Alvin Lustig was a modern designer , who chose away from some moderns ,Ideally rejecting the sacredness of the classic frame and central axis of type, He was very aligned with humanism,Acknowledging the interplay between the past and the present , with allot of learning and self teaching the new finner elements of typography, practicing on an old print machine at the age of twenty ,kept in the back of a drug store where he tightened his stronghold on his own thought of typography.Thoroughly thought upon the production of typography to release itself of boundaries of form and contrast and let the form speak for itself . which wasn't to over power a client or buyer,with type but to stimulate and tell of emotion and story ,A year or so later he retired from printing to devote himself exclusively to design. He became a charter member of a very small group (including Saul Bass, Rudolph de Harak, John Foli and Louis Danziger) called The Los Angeles Society for Contemporary Designers, whose members were frustrated by the dearth of creative vision exhibited by West Coast businesss
Lustig created monuments of ingenuity and objects of aesthetic pleasure. Whereas graphic design history is replete with artifacts that define certain disciplines and are also works of art, for a design to be so considered it must overcome the vicissitudes of fashion and be accepted as an integral part of the visual language. Though Lustig would consider it a small part of his overall output, no single project is more significant in this sense than his 1949 paperback cover for Lorca: 3 Tragedies ,said as a masterpiece of symbolic acuity ,composition strength and typographic craft .
This structure in which Lustig created , consciously or not ,would be followed throughout book jacket and covers time and time again .
Lustig within his time was sourcing text and scripts from England, Germany and other places which were very hard to find and receive ,at the time, He would Photostat or cut and print, sometimes draw to his own liking , add his own little eclectic touch , thus creating his own outlook , for the purpose he intended.
As publisher of New Directions, Laughlin hired Lustig in the early 1940s and gave him the latitude to experiment with personal graphic forms. New Directions’ quirky list of reprints, which featured such authors as Henry Miller, Gertrude Stein, D.H. Lawrence and James Joyce, was a proving ground for the designer’s visual explorations and distinctive graphic poetry.
http://faceoutbooks.com/149660/Alvin-Lustig-Covers
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