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From graphic designer Chip Kidd comes a brilliant new novel about advertising, electro-shock torture, potato chips, murder, powdered milk, suicide, shoes with buckles, crippling despair, and giant dogs. And the Holocaust.
Video by Bennett Holzworth at Be a Design Group.
Fresh out of college in the summer of 1961, Happy lands his first job as a graphic designer (okay, art assistant) at a small Connecticut advertising agency populated by a cast of endearing eccentrics. Life for Happy seems to be—well, happy. But when he’s assigned to design a newspaper ad recruiting participants for an experiment in the Yale Psychology Department, Happy can’t resist responding to the ad himself. Little does he know that the experience will devastate him, forcing a reexamination of his past, his soul, and the nature of human cruelty—chiefly, his own.
Scribner, 2008. 258 pp.
Learn more about The Learners. Read the opening scenes or an excerpt or another excerpt (PDF) (and this last one includes a deleted scene from The Cheese Monkeys). One could even listen to another excerpt entirely (realPlayer format) read by Chip himself. Or, maybe you’re feeling a bit non-committal and you’d like to read some reviews before you delve any deeper? Try Newsweek, USA Today, or The New York Times. On the other hand, perhaps you’re ready to consummate this thing right now: Order The Learners from Amazon or from Barnes & Noble.
LATEST JOURNAL ENTRY
Rough Justice.
The new book I worked on for Alex Ross, Rough Justice
RECENT CLIPPINGS
The Learners Paperback in The New York Times Book Review
The paperback edition of The Learners (available now
[read “The Learners Paperback in The New York Times Book Review” in its entirety…]
Chip Bids John Updike Adieu
Editors and writers remember John Updike over at Slate Magazine, and Chip is among them (and so, for that matter, is J. D. McClatchy):
Working with and for Mr. Updike was an honor and a treat, and because he was so prolific—not only in quantity but in type of book (novel, poems, essays, criticism)—there were many different kinds of design scenarios. One extreme was his habit of drawing up by hand the entire cover layout, including type specs, which I or another of us in the art department would then execute. On the other end of the spectrum, he would occasionally let us do whatever we wanted. And then everything in between.
[read “Chip Bids John Updike Adieu” in its entirety…]
The BDR on Being Digital
Joseph Sullivan over at The Book Design Review covers, so to speak, an oldie but a goody from Chip’s portfolio (and one that hasn’t yet made it into the Work. section of this site, but never fear: it’ll be there soon enough), Nicholas Negroponte’s Being Digital (1995):
I was lucky enough to live in London in ’94 and ’95, and I picked this up in a bookshop in Camden Town. I had no idea who Chip Kidd was, and only a marginal interest in graphic design at that point. But even I knew, back in ’95, that this was a pretty sexy way to package ideas.