Designing Black Power, and Other News

Larry Ratzkin’s design for Black Power.

It’s something we all dream of—that our favorite deceased writers will someday roam the earth again as robots. In Japan, that dream is becoming a reality, as the author Soseki Natsume, who died a century ago, prepares to enjoy a second coming: “Soseki Natsume is being re-created as an android by Nishogakusha University Graduate School, and will be programmed to read material out loud and give lectures. Created in a sitting posture, the robot will be 130 centimeters high and built using 3D scans of a death mask and vintage photos … The robot’s voice will be created after analyzing the voice of his grandson, Prof. Fusanosuke Natsume of Gakushuin University. Fusanosuke Natsume said, ‘Since [Soseki is] a human being, it is better that he is smiling.’ ”

Tall orders for graphic designers: in 1967, Larry Ratzkin was tasked with designing the jacket for Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton’s Black Power, meaning his assignment was essentially to turn a whole political movement into a book cover. And he succeeded, as Josh MacPhee writes: “The cover was simple yet profound: a white field, the center crowded—almost to exploding—with the giant words Black Power in a thick, slab-serifed type. The authors’ names and book subtitle stack above and below, in a more elegant, thin sans-serif. That’s it. No images, no frills … The cover to Black Power is surprisingly successful, such a simple treatment—almost elegant—for a text that caused massive conflict and defines the transition from the non-violent Civil Rights Movement to the much more militant Black Power Movement in the United States. The initial 1967 Random House first-edition dust jacket was created by Larry Ratzkin, a well-known graphic designer who turned out upwards of a thousand book covers … All U.S. editions of Black Power in the almost fifty years since its initial publishing … have used facsimile re-creations of Ratzkin’s original design … This has to be the most seen and trafficked cover of Ratzkin’s long career, yet it is never associated with him.”

Two hundred years ago, Mount Tambora belched a massive cloud of volcanic ash into the sky and ruined everyone’s summer, so much so that they called it the “Year Without Summer.” Perhaps not unrelatedly, Mary Shelley began work on Frankenstein: “Our too-easy version of Frankenstein—oh, it’s all about technology and scientific hubris, or about industrialization—ignores completely the humanitarian climate disaster unfolding around Mary Shelley as she began drafting the novel. Starving, skeletal climate refugees in the tens of thousands roamed the highways of Europe, within a few miles of where she and her ego-charged friends were driving each other to literary distraction. Moreover, landlocked Alpine Switzerland was the worst hit region in all of Europe, producing scenes of social-ecological breakdown rarely witnessed since the hellscape of the Black Death.”

London’s Foundling Museum is hosting an exhibition called “FOUND.” It’s about finding things, which, at the risk of being obvious, tends to involve losing them first: “Some found materials have been made into complete works, like the African textiles from Portobello Market that have inspired much of Yinka Shonibare’s art, including the Trumpet Boy … Or Polly Apfelbaum’s string of wishbones, graded from small to large, ‘electroplated like baby-shoes’ in copper—a string of good luck. But there’s bad luck here too, like the chain of pawnbroker’s tickets that Ron Arad found in London early 1970s. All are dated 1951, the year of his own birth, and many are marked ‘GWR’—gold wedding ring. Finding can provoke a shiver, a sadness.”

Zadie Smith introduces one of her favorite new writers, Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah: “I’m sure she is coolly skeptical of the phrase black-girl magic … but some version of that is what Rachel brings to me. I was very affected when I was a kid by a phrase of novelist Zora Neale Hurston’s, ‘The black woman is the mule of the world.’ This is not the only truth about us, and Zora is proof of that: despite all the difficulties, she lived her life with verve, purpose and joy. Rachel’s got some of the Zora energy; she walks into a room and it’s a kind of event. I’ve learned from Rachel that black culture is a house with a thousand rooms, with windows looking out on so many views. Her writing is like a high-wire act: Can she pull it off? Are these swirling ideas going to cohere? But they do. I admire her bravery, boldness and attention to the craft.”

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