The Wall Street Journal-20080216-WEEKEND JOURNAL- Picks -- Chip Kidd- Just Asking- The Celebrated Book Designer Turned Author Releases His Second Novel
Return to: The_Wall_Street_Journal-20080216
WEEKEND JOURNAL; Picks -- Chip Kidd: Just Asking; The Celebrated Book Designer Turned Author Releases His Second Novel
Full Text (501 words)Chip Kidd's day job is designing books for Alfred A. Knopf, and he has created covers for works by John Updike, Michael Crichton, David Sedaris and Donna Tartt, among others. In 2001, Mr. Kidd, now 43 years old, published a comic novel, "The Cheese Monkeys," about a graphic- design student much like himself in his years at Penn State. His second novel, "The Learners," will be published next week. We talked to him about authority figures, typography and cheap thrills.
WSJ: I imagine you reading all these books so you could design their jackets and chatting with the authors and starting to think,"Hey, I'm at least as smart as that guy. I could do that."
Chip Kidd: It's a little more nuanced than that, but I'd be lying if I didn't say there's something to it. I also realized that no one was writing fiction about graphic design. I was setting out to prove why someone should.
Q: I saw "The Cheese Monkeys" described as "semifiction" -- I guess that means partly autobiographical. Is "The Learners" semifiction?
A: It's much more fiction, which made it a lot harder to write. What looms over "The Learners" is the experiments the psychologist Stanley Milgram did at Yale in 1961. [Dr. Milgram tested how far people could be pushed by an authority figure to give a stranger painful electrical shocks; the ones who got shocked were known as the "learners."] I first found out about the experiment in Psych 101 at Penn State. I was just starting to study design, and it struck me that what made the experiment so brilliant was its design. The form of it seemed to be one thing, and the content was something else entirely.
Q: In some ways "The Learners" is a sequel to "The Cheese Monkeys." How are they different?
A: "The Learners" is a much darker book. It starts out as a frothy office comedy, and then the experiment changes the main character. The last third is his downward spiral into suicidal depression. It's not the hardy-har-har romp that "The Cheese Monkeys" was. There's a component of despair.
Q: Is it still possible to invent an entirely new typeface?
A: The typeface used for the cover of "The Learners" was Chris Ware doing me a favor. He did it by hand. To someone who doesn't know much about typography, it looks nice, it's pretty. But people who know typography know that one of the few downsides of the digital age is that it's very difficult to do cursive lettering digitally.
Q: I was reading some Readers' Reviews of "The Cheese Monkeys" on Amazon -- do you ever read those?
A: Only every other day.
Q: One of them, by Christine L. of Maryland, said, "Chip, I'll read another one of your novels when you have the patience to 'apply' your skill (and you do have immense skill), rather than squandering it in flashy unconventionalism and cheap thrills."
A: She's going to be waiting a long time.
