Design: Roy Kuhlman and Erwin Poell jacket-covers
September 1, 2011 
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Over the past decade, the art of the handmade poster has returned to fashion in a mammoth way through underground rock circles (check out gigposters.com for examples of work by literally thousands of contemporary poster artists), forcing all those highly-paid graphic designers who went to school to (supposedly) learn how to have taste to ramp up their own game significantly. Every movie fan has seen and drooled over the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema’s ongoing screen-printed poster series, and it made me want to look back at a couple designers who – despite working in a commercial medium – were able to reach heights of artistry that few since have been able to top.
Roy Kuhlman (1923-2007) designed over 700 avant garde/jazz/beat-infused covers for Grove Press books in the levitra 20mg side effects 1950s and 60s. Although Kuhlman is in company with fellow pioneering book jacket artists Alvin Lustig and Rudy de Harak, I feel a deeper connection to Kuhlman’s work just by virtue of the fact that I inherited many Grove Press books as a teenager and became viagra buy online cheap hooked on his stuff back then.
Another designer – probably the only guy who could make you want to collect boring medical journals in a language you can’t read – is German/Swiss type-designer and lithographer Erwin Poell (1930-) who did the covers for Naturwissenschaft und Medizin magazine (1965-1972), which are gorgeous modernist artworks that visually explored the meticulous systems contained within the mag’s pages. In 1992 a German book of his artwork was released, entitled ‘Entwürfe für den Alltag. Typografie. Grafik-Design. Art Direction’.
(this collection of n+m covers comes courtesy of the Things to Look At design blog)
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About the author:
Kier-La Janisse is a film writer, publisher, producer, acquisitions executive for Severin Films and an Adjunct Associate Professor in the School of Communication and Creative Arts at Deakin University. She is the author of Cockfight: A Fable of Failure (2024), House of Psychotic Women: An Autobiographical Topography of Female Neurosis in Horror and Exploitation Films (2012/2022) and A Violent Professional: The Films of Luciano Rossi (2007) and has been an editor on numerous books including Warped & Faded: Weird Wednesday and the Birth of the American Genre Film Archive (2021) and Satanic Panic: Pop-Cultural Paranoia in the 1980s (2015). She wrote, directed and produced the award-winning documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror (2021), levitra without registration and produced the acclaimed blu-ray box sets All the Haunts Be Ours: A Compendium of Folk Horror (2021) and The Sensual World of Black Emanuelle (2023).
