Tea at Trianon: From Cover to Cover

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Friday, November 14, 2025

From Cover to Cover

From Mark Judge at The New Criterion:

Roy Kuhlman (1923–2007) worked during the mid-twentieth century, when graphic design was defined by experimentation. He designed seven hundred book covers and jackets for Grove Press, a publisher of modernist literature, psychology, Eastern religion, sociology, and radical politics. Kuhlman also worked on the design for Evergreen Review, Grove’s cultural magazine. In Roy Kuhlman: Reluctant Modernist, Steven Brower, who is a graphic designer himself, offers a selection of well over two hundred book covers designed by Kuhlman. These attest to his extraordinary ability for rendering “narrative abstraction,” as Steven Heller dubs Kuhlman’s style in his introduction to the volume.
Robert Alexander “Roy” Kuhlman was born in 1923 in Fort Worth, Texas, the son of an automobile mechanic and a nurse. Roy was born with a hole in his heart, a condition that made it hard for him to be physically active. After his family relocated to California, he took to drawing, and at Glendale High School he studied under Ernest Tonk, a painter specializing in landscapes of the American West. Despite serious continuing health-related difficulties, Kuhlman earned scholarships to study first at the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles and then at the Art Students League of New York in 1946.

In 1951 Kuhlman was looking for work in New York when he visited Barney Rosset, the publisher of Grove Press. As Brower writes, “Grove offered American readers their first introduction to the European dramatists of the Absurd, the French Surrealists, the San Francisco and New York ‘Beat’ poets, and the New York Abstract Expressionists.” Rosset was not impressed with Kuhlman’s portfolio until two pieces of abstract art slipped out of Kuhlman’s folder. “This is what I want!” Rosset exclaimed. Rosset, a friend of Willem de Kooning, was publishing avant-garde literature, including Krapp’s Last Tape by Samuel Beckett, Last Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby Jr., and The Balcony by Jean Genet. These experimental books needed suitably avant-garde covers, and Kuhlman was just the man for the job. Although Kuhlman and Rosset had a long and productive working relationship, the two men were never friends. “Never do business with friends,” Kuhlman said. “They’re more trouble than they’re worth.” (Read more.)