The Exhibition

In both their style and their approach, Bascove’s book covers are singular. Identifiable by their bold, black lines, created by carving a design out of a block of wood, with colours that are just as dynamic as the linework, she rendered beautifully stylized and thoughtfully communicative illustrations that invite you into the text, without giving too much away. 

For the books of Robertson Davies, tarot cards and early European woodcuts were her primary stylistic references, inspired by Davies’ own interest in the Occult and in Jungian psychology—coincidentally, a mutual interest they learned of only after they had already been working together for several years. For other authors, she drew from other woodcut traditions, like the solidity and angularity of Russian political prints, or the sinuousness of Art Nouveau. Her approach to illustration was always considered, and tailored to each client and their voice.

Bascove began working as an illustrator in books and magazines in the 1970s, at a time when the field was openly unwelcoming to women. She was told, first by her instructors at art school, and then by art directors at publishing houses, that her work was not worth paying attention to or investing in, since she would leave the field when she got married; that book cover jobs were for men; and that they wouldn’t pay her the same as her male colleagues. Fueled by a lifelong desire to work as an artist and a profound love of reading, and bolstered by a community of other women artists and designers, she managed to carve out a career in book cover design that spanned more than two decades. She created covers for some of the most prominent writers in the West: Virginia Woolf, C.S. Lewis, Alice Walker, J.M. Coetzee, and Thomas Mann.

Her work was well-known while she was designing for publishing houses, but in recent years, her recognition has waned.  As market trends change, and new books, as well as new editions of old books, are released, the stand-out covers—and the designers who created them—tend to be forgotten. They are also, often, overshadowed by the figure of the author. 

I think there’s a truly enchanting quality to Bascove’s covers. They draw the eye immediately, and you can pick them out easily on a bookshelf. In fact, bookshops often turned books with her covers front-side-out, to show off to customers, and to physically draw them to the story.

Briar Levit, in an essay on mid-twentieth-century graphic artist and book illustrator Ellen Raskin, vividly describes how it makes her feel to come across a woman credited in a historic book. She writes:

“I tend to get perhaps inordinately excited whenever I see a woman’s name listed in the design credits of older works—a small release of the repressed enthusiasm that has bottled up over the years I’ve studied the disproportionately White, male history of graphic design. And because there is a too-common story of women in the first half of the twentieth century—dropping out of the field or leaving a small body of work due to a world that didn’t support working women—I wasn’t prepared for the sheer volume and breadth of work I’d find when I started seriously investigating Ellen Raskin.”1

I can feel her little frisson of joy, because I’m the same way! I was completely unfamiliar with Bascove’s work before I embarked on this project, but I was delighted to find so much rich material as I proceeded with my research.

During a conversation we had in the weeks leading up to this exhibition, Bascove told me that she felt that her job was, at its core, to help get authors’ work into peoples’ hands—and that it was a true pleasure to be tasked with doing so. 

In the same spirit, I'd like to get peoples’ eyes on Bascove’s work. I hope this exhibition will not only introduce you to her work, but leave you feeling enchanted and inspired by it, too.

▸ SARA J. FACKRELL
Exhibition Organizer
University of Toronto