‘Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins...’
The conceptual book cover for Lolita captures the novel's peculiar eroticism.
In Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov (born today in 1899) tells the story of his character Humbert Humbert's all-consuming obsession with the girlish Lolita—a romance that is strange, inappropriate and incredibly sexual, not to mention highly illegal. Pentagram's Paula Scher is one of 60 designers invited to create conceptual covers for Nabokov's classic for Lolita: Story of a Cover Girl, an upcoming collection of graphic representations of Lolita since its publication in 1955. Scher's new cover captures the novel's peculiar eroticism in custom letterforms that are ripe, fleshy and almost anatomical.
Edited by John Bertram and Yuri Leving, Lolita: Story of a Cover Girl was inspired by Dieter E. Zimmer's exhaustive online archive of Lolita covers, as well as a 2009 cover contest held by Bertram's blog, Venus Febriculosa. Pentagram's Michael Bierut has also contributed a Lolita design for the book, and several of the other designer submissions can be seen in a recent feature on Print's Imprint blog. Lolita: Story of a Cover Girl will be published this August by Print Books.
