VANISHED NEWYORK
247
●
MARC TAUSS.
Cover art for Bright Lights, Big City.
Photography, dyes, color pencil, airbrush, and glaze on chromogenic print paper. Cover art
for Jay McInerney’s “Bright Lights, Big City.” NewYork:Vintage Books, 1984.
[8,000/12,000]
ONE OF THE MOST ICONIC BOOK COVERS OF THE
1980
S AND ONE THAT DEFINED AN ERA
.
Editor Gary Fisketjon launched Vintage Contemporaries, a paperback imprint of Random House, in
September 1984.The series was an immediate critical and commercial success with its recognizable art
design color-banded spines, dot matrix accents, and graphic, often surreal artwork. Many novels, includ-
ing Bright Lights, Big City, appeared for the first time in this format, foregoing the usual hardcover
edition. James McInerney said of the series and Marc Tauss’s cover: I loved the Vintage
Contemporaries design. My first thought was that the books looked like albums—this was in the days
of LPs—and that seemed a good thing, since Gary was trying to appeal to a younger audience. No
other books on the market looked like that. And I thought the cover image for Bright Lights
was absolutely emblematic of the book. It was incredibly evocative and haunting”—
talkingcovers.com/2012/09/12/vintage-contemporaries/.This image was the first and only cover for
the book for over 25 years.
Tauss used a combination of methods for the image; he photographed on site in lower Manhattan,
using a friend whom he felt served as the model for the main character, Jaime. He then shot “the warm
glowing facade of the Odeon, and the icily lit World Trade Center” and recomposed these elements
using a series of collage, airbrush, and dye techniques to blend the images together into a perfect “stage”
setting that would forever capture the essence of the novel and New York in the ’80s.The cover has
attained poignance since September 11th and Tauss remarked:“Eight years [after making this work] I
moved three blocks north from the exact location I had photographed for the Bright Lights, Big City
cover.The World Trade Center filled my front window. I would never have imagined that of the three
components of that iconic cover, the towers would be the first to vanish”—ibid.
