Peter Mendelsund - A playful, illustrated treatise on how words give rise to mental images. Reading is an act of co-creation, our impressions of characters and places owe as much to our own memory and experience as to the descriptive powers of authors

Peter Mendelsund, What We See When We Read, Vintage, 2014.


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Portrait of a Cover Artist: An Interview with Peter Mendelsund By Peter Terzian (New Yorker)
A gorgeously unique, fully illustrated exploration into the phenomenology of reading—how we visualize images from reading works of literature, from one of our very best book jacket designers, himself a passionate reader.
What do we see when we read? Did Tolstoy really describe Anna Karenina? Did Melville ever really tell us what, exactly, Ishmael looked like? The collection of fragmented images on a page—a graceful ear there, a stray curl, a hat positioned just so—and other clues and signifiers helps us to create an image of a character. But in fact our sense that we know a character intimately has little to do with our ability to concretely picture our beloved—or reviled—literary figures. In this remarkable work of nonfiction, Knopf's Associate Art Director Peter Mendelsund combines his profession, as an award-winning designer; his first career, as a classically trained pianist; and his first love, literature—he considers himself first and foremost as a reader—into what is sure to be one of the most provocative and unusual investigations into how we understand the act of reading.


“A playful, illustrated treatise on how words give rise to mental images. . . . Mendelsund argues that reading is an act of co-creation, and that our impressions of characters and places owe as much to our own memory and experience as to the descriptive powers of authors. . . . [What We See When We Read] explore[s] the peculiar challenges of transforming words into images, and blend[s] illustrations with philosophy, literary criticism and design theory.” —Alexandra Alter, The New York Times

“Mendelsund, throughout this thought-provoking book, helps the lay reader contemplate text in ways you hadn’t thought about previously.” —Los Angeles Times

“A conversation piece, created to entice repeated thumb-throughs. . . . [The author is] a highly regarded book-jacket designer. . . . Reading is often considered (especially by those who don’t love to do it) a passive activity. But Cambridge native Mendelsund . . . makes a nice case that it is, in fact, a kind of active collaboration. . . . What We See When We Read, itself a work of conceptual design, unfolds the author’s ideas about what makes reading a creative, visual act all its own on pages—some packed with text, others just a line or two—that incorporate sketches, clip art, images of classic book covers and more.” —The Boston Globe

“The liveliest, most entertaining and best illustrated work of phenomenology you'll pick up this year. An acclaimed book-jacket designer and art director, Mendelsund investigates, through words and pictures, what we see when we read text and where those images come from. His breakdown of the reading and visualizing processes yields many insights. . . . Playfully, he offers us a police composite sketch of Anna, based on the description in Tolstoy's novel.” —Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel

"Wow. . . . Mendelsund has changed the way I think about reading. Like the Wizard of Oz tornado, Mendelsund's lucid, questing prose and his surprising, joyful visuals collide to create a similar weather system inside the reader. Not only are you carried off to Oz, but you're aware at every moment of the cyclonic action of your reader's mind and your reader's imagination. It's so smart, so totally original, so beautiful. This is the perfect gift for anyone who has ever blinked awake inside a book." —Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia!
“[Mendelsund] produces a kaleidoscopic, immersive experience that successfully combines text, graphics, illustrations, cover images and more into a cohesive whole. It’s a book to be read, reread, shown to perspective graphic designers and shared.” —Kirkus

“Mendelsund, one of the truly great book-cover designers, explores what we see when we read, in a volume packed with stunning visuals. It’s a fascinating and enlightening look at something we might not actually realize we’re thinking about with every word we read.” —Flavorwire

"Amazing. . . . Sparkling with verbal as well as visual wit and the personable exhilaration of one of the best conversations you've ever had, What We See When We Read opens one's eyes to that special brand of blindness which makes the vividness of fiction possible. It reads as if the ghost of Italo Calvino audited Vladimir Nabokov's literature class and wrote his final paper with the help of Alvin Lustig and the Radiolab guys." —Chris Ware, author of Building Stories
“Quirky and fascinating. . . . Mendelsund draws our attention to things we may not be fully conscious of when we immerse ourselves in a narrative. . . . We See When We Read will make passionate readers think about things they may largely take for granted when absorbed in a book and spark further thoughts about what the pleasurable experience of reading is all about.” —BookPage

