Covering The 60s

George Lois was the genius graphic designer responsible for the legendary series of covers of Esquire magazine that were an icon-shattering and icon-defining commentary on the '60s. This collection of the best of those covers includes short anecdotes by Lois, but the chief interest is in the pictures he created. His covers were generally poster-like and free of excess words, and yet these pictures say plenty. The list of subjects is stellar: Marilyn Monroe, Norman Mailer, Muhammad Ali, Andy Warhol, Germaine Greer, and Richard Nixon. Sometimes the picture is a tease for the story within, sometimes it subverts it (as in the cover of a hangdog Roy Cohn with a ridiculous halo that accompanied a self-justifying piece written by Cohn). Only one of the covers reproduced here, a nude shot of Jack Nicholson, was cut before press time.

The hectic cultural and political upheavals occurring in the 1960s marked a divide between the relatively stable cultural environment of the previous decade and what is now regarded as the golden age of pop music and youth culture. The flourishing of alternative cultures in the latter part of the decade laid many of the foundations of later trends and subcultures. And this influence is nowhere more apparent than in record packaging, with classic graphic design and layouts reappearing again and again. ‘Classic Album Covers of the 60s’ is a collection of over 200 of the very best (and in some cases) worst that designers had to offer throughout the decade. Representative designs from each period are illustrated in full colour, taking the reader on a journey from the wholesome joviality of the 'Very Merry Macs' and 'Muscle Beach Party', through stylish and understated jazz cover designs, to the best psychedelic designs of the late 60s such as the Beatles’ "Sgt Pepper" and the Incredible String Band’s "The 5000 Spirits". The changing style of album cover design illustrated in ‘Classic Album Covers of the 60s’ provides a fascinating reflection of changing cultural trends during a decade whose ideas and artistic expressions sought to break the prevailing rules and, so doing, laid the foundations for cover design today.

A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of the Year From the National Book Award winner, a masterful history of the decade whose conflicts shattered America’s postwar order and divide us still. On July 4, 1961, the rising middle-class families of a Chicago neighborhood gathered before their flag-bedecked houses, a confident vision of the American Dream. That vision was shattered over the following decade, its inequities at home and arrogance abroad challenged by powerful civil rights and antiwar movements. Assassinations, social violence, and the blowback of a “silent majority” shredded the American fabric. Covering the late 1950s through the early 1970s, The Shattering focuses on the period’s fierce conflicts over race, sex, and war. The civil rights movement develops from the grassroots activism of Montgomery and the sit-ins, through the violence of Birmingham and the Edmund Pettus Bridge, to the frustrations of King’s Chicago campaign, a rising Black nationalism, and the Nixon-era politics of busing and the Supreme Court. The Vietnam war unfolds as Cold War policy, high-stakes politics buffeted by powerful popular movements, and searing in-country experience. Americans’ challenges to government regulation of sexuality yield landmark decisions on privacy rights, gay rights, contraception, and abortion. Kevin Boyle captures the inspiring and brutal events of this passionate time with a remarkable empathy that restores the humanity of those making this history. Often they are everyday people like Elizabeth Eckford, enduring a hostile crowd outside her newly integrated high school in Little Rock, or Estelle Griswold, welcoming her arrest for dispensing birth control information in a Connecticut town. Political leaders also emerge in revealing detail: we track Richard Nixon’s inheritances from Eisenhower and his debt to George Wallace, who forged a message of racism mixed with blue-collar grievance that Nixon imported into Republicanism. The Shattering illuminates currents that still run through our politics. It is a history for our times.

