
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