“Intriguing. . . . A truly remarkable book.” —Coolhunting.com

“A delightful treat for the avid reader. . . . [A] topsy-turvily illustrated marvel. . . . [Mendelsund] maps the dreamscape of reading to show us how the mirage dissolves under close scrutiny but its memory still burns brilliant. What a tangible magic books are!” —Shelf Awareness
“Offhandedly brilliant, witty, and fluent in the works of Tolstoy, Melville, Joyce, and Woolf, Mendelsund guides us through an intricate and enlivening analysis of why literature and reading are essential to our understanding of ourselves, each other, and the spinning world.” —Booklist
 
“This examination of how words on a page become pictures in our brains is blowing my mind a little in the best possible way.” —BookRiot

"This is not a book, this is a sacred text. It inspires, it expands the mind, it proves that Mendelsund is a total freaking genius." —Heidi Julavits, author of The Vanishers
An artist investigates how we make meaning from words on a page.
In this brilliant amalgam of philosophy, psychology, literary theory and visual art, Knopf associate art director and cover designer Mendelsund inquires about the complex process of reading. “Words are effective not because of what they carry in them,” writes the author, “but for their latent potential to unlock the accumulated experience of the reader. Words ‘contain’ meanings, but, more important, words potentiate meaning….” Writers “tell us stories, and they also tell us how to read these stories,” he writes. “The author teaches me how to imagine, as well as when to imagine, and how much.” Copiously illustrated with maps, doodles, works of art, plates from illustrated books, cartoons, book jackets, facsimiles of texts, photographs, botanical drawings and a few publicity shots of movie stars, the book exemplifies the idea that reading is not a linear process. Even if readers follow consecutive words, they incorporate into reading memories, distractions, predispositions, desires and expectations. “Authors are curators of experience,” writes Mendelsund. “Yet no matter how pure the data set that authors provide to readers…readers’ brains will continue in their prescribed assignment: to analyze, screen, and sort.” In 19 brief, zesty chapters, the author considers such topics as the relationship of reading to time, skill, visual acuity, fantasy, synesthesia and belief. “The Part & The Whole” presents lucidly the basic concepts of metaphor, with succinct definitions of metonymy and synecdoche. Throughout the book, Mendelsund draws on various writers, from Wittgenstein to Woolf, Tolstoy to Twain, Melville to Calvino, to support his assertion that “Verisimilitude is not only a false idol, but also an unattainable goal. So we reduce. And it is not without reverence that we reduce. This is how we apprehend our world.”
Mendelsund amply attains his goal to produce a quirky, fresh and altogether delightful meditation on the miraculous act of reading.—Kirkus Reviews (starred)

"Brilliant. Peter Mendelsund has peered into our messy heads and produced an illuminating, kaleidoscopic meditation on reading. Also on seeing. And understanding." —Jim Gleick, bestselling author of The Information

"Peter Mendelsund is to the art of  book design what Walter Murch is to the art of  film-editing. That, of course, is the highest praise  imaginable." —Geoff Dyer, author of Another Great Day at Sea


Praise for Peter Mendelsund's work:

"He's the exact visual correlative of what I think contemporary literature should be, but usually isn't doing." —Tom McCarthy

"Peter Mendelsund pushes the visual and the verbal into unforeseen alliances. These alliances feel inevitable, establishing exactly the right balance between the timely and the timeless." —Jed Perl

"When I first spoke with Peter, after he'd begun work on the jacket for The Flame Alphabet, I was struck by how carefully he'd read the book. . . . To have it from a designer is unnerving and, of course, a piece of very good luck. When he asked me if there was anything I had in mind for the jacket, I knew by that point that I did not want to get in his way or even to put my voice in his head. I wanted an original Mendelsund." —Ben Marcus

"Once in a while I'm presented with design that crosses the barriers of cultural references and visual language—that feels universal—that feels like the perfect start to the story; design that I don't want to reader to forget, but to carry with them. These designs are Peter Mendelsund's." —Jo Nesbø

"All of Peter's covers are funny, smart, and beautiful. And all of them say something about the visual nature of reading, writing, and perception. Each one is a poem. Look at them closely." —Jane Mendelsohn



Like a TED talk or a lesser Alain de Botton book, Peter Mendelsund’s “What We See When We Read” is friendly and shyly philosophical, filled with news you can almost use.

It explores a simple but confounding question, one the author wrests from theorists literary and otherwise and presents this way: “What do we see when we read? (Other than words on a page.) What do we picture in our minds?” Mr. Mendelsund looks at these questions from a thousand angles, zooming in and out as if surveilling them with Google Earth.

