Steve Heller.
The New York Times book review

Steve Heller

For over 27 years I have been the art director of The New York Times Book Review. During this long duration the most satisfying part of my job has been discovering new illustrators (many from Eastern Europe and Russia), identifying their strengths, pushing their latent talents, and giving them wide exposure in a national publication.

The Book Review was the first of The New York Times Sunday sections to go to colour. And colour meant rebirth. Illustrators who had worked solely in black and white now had a full palette.

For the first two years the editors did not view the Book Review cover as a magazine cover, until a new editor, Chip McGrath (a former editor at the New Yorker) was installed. Coming from the New Yorker magazine, which is the last bastion of independent illustrated covers,he felt that the Book Review should have a single cover image (with headlines).

So for the seven years he edited the section, I published over 350 cover paintings, drawings and sculptures.

Currently, under a new editor, Sam Tanenhaus, the Book Review covers include much more type (sometimes they are all type). Since formats and styles are cyclical and a new editor believes in the power of words, emphasis is given to strong reviews on the cover. He is not wrong (and sometimes we still run full page images when the content demands it). But the era of the full illustrated cover is over for now. Illustration still plays an important role in the Book Review's visual content, but the covers shown on these pages represent a period that celebrated the power of illustration to convey ideas and tell stories.