In Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov (born 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 and Michael Bierut are two 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.
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. Scher's cover captures the novel's peculiar eroticism in custom letterforms that are ripe, fleshy and almost anatomical; while Bierut's cover cuts the book's title from a copy of the Mann Act, or White Slave Traffic Act, the 1910 law prohibiting interstate transportation of women and girls for "immoral purposes."