Because the author is also the associate art director of Alfred A. Knopf, “What We See When We Read” is heavily and often whimsically illustrated. This would-be TED talk includes a PowerPoint presentation, one that’s redolent of X-Acto knives and drawing tables and graphic design software and clunky eyeglasses.           

I’d like to be able to report that cracking and unpacking this exquisite package is a thoroughgoing joy. But “What We See When We Read” is so self-consciously charming that the senses frequently rebel.                  

Mr. Mendelsund too often speaks to us as if he is feeding nuts to fragile woodland creatures. (“Here’s a thought experiment: Picture your mother. Now picture your favorite literary character.”) We are told many things we already know. The book has few weird or wild hairs. It’s a tidy little biosphere, one that runs on tweeness of its own excreting.

The book poked me awake on Page 203, however, and began to keep me awake. Page 203 is where Mr. Mendelsund prints a photograph of the actress Keira Knightley in the title role of the 2012 film of “Anna Karenina” and declares: “This — the picture to the left — is a form of robbery.”

He means mental robbery, of course, the sort that all film adaptations of novels commit. He observes, in what’s not an original thought but a vital one: “One should watch a film adaptation of a favorite book only after considering, very carefully, the fact that the casting of the film may very well become the permanent casting of the book in one’s mind. This is a very real hazard.”

This book’s midpoint, in fact, is about where you realize that Mr. Mendelsund does several things well. He has a wide range of reference, taking core samples from the work of Joyce, Dickens, Nabokov and Woolf, among others, and he quotes with care. This line from Oliver Sacks sums up some of this book’s subject matter: “One does not see with the eyes; one sees with the mind.”

While many of the book’s illustrations seem extraneous, merely visual distraction, two dozen or so are very inspired. We are given a sketch of Anna Karenina, for example, produced from police composite-sketch software, based on descriptions from the text. The author instructively maps the locations in Woolf’s “To the Lighthouse.” He plots the squiggly shapes of famous narratives (“Titus Andronicus,” “Tristan and Isolde”) on a graph.

Mr. Mendelsund is an adept memoirist; the personal material in this book resonates. He notes that we can read novels quickly, as if driving through them, or slowly, as if walking, and have distinct experiences. About this he notes, “The best book for me: I drive though it quickly but am forced to stop on occasion, to pull over and marvel.”

He can be a canny close reader. He prints a few descriptive sentences of a couple walking together from Wharton’s “House of Mirth,” and mentally X-rays them. “It is helpful that we are told about the shape of this character’s hair, and the thickness of her lashes,” he writes, “but what is truly being communicated to us is a rhythm. The rhythm, in turn, conveys a young man’s elation at walking alongside a young woman.”

You read this and you think: Yes.

The best critics and philosophers slide, necessarily, to and fro on the scale from butterfly to pedant. To his credit, Mr. Mendelsund keeps his tone light while thinking deliberately about fundamental things. He moves from a remembered family trip along a river, for example, to a sense that, as he writes, “Words are effective not because of what they carry in them, but for their latent potential to unlock the accumulated experience of the reader.”

He adds, “We are already flooded by river water, and only need the author to tap this reservoir.” This thought Ezra Pound put somewhat differently. Pound said: “Any general statement is like a check drawn on a bank. Its value depends on what there is to meet it.” (Or, conversely, as Funkadelic put it, “Checks you sign with love and kisses later come back signed ‘insufficient funds.’ ”)

“What We See When We Read” is the sort of epistemological exercise that, at its best, calls all sorts of associations to mind. It summons a mental flood. The words it conjured for me were Wallace Stevens’s, from “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” his indelible poem about perspectives. Stevens wrote:

I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendos,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

A gifted designer, Mr. Mendelsund is more alert than most to inflection and innuendos. He’s the man, after all, who designed the dust jacket for Stieg Larsson’s “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.”

