‘American Canto’ was designed to be a modern classic

Judge a book by its cover, and you might think that American Canto, the memoir by Vanity Fair‘s outgoing West Coast editor Olivia Nuzzi, is destined to be a classic. The memoir, which chronicles Nuzzi’s drama-filled life and career as a political reporter in the The President era, features a strikingly simple cover that serves as shorthand for the book’s ambitions.

“The intent was to give the book a clean, no-frills design that felt both classic and contemporary,” says Simon & Schuster senior art director Alison Forner, who’s also designed book covers like Ezra Klein’s all-type cover Why We’re Polarized and Garrett M. Graff’s Watergate: A New History.

Nuzzi’s book features a stark white cover with the title and her name rendered in a serif typeface inspired by fashion magazine typography of the 1980s. The typeface does a lot of work for the book, which appears to be off to a slow start amid the ongoing media storm surrounding its rollout.

A political reporter since 2014, Nuzzi was fired last year from New York magazine following an alleged relationship with now-Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Her publisher Simon & Schuster describes the much buzzed-about book by what it’s not: “not a memoir, nor a tell-all, nor a book about the president,” but “a character study of a nation undergoing radical transformation in real time.” Critics have called it a “tell-nothing memoir” that falls short of its ambition and is less interesting than the scandal that surrounds it.

Typographic covers using a vintage-inspired font is a surefire way to evoke a classic mid-20th century look, like in covers for John F. Kennedy’s 1956 Profiles in Courage or Robert A. Caro’s 1990 The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Means of Ascent. Most bestselling books today, however, use pictures and illustrations.

On the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list, just two books have type-led covers, and both have numbers in their titles and also use other visual elements. (Andrew Ross Sorkin’s 1929, about the year’s market crash, uses a cratering market line to divide the bright red cover, and the cover of former Vice President Kamala Harris’s 107 Days about her 2024 campaign counts down in serif numerals from 1 to 107 on a blue background.)

American Canto goes further, relying on just text and a subversively patriotic white, red, and black color palette to communicate its message. “I wanted something simple and evocative—red, black, and white give the jacket an urgent minimalism,” Forner tells Fast Company. “Olivia specified wanting a red without blue undertones, and I was more than happy to oblige.”

To capture the right shade of red, Nuzzi sent still photos of wildflower petals and cropped stills from films by director Martin Scorsese, including a scene in Goodfellas where a body’s in the back trunk of a car and the taillights are lighting up the fog.

“When there’s no imagery to rely on, every detail becomes extremely important—from the typeface choices and letter spacing, to the negative space and color,” Forner says. “They all need to work on an almost subliminal level to become the ‘voice’ of the book.”

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