Designing Dylan / Ideas

Books are aesthetic objects. As much as the collected material it documents, Bob Dylan: Mixing Up the Medicine – the official publication of The Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma – is a physical design artifact, and the content it holds is just as constructed. Like all aesthetic objects, Mixing Up the Medicine is a product of the choices of its creators, the imprint of its historical moment, and the inextricable link between the two. Following Alessandro Carrera’s review of the book in The Dylan Review’s previous edition¹, our challenge here is understanding what was actually designed, in the sense of consciously created, and what is also routine cultural reflex, born from the systemic, ongoing effects of design and its evasive relational complexity.

Any published account of Dylan’s career is automatically epic due to the mythology of its shape-shifting subject. Mixing Up the Medicine, like many of the earliest literary works, is an adventurer’s log book charting the landmarks of a pioneering explorer’s discoveries. From the very first book, the travails of Gilgamesh, transcribed in cuneiform on clay tablets, to Chinese Song-dynasty block-printed travel literature, books have long been produced as mythological and historical records of heroic travelers’ adventures.

In their day, the lead-set printed European colonial conquests were a publishing phenomenon. I recently donned white gloves to view the first ever published account of Captain James Cook’s (ultimately genocidal) journey around the world, and the rarest published work relating to Cook’s Endeavour voyage, a collection of charts of the east coast of Australia and New Zealand. Until the late 19th century most books did not have illustrated covers, so in the absence of pictures, extravagantly descriptive titles were needed to evoke content and attract readers. Although from a contemporary perspective, reading the whole title almost risks negating the need to read any further. One of the Cook books is titled: Astronomical observations made in the voyages which were undertaken by order of his present Majesty, for making discoveries in the Southern Hemisphere, and successfully performed by Commodore Byron, Captain Carteret, Captain Wallis, and Captain Cook, in the Dolphin, Tamer, Swallow, and Endeavour.

In contrast, Mixing Up the Medicine’s front cover is all image. The single striking photo without a title, or any text at all, may reveal as much about evolving socio-technical conditions as it does about Dylan’s fame. For centuries, books have been sold in brick-and-mortar stores, romantic sites that persist in our imagination even as they vanish from our communities (support your local independent bookstore!). Like the album covers increasingly designed to be viewed as thumbnails on digital streaming platforms, the majority of books are now viewed initially on a screen and sold online (by 2020, over 71.2% of the United States publishing industry’s total revenue was coming from online book sales).² As a consequence, covers are becoming simpler, bolder, and in some cases are exaggerating their formal, material qualities in opposition to the intangible ephemerality of digital information. The distillation of visual information on book covers isn’t just down to a new diminished virtual viewing context, but also the ability for less literal images to be accompanied online by descriptive texts. It’s also worth noting that the magnetic, unadorned photo on Mixing Up the Medicine’s cover is by Jerry Schatzberg from a post-Highway 61 Revisited studio shoot, and prefaces his Blonde on Blonde cover shot, which began a brief, anomalous period (1966–1970) when most of Dylan’s album covers were similarly devoid of title typography.

There are thousands of photographs of Dylan at every age and in every era. However, reinforcing the archaic characterization of Dylan as a folksinger singing protest songs defaults stubbornly to the 60s. As Dylan himself said in a 1985 interview: “It’s kinda funny… When I see my name anywhere, it’s (often) ‘the 60s this or the 60s that.’ I can’t figure out sometimes if people think I’m dead or alive.”³ As a marketable medium, perhaps an image of iconic 60s Dylan is highly legible, while Dylan’s older visage is just harder to read. Regardless, the cover image suspends him in amber as some kind of estranged historical subject. A “walking antique” for the hypnotist collectors. For the cover of a Dylan book published in 2023, at the tail end of an unprecedented seven-decade career, should designers still be searching through mid-century photographic proofs? At the time of writing, Bob Dylan is 83 years old. Can’t this resilience and maturity be visually celebrated, rather than habitually ignored? Give me a portrait of the old explorer still powerful and relevant: “I can see the history of the whole human race / It’s all right there – it’s carved into your face.”

