‘Recovering the Classics’: A look at Olin Library’s exclusive pop-up exhibit

Scott Lu | Contributing Reporter

It’s Friday afternoon, but instead of bright sunshine heralding a warm end of the week, it’s overcast with a sizeable amount of water cascading down to dampen everyone’s spirits. However, the inside of John M. Olin Library is tad more lively, with a colorfully diverse amount of artwork of newly designed covers for books older than Washington University itself arranged neatly around the first floor on pop-up stands.

Students and Wash. U. community members look at the 50x50 Missouri exhbit in Olin Library. The exhibit kicked off this past Friday by showing off a variety of re-designed book covers.Sami Klein | Student Life

Students and Wash. U. community members look at the 50×50 Missouri exhbit in Olin Library. The exhibit kicked off this past Friday by showing off a variety of re-designed book covers.

This collection is Missouri’s own 50×50, a pop-up art showcase that’s part of a nationwide crowdsourced and crowdfunded initiative known as “Recovering the Classics,” where artists in all 50 states pitch in to design new covers for 50 classic books in Western literary history. These include familiar titles such as “Jane Eyre,” “The Count of Monte Cristo” and “Anna Karenina”—books considered essential reading, probably by a Wash. U. student’s talkative older relative or high school English teacher.

Among the more crazily interpretive redesigns I saw featured at 50×50 Missouri were two blood-red dots against a sheer white background for Bram Stoker’s “Dracula,” a giant heart with snakes as veins for Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” and even a massive three-headed Lucifer trapped in ice for Dante Alighieri’s “Inferno.” Rest assured, the event also had its fair share of less intimidating reimaginings, including an adorable pink and pastel cover of Hodgson Burnett’s “A Little Princess” and a pretty birdlike shape morphing into abstract teardrop designs for Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice.”

One of the people who made all this possible was Bill Feng, a junior in the Olin Business School. Feng was introduced to 50×50 by one of his friends who went to a hack-athon at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology during sophomore year, where Feng’s friend got introduced to Recovering the Classics through 50×50 Massachusetts. After hearing about this, both Feng and his friend started working to bring 50×50 to Missouri, specifically to Wash. U. However, partway through the process, his friend transferred out of Wash. U., so Feng took over the entire project himself. Feng reached out to artists both within Wash. U. and in the St. Louis community to help design the book covers. After just three meetings with the library administration and a phone call to Olin education librarian Cheryl Holland, Feng was able to get the library to fund the idea.

“I think a lot of students don’t know that you can get these financial resources and receive backing from the school to pursue something that you are really passionate about,” Feng said.

Holland was especially excited to introduce the project to the Wash. U. community.

“This event follows what the library is all about,” Holland said. “This exhibit is one that encourages reading and literacy and that’s in line with what the White House Initiative originally wanted for this particular project.”

In addition to St. Louis-based artists, a number of Wash. U. students contributed to the project. Taylor Tuteur, a junior in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, designed a fresh new cover for the “Grimms’ Fairy Tales” with a rustic forest theme in mind, choosing to depict a house in the woods with the title on a wooden sign to evoke a fairytale-esque quality. Alice Wang, another junior in Sam Fox, who redesigned a cover for Lewis Carroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” said her inspiration stemmed from her nostalgia reading “Alice in Wonderland” as a child. In her cover, the figure of Alice sits within a picture frame, where two rows of roses blossom from her footsteps, making the flowers look like they are sprouting out of the cover itself.

Students view a re-designed book cover for "A Little Princess." The 50x50 project has been in other states besides Missouri, such as  New York and Colorado. Sami Klein | Student Life

Students view a re-designed book cover for “A Little Princess.” The 50×50 project has been in other states besides Missouri, such as New York and Colorado.

Wash. U. faculty, like Sam Fox professor Ron Fondaw, also contributed some new covers. He created a more abstract cover for Jules Verne’s “Journey to the Center of the Earth,” depicting a monochrome sketch-like shaft extending downwards, with the title orientated vertically in the shaft as if descending into the earth itself. Fondaw, who used to be a big fan of the book growing up, said that his redesigned cover was inspired by his experiences scuba diving at night. He incorporated core samples taken by geologists to analyze the different rock strata, with the lines spiraling around the shaft as drill marks.

Whether terrifying, cute or terrifyingly cute, these covers are nevertheless a far more effective way to get some disinterested readers to give the classics a chance—more than boring lectures from their grandparents and teachers.

50×50 Missouri will be open on the first floor of Olin Library until Oct. 7, so grab a friend and take a look at all wonderfully redesigned book covers. Who knows, maybe you’ll even be inspired to pick up one of those old books in your high school library and save it from its dusty fate as bookworm fodder.

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