Mid-Century Modern Architecture Travel Guide: West Coast USA by Sam Lubell, photographs by Darren Bradley
Phaidon, 2016
Flexicover, 376 pages

[All photographs courtesy of Phaidon]

I've never considered that the idiom "never judge a book by its cover" should be ascribed to illustrated books. It makes sense in regards to works of fiction, where the text could hardly be distilled into a cover image. But covers of illustrated books, while not capturing every aspect of the contents, contain some accuracy about the words and images inside. Take the geometric cover of the Mid-Century Modern Architecture Travel Guide, which features five rows of patterned shapes: diamonds, circles, squares, hexagons, and triangles, from top to bottom. These shapes reference the five chapters that the 254 buildings are grouped into and they reflect the graphic design of the pages and maps, but they also capture the mood of mid-century modernism from a remove, much like the cover of Sugar's File Under Easy Listening. More subtly, the cover implies that the guidebook's author and photographer have a love of mid-century modern architecture that runs deep.
My first thought on flipping through the book was "what entails mid-century modern architecture"" It's an oft-used phrase, thanks to Dwell magazine, the popularity of Eames furniture and the sentimentality of baby boomers, among other things, but it's used so often that its definition is implied rather than explicitly st...