The book exists because of its subject, for its subject’s audience. Then again, Dylan, as a popular performer and songwriter, is actually the direct result of the book form – not just as a source of content, or influences (“I read Erica Jong!”) but more fundamentally as a transformative technology. The development of the printed word manifested the possibility of an audience. This is Marshall McLuhan’s idea that books created the phenomenon of a public: “The old manuscript forms were not sufficiently powerful instruments of technology to create publics in the sense that print was able to do — unified, homogeneous, reading publics.”⁴ One of Dylan’s influences acknowledged in his Nobel lecture, Charles Dickens, caused a riot in 1841, as legend has it, when frenzied readers stormed the New York harbor in anticipation of the British ship arriving with the final installment of his serialized novel, The Old Curiosity Shop.⁵ Long before recorded music and film, books manifested fans, not just for a writer, but for an actor, artist and “song and dance man”: “I see the turning of the page / Curtain risin’ on a new age.”⁶ Gutenberg’s printing press and Dylan’s guitar are playing the same song.

Offering the book’s content as a more broadly accessible online archive would involve obtaining unlikely permissions from rights holders, but who knows, they may yet. Even so, the digital transmission of the written word, for all its convenience, has not replaced traditional print, especially not for longer texts (and not always as a foolproof monetizable commodity). Popular predictions of prints’ extinction now seem obsolete themselves. The unique sensorial qualities of the printed page, with its ink solvent aromatics, the vanilla and almond notes from a complex organic polymer in the paper called lignin, and the medium’s tactility – as well as the ways in which light is absorbed and reflected from its surface – combine to offer unique haptic, optical and olfactory pleasure. Then there’s the growing body of research showing the reading benefits of a book’s physicality, for example, that print reading can enhance comprehension by up to eight times more than reading on digital devices.⁷ And Mixing Up the Medicine’s hefty 608-page hardcover format is plenty of print, enabling provisional global dissemination of the Dylan museum’s Oklahoma-based collection.

There is a typical limit to the scale of a large format hardcover, that relates to both the economics of conventional publishing efficiencies and the human body itself. To accommodate more of the museum’s collection, Mixing Up the Medicine could have easily been many multiple times its current length. The authors, Mark Davidson and Parker Fishel, claim the book represents just 2% of the Bob Dylan Archive.⁸ But it deserves to be read, not just looked at, and that means conforming to some physical constraints. Odds are you’re not reading many of German publisher Taschen’s “Sumo” sized books in bed, for example, some of which are 44 pounds and come with their own custom stands. Mixing Up the Medicine’s own publisher, Calloway, has titles that include the limited edition “super-deluxe” Sistine Chapel, with a total of 822 pages across three volumes, weighing 75 pounds and costing $25,000.⁹

A museum can update and rotate its collection, and a website is a bottomless pit of mutable data, but a book is a fixed and finite codex. This is the printed publication’s simultaneous strength and limitation. Carving something in stone takes nerve – it stays carved, while history dissolves around it. In a limited exhibition space, as on the bounded pages of a book, the quantity of information is as critical a design decision as choices regarding the nature and presentation of the content. Squeezing too much in can result in missing a lot out. As Mixing Up the Medicine emerges from the 60s and 70s, many entries list awards and industry honors, as if to reassure the reader of the subject’s ongoing cultural relevance. Maybe the aim here is to ground Dylan in the pop-culture context of the day, but traces of hagiographical deification taint the book’s otherwise focused editorial narrative. This is evidenced, not by the celebratory tone, which is arguably unavoidable, but by the omission of shadow, struggle, and failure.