The hectic cultural and political upheavals occurring in the 1960s marked a divide between the relatively stable cultural environment of the previous decade and what is now regarded as the golden age of pop music and youth culture. Flourishing alternative cultures in the latter part of the decade laid many of the foundations of later trends and subcultures and this influence is nowhere more apparent than in record packaging, with classic graphic design and layouts reappearing again and again. This newly reformatted edition of Classic Album Covers of the 60s is a collection of over 200 of the very best (and in some cases worst) that designers had to offer throughout the decade. Representative designs from each period are illustrated in full colour, taking the reader on a journey from the wholesome joviality of the Very Merry Macs and Muscle Beach Party, through stylish and understated jazz cover designs, to the best psychedelic designs of the late 60s such as the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper and the Incredible String Band’s The 5000 Spirits. The changing style of album cover design illustrated in Classic Album Covers of the 60s provides a fascinating reflection of changing cultural trends during a decade whose ideas and artistic expressions sought to break the prevailing rules and, so doing, laid the foundations for cover design today.

The next instalment in the acclaimed New Yorker 'decades' series featuring an all-star line-up of historical pieces from the 1960s alongside new pieces by current New Yorker staffers. The 1960s, the most tumultuous decade of the twentieth century, were a time of tectonic shifts in all aspects of society – from the March on Washington and the Second Vatican Council to the Summer of Love and Woodstock. No magazine chronicled the immense changes of the period better than The New Yorker. This capacious volume includes historic pieces from the magazine’s pages that brilliantly capture the sixties, set alongside new assessments by some of today’s finest writers. Here are real-time accounts of these years of turmoil: Calvin Trillin reports on the integration of Southern universities, E. B. White and John Updike wrestle with the enormity of the Kennedy assassination and Jonathan Schell travels with American troops into the jungles of Vietnam. The murder of Martin Luther King, Jr., the fallout of the 1968 Democratic Convention, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, the Six-Day War: all are brought to immediate and profound life in these pages. The New Yorker of the 1960s was also the wellspring of some of the truly timeless works of American journalism. Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem and James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time all first appeared in The New Yorker and are featured here. The magazine also published such indelible short story masterpieces as John Cheever’s ‘The Swimmer’ and John Updike’s ‘A & P’, alongside poems by Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. The arts underwent an extraordinary transformation during the decade, one mirrored by the emergence in The New Yorker of critical voices as arresting as Pauline Kael and Kenneth Tynan. Among the crucial cultural figures profiled here are Simon & Garfunkel, Tom Stoppard, Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsberg, Cassius Clay (before he was Muhammad Ali), and Mike Nichols and Elaine May. The assembled pieces are given fascinating contemporary context by current New Yorker writers, including Jill Lepore, Malcolm Gladwell and David Remnick. The result is an incomparable collective portrait of a truly galvanising era. With contributions from: Truman Capote, John Updike, E.B. White, Rachel Carson, James Baldwin, Jonathan Schell, Dwight Macdonald, Renata Adler, Hannah Arendt, Pauline Kael, AJ Liebling, Nat Hentoff, Calvin Trillin, Xavuer Rynne, John McPhee, Anthony Hiss and more.

During the 1960s, many models, Playboy centerfolds, beauty queens, and Las Vegas showgirls went on to become "decorative actresses" appearing scantily clad on film and television. This well illustrated homage to 75 of these glamour girls reveals their unique stories through individual biographical profiles, photographs, lists of major credits and, frequently, in-depth personal interviews. Included are Carol Wayne, Edy Williams, Inga Neilsen, Thordis Brandt, Jo Collins, Phyllis Davis, Melodie Johnson, and many equally unforgettable faces of sixties Hollywood.

This is a unique collection of cover artwork of revolutionary Jazz releases in the USA in the 1970s, a time of great political and social importance for African-American artists. Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and John Coltrane loom large as self-determination, economic power and musical freedom led to artists finding new paths - both musical and economic. Away from the mainstream, many of these musicians chose to 'take control' of their economic worth by recording, releasing and distributing their own material. Thirty years later and these artefacts are a striking reflection of the time; pre-desktop publishing, pre-internet these small-run (sometimes as low as 500 copies), self-made sleeves are as iconic and historically important as the revolution of D-I-Y culture that sprang out of Punk. Soul Jazz Records have produced many releases relating to this music and this book is the first ever collection of this amazing artwork. The book comes with a large introduction contextualising the music and artwork and relating how the music came about along with interviews with many of the people involved.