Why vintage design books are now so radical?and radically expensive In February 1972, the design director at MIT Press thought she had a fabulous idea. The publisher?s forthcoming book was about Las Vegas, and she would make the cover an ?homage to Vegas Glitz.? Bubble wrap would echo the shape of the Strip?s bulb lights, fluorescent dots printed beneath would shine through the plastic. ?I thought: boy, this is wonderful material. I?m not gonna let them screw it,? she later told an interviewer. ?Well, they hated it! I loved it.?
The authors of the book responded by letter: ?The cover as designed is absolutely unacceptable: leaving out questions of good or bad design, it is inappropriate. It is against the philosophy of the book; it is a duck??heroic and original??almost fruity in its appearance.? And so, the seminal Learning from Las Vegas ended up with a straightforward exterior: Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, the authors, sketched for Muriel Cooper, the designer, ?a dignified conventional image?: dark cover with authors and title stamped in gilt, wrapped in an onionskin jacket heavy with text. The wink to the reader was only in the choice of photograph, a billboard for coconut oil and cocoa butter, ?Tan Hawaiian with TANYA,? in shades of yellow and sienna. Provocative, in every sense of the word.

Courtesy of Modernism 101

Two thousand copies of that first 14-by-11-inch edition of Learning from Las Vegas were printed. Cooper got her way ...