Paul Bacon, the influential designer known for creating radical, eye-catching book jackets for major literary works like Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22” and Philip Roth’s “Portnoy’s Complaint,” died on Monday in Fishkill, N.Y. He was 91.
The cause was a stroke, his son, Preston, said. He added that Mr. Bacon, who had been living in a nursing home, had Alzheimer’s disease.
During a career of more than 50 years, Mr. Bacon designed covers for more than 6,500 books, including “Slaughterhouse-Five” by Kurt Vonnegut, “Ragtime” by E. L. Doctorow, “The Power Broker” by Robert Caro, “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” by Ken Kesey, “The Andromeda Strain” by Michael Crichton, “Jaws” by Peter Benchley and “Shogun,” by James Clavell. He is widely credited with pioneering what is known in the industry as the “Big Book Look” — typically a bold, minimalist design featuring prominent lettering and a small conceptual image. He did all of his designs, including the lettering, by hand.
One of his earliest and most imitated cover designs, for Meyer Levin’s 1956 novel, “Compulsion,” is composed of mostly gray blank space, with two small red figures running on the horizon, and a prominent title in ragged hand-drawn lettering.
“That jacket is almost 60 years old, and if you saw it on a shelf now it would jump right out at you,” said Peter Mendelsund, a book cover designer and associate art director for Alfred A. Knopf, who counts Mr. Bacon among his influences. “He directs your eye and shows you where to look. He shows you what’s important.”
Robert Gottlieb, a former editor in chief at Simon & Schuster and later at Knopf, said Mr. Bacon displayed more creative flexibility than many other artists and designers.
“He didn’t see himself as a sensitive artist; he was there to serve,” said Mr. Gottlieb, who worked with Mr. Bacon for many years. “If you rejected the first one, he was happy to do a 10th one. We worked and worked until it was right.”
The graphic designer Chip Kidd said that Mr. Bacon’s visual take on “Jaws” — a stark black cover with the outline of a massive shark rising from the bottom and a female swimmer floating above — was an especially powerful influence on his own work. He noted that it shows “just how much you can entice the reader on the content by using minimal form.”
When describing his approach to design, Mr. Bacon said he had learned to subordinate his own aesthetic impulses to convey the main concept of a book. “I always tell myself: ‘You’re not the star of the show. The author took three and a half years to write the goddamn thing and the publisher is spending a fortune on it, so just back off,’ “ he said in an interview with Print magazine in 2002.
Mr. Bacon was born on Dec. 25, 1923, in Ossining, N.Y., the son of John Bacon and the former Mary Pierson. His family moved around the region during the Depression, settling in Newark.
Mr. Bacon displayed a talent for drawing at an early age. After graduating from Newark Arts High School, he got a job at an ad agency in Newark. He joined the Marine Corps after being drafted in 1943 and served in Guadalcanal, Guam and China during World War II. He never attended college.
After returning to the United States, he found work with a typographic designer in Manhattan. He designed his first book cover when a friend’s father, Bill Westley, asked him to draw illustrations for his book, “Chimp on My Shoulder,” which was published by E. P. Dutton in 1950.
Mr. Bacon was hired to design the cover as well. That led to other assignments, and soon he had steady work at major publishing houses. He was so driven, his son said, that he typically slept just four hours a night.
Though he retired around 2000, Mr. Bacon continued to take freelance assignments. The last cover he designed was for Lindsay Hill’s novel “Sea of Hooks,” published in 2013.
Mr. Bacon married Maxine Shirey, a dancer and choreographer, in 1951. She died in 2004. In addition to his son, he is survived by a sister, Nancy Bacon-Fothersgill; a brother, Jeremy; and two grandsons.
Before establishing himself in the publishing industry, Mr. Bacon was already well known and admired in jazz circles for the many album covers he designed for the Blue Note and Riverside labels. A jazz fan since he was a boy, he often hung out at the Harlem nightclub Minton’s Playhouse and wrote about jazz for The Record Changer magazine.
He also performed in a New Orleans-style jazz band called Stanley’s Washboard Kings, which for many years had a regular gig at the Cajun, a restaurant in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan.
Mr. Bacon’s instrument was a tortoiseshell comb covered with a cellophane wrapper from a cigarette box, which he blew into to make a kazoolike sound. “He was a unique musician,” said Stanley King, a longtime friend who played the washboard in the band.
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