Wren Abbott, an editorial intern at New York magazine and freelance writer, reviewed last night’s Reading Series event for the 92Y Blog.

The challenge of creating book jacket art, suggested design legend Milton Glaser last night in a presentation at the 92nd Street Y, is in “taking something that exists only as an idea and making it real.” At this well-attended event, put on by the Y’s Unterberg Poetry Center, jacket designer Chip Kidd and McSweeney’s publisher Dave Eggers joined Glaser to present their diverse techniques for translating word to image.

Like the ubiquitous “I heart New York” logo Glaser created, much of his work is iconic and familiar but not necessarily associated in most people’s minds with his name. Few outside the book design industry, for example, probably realize that Glaser created the Signet Classics Shakespeare paperbacks’ cover designs, modest white covers that feature a sparely-colored pen and ink illustration of each play. The statement in favor of balance and restraint Glaser made with these books is as striking and modern now as when they were first designed in the 1960’s.

By contrast, Chip Kidd’s slick and intuitive designs for Alfred A. Knopf, where he has been since 1986, feel much more of the moment, such as the jacket he immediately envisioned when he heard the title of client Augusten Burroughs’ book Possible Side Effects – a six-fingered child’s hand on a yellow background.

The tour of Kidd’s and Glaser’s comparatively modern and mainstream designs aptly set up the shock of Dave Eggers’ McSweeney’s output: the magazine Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern and the publishing house’s books are made to look deliberately old-fashioned and obscure. The youngest presenter of the evening, Eggers is apparently the most technology-averse, claiming he relies almost exclusively on the font Garamond because he can’t quite master the type feature in his circa-1999 version of QuarkXPress. Eggers’ resistance of new technology seems to be a way for him to hem in his restless creativity; in addition to his familiar roles as novelist, editor, publisher, and teacher at the writing workshop 826 Valencia, Eggers draws and paints much of the art used in his publications. Eggers’ detractors – people who accuse him of “selling out” or criticize the quirks of his writing style - might have to get used to the fact that Eggers is perhaps the single figure now striking out on his own innovative path in the manner Glaser began to do in the 1950’s (both men started their own magazines, Glaser at New York Magazine in 1968 and Eggers’ Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern in 1998, among others). And as Eggers clicked through his chronologically-ordered slides, the sometimes gimmicky tendencies of his early McSweeney’s cover designs gave way to more deeply imagined pieces, such as the monochrome landscape on the cover of McSweeney’s Issue 15, a collection of Icelandic fiction. Like it or not, Eggers seems destined to loom large in the future of book design – though his publishing software will probably stay in the past.

Wren Abbott can be reached at wren.abbott @ nymag.com.

Two more reviews: Mel, Time magazine designer, on her Myspace blog and website builder/blogger Jason Kottke

[Literary Readings & Performances]