His humbleness is another of this book’s good qualities. “I am a visual person (so I am told),” he says. “I am a book designer, and my livelihood depends not only on my visual acuity in general, but on my ability to recognize the visual cues and prompts in texts. But when it comes to imagining characters, daffodils, lighthouses, or fog: I am as blind as the next person.” - DWIGHT GARNER

Years ago, I had the honour of working for Duthie Books in Vancouver. We had a solid inventory, but there were always a few books that defied the standard categories. What We See When We Read, a new treatise of sorts by the celebrated cover designer Peter Mendelsund, is an example of such a book. It’s clearly straddling literary criticism and philosophy (which means, in our store, it would go into belles lettres) but its approach is popular, and it would likely get lost amongst Rabelais and his World and the essays of Michel de Montaigne. These are both good titles, but so is Mendelsund’s. The solution is to put a little stack of What We See When We Read on the counter beside the register, and make a display in the window, with one or two companion books, to explain the title to the boulevardiers. But what would the other titles be? A few suggestions:

Italio Calvino, If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller (1982)
Calvino is both rascally and profound, and but this meditation on storytelling and reading also opens, as Mendelsund notes, in a railway station, “a locomotive huffs, steam from a piston covers the opening of the chapter, a cloud of smoke hides part of the first paragraph.” This theme of obscurity is important for What We See: the sense that, like printed words in dreams, the solid images that reading summons melt into fog when directly interrogated. The sense that one sometimes has from Calvino – that one has risen up for a moment and seen the world a little clearer, but in a way that’s difficult to pinpoint – one feels in Mendelsund’s book too.

Oliver Sacks, The Mind’s Eye (2010)
Reading has received a lot of attention of late. Maryanne Wolf brought out her Proust and the Squid seven years ago. Since then we have been treated to Stanislas Dehaene’s Reading in the Brain (2009), and Oliver Sacks The Mind’s Eye (2010) devotes a well-turned chapter to the subject.
Unless you teach or have school-age children, you have likely forgotten the hours you devoted to colonizing parts of your brain with the squiggles that let you “listen to the dead with your eyes,” as Dehane quotes Francisco de Quevedo suggesting. With practice you mastered the skill of reading, which means that you burned it into your subconscious, in the same way that pianists do when they work on their fingering. This lets us read better, faster, and allows us to understand more when we read, but it also hides the strangeness of reading from us. Sacks’ essay is, as his writing always is, lapidary, but like Wolf and Dehaene, he encounters the strange by looking at our consciousness from the outside in. Mendelsund, as his subtitle suggests, proceeds from the inside out.
Phenomenology asks us to reject the ‘natural attitude’ that things are just as they seem at first glance, and What We See repeatedly upends our commonsense notions. With reading this is not hard: reading is strange. The French critic Georges Poulet (whom Mendelsund quotes) went further than de Quevedo (above): in a text the author takes control of your mind. What could be odder than that? We’ve already mentioned the difficulties we have pinning down the faces of characters in novels, and when Mendelsund asks friends to describe these people, he is offered “one or two physical characteristics...followed by a longer disquisition on the character’s persona.” We are here unknowingly equating action and appearance. And do we really read a page in one smooth motion from upper left to lower right? No, we “gulp [words] like water,” we jump forward and back, and our eyes jump along the strings of letters.
To ask the question posed in the title, Mendelsund has in phenomenology chosen an ideal tool, but the question he asks also carefully avoids the difficulties that phenomenology throws up: he doesn’t need to bracket out questions of existence, he just needs to ask about how reading feels.

Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (1984)
A couple years before Calvino published If On a Winter’s Night, de Certeau asked some fundamental questions about reading in his “Reading as Poaching (Lire: un braconnage),” which is collected in The Practice of Everyday Life. One of the points that he, and Mendelsund, makes is that readers are not passive. In adding The Practice of Everyday Life to the pile I’m not trying to scare you off: although Mendelsund has written a critical essay on reading, he has worked hard, particularly through the use of layout, to make it accessible. But in some things it feels as if Mendelsund got to the party late. There is a robust stream of thought that addresses some of these topics in the work of people like Roger Chartier and D. F. McKenzie.

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927)
What We See had its genesis in a conversation that Mendelsund had with the writer Peter Terzian about To the Lighthouse. What does it mean to have the picture you have developed in your mind of a fictional location re-written, in this case by historical images of the writer’s life? This also points to the paradoxical delicacy of the visions that a writer can call up in a reader’s imagination. This would be a problem with any book, but it is particularly acute with Woolf (or Joyce’s) fiction: their epiphanies take such total control over our minds that it’s a disappointment for that vision to be rewritten. If I pick up a copy of To The Lighthouse I can re-enter Lily Briscoe’s consciousness as she paints, but a photograph of the Woolf’s summer home can collapse the moment.

