The design and redesign of various editions of Invisible Man serves as an index of Ellison's fluctuating status in the literary marketplace. From Random House’s modernist dust jackets to Signet’s eye-catching pulps to Vintage’s “hip” reprints, the designs of Ellison’s books reveal the surprising turns by which his work (and midcentury modernism generally) has been incorporated into institutions of reading. This chapter approaches the history of those designs as a privileged site for examining Ellison’s canonization as an American author.

The chapter sees Ibsen’s success as a playwright through the lens of his books as material, visual, technological, commercial and social objects. It explores his publisher Gyldendal’s strategies for enhancing Ibsen’s name in the market by means of his books. In the course of Ibsen’s more than thirty years of collaboration with Gyldendal, his books’ bindings went through three main phases: The rococo revival period (1867–81), the ‘Ibsen signature binding’ (1882–98) and the Collected Works (1898). All three phases take into account the taste of readers, current ideas in craft and design, new technology, as well as representing consciously wrought marketing moves. The lavishly decorated cloth bindings were introduced in full agreement with Ibsen and they reflected a pull towards the sentimental among his middle-class book buyers. The signature binding was a decorated prototype cloth binding exclusively designed for Ibsen. The claim is that the signature binding, by means of its uniform design as well as by making the author’s name the most eye-catching part of the front cover, utilized Romantic ideas about the author-genius.

This monograph closes with a reading of Sterne’s extra-textual collaboration with Joshua Reynolds and William Hogarth, on frontispieces for his Sermons of Mr. Yorick as well as for Tristram Shandy. These images were both free-standing as well as bookish ones bound within Sterne’s works, and served as important marketable visuals to prospective buyers. This final discussion of design elements beyond the narrative proper of Tristram Shandy demonstrates how, for Sterne, his literary project spanned print media, constructing an image of the man and the book as a print commodity.

In the late 1960s and 1970s a confluence of anticolonial politics and publishing revitalized the Cairo–Beirut link, itself emblematic of the turn of the century Arab nahda. This connection saw a reverse flow, which advantaged Beirut by way of Cairo’s amassed expertise in the publishing industry. Emerging Arab nationalist Beirut-based publishers relied on expertise in the production of illustrated books and periodicals developed in Cairo. Chapter 4 examines the subsequent Cairo–Beirut circuit of graphic design modernism, while probing the political relations and cultures of the visual carried through the influx of this expertise. The analysis brings to light a visual culture that embodies a modernist double claim of aesthetic authenticity, articulating Arab socialist politics with processes of artistic decolonization in and through printed mass media. The analysis is focused on Helmi el-Touni’s move from Cairo to Beirut in 1974 and his settling there for a decade, tracing the aesthetic and political relations articulated in his graphic design practice, while analysing in particular two sustained consultancies he undertook with Beirut-based Arab nationalist institutions: Beirut’s Arabic Book Fair and the Arab Institute for Research and Publishing.

Elena Rebollo-Cortés examines how the material features of Sylvia Plath’s final two books have played a key role in establishing a critical framework for the interpretation of her texts and in defining her posthumous identity as a writer. In the context of the publishing history and the literary afterlife of Plath’s works, Rebollo-Cortés shows us how the figure of Plath has been presented to readers through the visual and textual packaging of key editions of Ariel and The Bell Jar. These key works have had a wide readership and large presence in the literary market. Their editions have therefore played a major role in the creation and perpetuation of Plath’s identification with a tragic figure. This concentration on books as historical and material objects presupposes that editions are (sometimes overlooked) vehicles of meaning, revealing, for example, that editions of Ariel disclose how Plath has been portrayed as a Faber poet, a woman poet, or a myth, while editions of The Bell Jar have privileged biographical readings of the novel.