By Karen Schechner

Whether it’s the gasping, crowded koi on After the Quake, The Elephant Vanishes’ pudgy mechanical elephant or hundreds of other choices, graphic designer Chip Kidd creates some preternaturally memorable book jackets. Kidd, who lives on the Upper East Side and in Stonington, Conn., confessed he doesn’t have the time to read all the books he’s designed in entirety, but it’s a list I can’t imagine anyone would knock off the nightstand—including David Sedaris’ Holidays on Ice, A.M. Homes’ In a Country of Mothers and David Rakoff’s Fraud.

When his first novel, The Cheese Monkeys, was published in 2001, there was a lot of curiosity from the Kidd cult wondering whether his fiction would be any good. And it was. The Cheese Monkeys is a fun, acerbic semi-autobiographical look at graphic design chronicled by Happy, a goofy budding artist. In his second novel, The Learners: The Book After The Cheese Monkeys, fans can continue to follow Happy into adulthood at Spear, Rakoff, and Ware, a Connecticut ad agency, where he gets embroiled in an office ruled in part by an unpredictable Great Dane (named Hamlet) and Mimi Rakoff, “a pasty, slacked-titted harpy,” as well as other eccentrics. Happy even stumbles into designing an ad for a Yale social psychology experiment, which resembles the 1961 Milgram Experiments.

But Kidd can talk about more than the anatomy of book design (literally). He’s also part of a band called artbreak and has a Batman comic book project in the works.

What drove your interest in the Milgram experiments?

I’ve been obsessed with them ever since I learned about them in college. They are so brilliantly designed, they became a metaphor for advertising itself. It starts with an ad in the paper recruiting for a memory experiment, so right away there’s total deception. I just thought it was such a brilliant ruse basically with a very noble goal. Milgram, for better or worse, achieved that goal, and it was quite alarming to everyone.

The Cheese Monkeys and The Learners seem to serve as a graphic design primer and tribute.
I was trying to fill a hole that I saw. I wasn’t really trying to invent a genre, but I didn’t think anyone was really dealing with graphic design in fiction. So I wanted to do that in a very basic way.

How much of your early experience in graphic design is similar to Happy’s?
A good bit in The Cheese Monkeys. Obviously I took some liberties. But the basic tenor is true to what I learned and the way I learned it, but that would only take you through your freshman year. But in The Learners I just used the general atmosphere of a place that I had worked. I based it on a summer internship that I had in State College, Pennsylvania.

So, you’ve written the book, designed its jacket. Is there any art form you haven’t conquered?

There’s conquered and then there’s conquered. I’d like to pursue a music project called artbreak. We’re a duo, and I’ve been doing that with an old friend from college. We reconnected at a McSweeney’s reading at Housing Works six years ago.

If you could, what kind of soundtrack would you give The Learners?

There’s some music described in certain parts of the book. I wouldn’t go much beyond that. I was very impressed with the whole soundtracklessness of No Country for Old Men. I thought it worked really, really well, as opposed to There Will Be Blood, which made me want to break dishes or something. One character [in The Learners] is into old ragtime records and plays them on an old phonograph. Happy and Himillsy go into a pizza place, and Dean Martin is singing on the PA. I wouldn’t go much beyond that.


How was it to design a jacket for your own book? Did you get to do things you wouldn’t ordinarily be able to?

Certainly I wouldn’t be able to split up the author photo over two flaps, for example. Or bury what is essentially the title-page spread in the gutter so it’s literally disappearing up the book’s asshole. But there’s not too much of that going on. I didn’t want all of that to get too distracting. Obviously there’s some typographic play, but I didn’t want that to take over.

As a designer and writer, what are your thoughts on the Kindle?
The sick thing is somebody totally goofed on me and showed me you could get my book in a Kindle version. I could only imagine what that looks like because I use so many typefaces and they only have one typeface available. I mean, what the hell does it look like? My thoughts on it are: I’ve never seen anyone using one, it doesn’t interest me and I don’t think it’s the future of books.


What’s your next project?

[It’s] one of my comic book projects, and it is Batman in Japan in the 1960s. It’s called Bat-Manga! The Secret History of Batman in Japan, and it will be out in November. It’s going to be really, really, really terrific. I’ve got the blessing of DC comics. It’s very much sanctioned. The only thing cooler than Batman in 1966 was Batman in 1966 in Japan. And it’s all art by and for the Japanese, and it’s all official. It’s just that it’s different.