The Columbia History of the Twentieth Century

Who can illustrate the twentieth century? That was the problem facing the designer of this jacket. Intelligently, he chose to ignore the obvious mushroom cloud or test-tube baby and use the title itself to represent our unrepresentable century. The use of sans serif letterforms and metallic inks suggests Modernism and the machine age. The repetition of the title across the black field conveys the movement of film, mass production, and the passage of time. The lack of color acknowledges the contribution of black-and-white documentary photography and film to our present view of this century.