In Remembrance of Richard Eckersley

Design by Richard Eckersley. (Detail from copyright page of Avital Ronell’s The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech, 1989)

Richard Eckersley died on April 16, having given the best years of his life to establishing the importance of high-quality book design for university presses. In 1980, David Gilbert, director of the University of Nebraska Press, foresaw that Nebraska needed to have a superior book designer if it wished to publish complex and heavily illustrated books. For nominations, he sought the advice of another great contemporary book designer, Richard Hendel, now with the University of North Carolina Press. Hendel strongly recommended Richard Eckersley, who was looking for a permanent opportunity in the United States.

Richard and his wife Dika, also a designer, defied all prejudice about the American Midwest and moved to Lincoln, where both immediately began to revamp the look of print design, far from the usual design centers of New York and London. Richard’s first assignment upon his arrival was a project Nebraska has undertaken for the Joslyn Art Museum of Omaha, Karl Bodmer’s America, a large-format book with color throughout, featuring the water-colors of a Swiss artist till then little known. As Gilbert had hoped, the book itself became a work of art, winning high praise in national media and making a resounding statement about Nebraska’s commitment to book design. In 2004 Nebraska published a long-awaited successor: Karl Bodmer’s North American Prints, again masterfully designed by Eckersley.

That commitment enlarged year by year. The Press undertook a series of translations of French surrealists — André Breton’s Mad Love and Lost Steps, Louis Aragon’s Treatise on Style and Adventures of Telemachus, René Daumal’s You’ve Always Been Wrong, Mary Ann Caws’s collection of manifestos — and Eckersley made them gorgeous. The bread-and-butter of the Nebraska list was the history of the American West and the centerpiece of the Nebraska’s list in the 1980s and 1990s was the thirteen-volume set of The Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, edited by Gary E. Moulton. Eckersley designed these volumes too, planning the full set carefully before the first volume appeared. Those fortunate enough to own the complete and jacketed set can see at a glance how Eckersley effectively asserted the importance of river travel to the success of the expedition.

Acquiring editors at Nebraska took it for granted that the most difficult books would be designed by Eckersley, but Debra Turner, the production manager, knew that even Richard could be overwhelmed. Building on the strong core provided by Richard and Dika, she hired other talented designers — Andrea Shahan, Ray Boeche, and Roger Buchholz — who learned from the Eckersleys and quickly came into their own. Their continued work at Nebraska will be part of Eckersley’s living legacy.

That legacy is enormous. His books and jackets have been annually included as selections in the annual Association of American University Press competition, as well as frequently included in the AIGA “50 Books” competition, and among them are many that were instantly hailed as masterpieces of the publishing arts: Karl Bodmer’s America and The Journals of Lewis and Clark, of course, but also Jacques Derrida’s Glas and Cinders, Avital Ronell’s The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech, Warren Motte’s Small Worlds, a steady stream of translations of contemporary French writers (including books by Marcel Benabou, Marguerite Duras, Jean Echenoz, Maurice Blanchot and Gérard Genette), and many, many more.

Eckersley also designed books from other presses. He designed yet another competition winner, Avital Ronell’s Stupidity, and has been a source of inspiration, consolation and advice for book designers throughout the Association of American University Presses.

I have also had the high honor of writing a book that was designed by Eckersley. He did another spectacular job, creating yet another AAUP winner. In my acknowledgments I admitted that the best justification for the book was that it gave raw material for Richard to convert into beauty. That’s the plain truth. He was wonderful throughout the design process, soliciting my input, listening carefully, and in the end exceeding my supernally high expectations.

A gentle soul who understood all too well the dark humor of Samuel Beckett, Eckersley lived much of his life the hard way, in a fashion that tried his thin body with late nights, cigarettes and alcohol. He will be adored because of his book design, but those who knew him well loved him because he gave everything he had to his art and to others. Famous for his artistic restraint and occasional exuberance, he demanded much of himself, and gave himself generously, to the very end.

Willis Regier is currently the director of the University of Illinois Press, having previously held the same position at University of Nebraska Press and Johns Hopkins University Press. He is the author of Book of the Sphinx (University of Nebraska Press, 2004) and the editor of Masterpieces Of American Indian Literature (Bison Books, 2005).