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Cover Story: Lolita—The Story of a Cover Girl

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A classic 20th-century novel continues to inspire countless cover designs

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In March of 1951, The New Yorker rejected Vladimir Nabokov’s latest submission, “The Vane Sisters,” on the grounds of its “overwhelming style,” “light story,” and “elaboration.” The author, then living in Ithaca and teaching at Cornell, fired back a prickly response. “All my stories are webs of style and none seems at first blush to contain much kinetic matter,” he wrote to editor Katherine White. “For me ‘style’ is matter.” His apparent defiance of the laws of literary physics has long bewitched readers—and thwarted cover designers.

Cover design by Michael Bierut. From Lolita—The Story of a Cover Girl, by John Bertram and Yuri Leving, eds. (2013, Print Books/F & W Media)

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