Marshall McLuhan, Quentin Fiore, The Medium is the Massage: an Inventory of Effects (1967)
Mendelsund is a designer of book covers. His job is to express, in words and pictures, the essence of a book, in such a way that you must reach out and pick it up. He is very good at this, and it is likely that, as a reader of these pages, one of his creations is sitting on your shelves. It’s therefore logical that he would use both words and pictures to tackle the problem of reading. While we usually encounter this approach within the envelope of children’s literature and independent (or underground) comics, there is no reason that it can’t be bent towards other topics: The Medium is the Massage is a good example of what can be done at the intersection of text and images.
You’d think that, living as we do in an age of computerized layout, that there would be more books like this, but technology isn’t the limiting factor. It is difficult to get the croissant-like folding of text and image right. Words and pictures are processed very differently in our brains. Add to this the reader’s prerogative to read the words and images as they wish, and the trick becomes quite difficult. Of course we manage this when we watch a foreign film, but this works best when we forget that we’re actually reading the subtitles. When we forget the (aforementioned) strangeness.
What We See is not always a two-channel Gesamtkunstwerk: sometimes the lamination between word and picture part and the images are reduced to providing inflection to aphorisms. We get a picture on this spread because elsewhere we have pictures, or because it helps the pacing of the book. Much to his credit, Mendelsund acknowledges the limitations of using so much imagery. But the project is successful: he takes what could be a very dry subject and, using images, gives it juice. I for one think that this book is worth having simply to see a master’s take on a difficult form. - Brian Morgan

Virginia Woolf’s “To the Lighthouse” revolves around the Ramsay family’s vacations on Scotland’s Isle of Skye over a decade. It’s one of Peter Mendelsund’s favorite books.

He’s been tempted once or twice to Google whether Woolf’s own family had a getaway like that of the Ramsays, but he has resisted. The Ramsays’ busy summer house, he writes in this unusual, illustrated inquiry into the nature of reading, “is like the rough-and-tumble, rowdy houses my family rents during summers on Cape Cod.”

And the author, a highly regarded book-jacket designer, would just as soon retain his own mental image of the place, thank you very much.

Reading is often considered (especially by those who don’t love to do it) a passive activity. But Cambridge native Mendelsund — who is publishing this title concurrently with another book, “Cover,” an appealing look into his design process — makes a nice case that it is, in fact, a kind of active collaboration.

“What We See When We Read,” itself a work of conceptual design, unfolds the author’s ideas about what makes reading a creative, visual act all its own on pages — some packed with text, others just a line or two — that incorporate sketches, clip art, images of classic book covers and more. It’s less a scholarly manifesto (such as, say, James Woods’s “How Fiction Works” or the Adler-Van Doren classic “How to Read a Book”) than it is a conversation piece, created to entice repeated thumb-throughs.

Because the experience of reading remains extraordinarily difficult to understand or describe, Mendelsund notes, we resort to analogies: It’s like watching a movie, or gazing into a mirror that helps the beholder look inward. Novels are like cartoons, as Italo Calvino proposed in “The Uses of Literature.” Or, better yet, they’re comparable to comic books, with characters performing in panels — scenes.

“I can imagine reading is like withdrawing to a cloister behind my eyes,” Mendelsund writes. Yet “[w]hat I see when I’m reading is not the act of reading itself, nor do I see analogies for the act of reading.”

There’s a lot of addition by subtraction going on here. Despite the book’s title, there is no definitive explanation of what we “see” when we read, of course. That, effectively, is Mendelsund’s point. Like literature itself, he doesn’t have the answers, but he’s eager to raise the questions.

When an author describes a character, he points out, she often does so with just a few linguistic brush strokes — a hardness of the eyes, say, or long, slender fingers, or a chipped tooth.

“Characters are ciphers,” Mendelsund writes. “And narratives are made richer by omission.” Just as in music, “notes and chords define ideas, but so do rests.” Essentially we take what the author gives us and imaginatively fill in the blanks.

By offering clues but leaving more to the imagination, all well-written novels, regardless of genre, are mysteries: “This is one reason we bother to turn a book’s pages.”

Intriguingly, he suggests that while average readers often assume their favorite authors have great imaginations, the inverse might be true. The author’s mind may not be freer than ours, he writes: maybe “his mind is less wild, and therefore it is easier to subdue his thoughts, tame them, and corral them onto the page.”

No mention is made of e-books, and Mendelsund is apparently not interested in statistics about the relative health of the publishing industry. Human beings read simply because it is in itself a creative act, he argues. In fact, it can be an exalted undertaking.

“Can the visions of literature claim to be, like religious epiphanies, or platonic verities, more real than . . . reality itself?”

As Molly Bloom said: yes. - James Sullivan