It’s well acknowledged that one of the artist’s most defining qualities is his creative risk-taking, his willingness to chance falling down and failing, and his ability to pick himself up and forge ahead in new directions, just to risk it all again. Not to mention the creative bravery of changing tack just when success is assured. But we can’t have it both ways. Glossing over career missteps, personal misadventures, and creative miscarriages never works out as intended. Rather than elevate the art, it robs it of substance. Can’t we also accept the failure, the sexism, the appropriation, the reactionary rants, the lingerie peddling, the dud films, the sub-par songs, and more? “Won’t you descend from the throne, from where you sit?” This is the challenge for the creators of a book like Mixing Up the Medicine, as it is for all custodians of cultural legacy: how to honor an artist without selectively airbrushing their art and life. After all, “To live outside the law, you must be honest.”

The design, by Nicholas Callaway, Jerry Kelly, and Toshiya Masuda, fares best when playing it straight, especially with the texts of the twenty-nine invited writers who contribute essays responding to material in the archives. These are distributed regularly amongst the editorial sections and visually differentiated with a gray background, alternate typography, and more consistent, full-page column widths. The book’s main body text is set in Century Schoolbook, a highly legible, transitional serif typeface designed for the American Type Founders by Morris Fuller Benton in 1924. Here again, the design reaches back to the comfort of the past, with the typeface bathing the book in an aura of authoritative nostalgia. Century Schoolbook was ubiquitous in the first half of the 20th Century in US American textbooks, and will be subconsciously familiar to many US Americans as the typeface they learned to read with.

If reviews mention the book’s form at all, they invariably praise its design: “immaculately designed compendium”;¹⁰ “the very design of Mixing Up the Medicine may be its greatest virtue”;¹¹ “gorgeous and luxurious.”¹² But for all its considerable merit, the book is not quite any of those things. It looks handsome at first glance, but the book’s sensitive typography and compelling images excuse compositional and rhythmic lapses. For example, with the Newport Folk Festival spread (pages 158-159), the layout gets cramped and cluttered, with too many images, every one a different size and shape, and text in awkward spaces between.

With a dynamic page composition, not unlike songwriting and performing, the appearance of effortlessness belies considerable ingenuity and dexterity. Making it look easy is never easy.

Perhaps a mix of messy scrapbook and grid-conforming template could have worked, mirroring Dylan’s own inventiveness on albums like Blood on the Tracks. If it’s good enough for Dylan, it’s good enough for a book about Dylan. Here’s Greil Marcus from the infamous 1970 review of Self Portrait:

What matters most is Bob’s singing. He’s been the most amazing singer of the last ten years, creating his language of stress, fitting five words into a line of ten and ten into a line of five, shoving the words around and opening up spaces for noise and silence that through assault or seduction or the gift of good timing made room for expression and emotion. Every vocal was a surprise. You couldn’t predict what it would sound like. The song itself, the structure of the song, was barely a clue. The limits were there to be evaded.¹³

Raymond Foye describes some of this in more formal terms in his essay “Reflections on Dirge,” where he considers Dylan’s “unique rhythmic sense,” his use of syncopation, as well as rubato: “borrowing time from one bar while giving it back to the next, without disrupting the overall rhythmic flow.” From liberated page to unbound song, Dylan himself has made these kinds of direct visual/musical comparisons. Speaking about “Tangled Up in Blue,” Dylan said: “I guess I was just trying to make it like a painting where you can see the different parts, but then you can see the whole of it.”¹⁴

Now I’m fantasizing that if Dylan had discovered pioneering modernist designers like Kurt Schwitters and Paul Renner, instead of Woody Guthrie and Arthur Rimbaud, he might have made an inspired avant-garde editorial designer…

Mixing Up the Medicine compares with other “inside-out biographies” (as Davidson and Fishel describe the volume in their introduction), such as Nick Cave’s Stranger Than Kindness, another ephemera-built biography whose material artifacts Cave introduces as a “wild-eyed and compulsive superstructure… a support system of manic tangential information.”¹⁵ Designed by Tom Hingston and Rasmus Koch, the “peripheral stuff” is beautifully photographed and controlled on the page. Or something like A History of the World in 100 Objects, based on the BBC’s radio series, in which a “history of humanity” is told with illustrated and interpreted artifacts from the British Museum.¹⁶ To be fair, these are not exactly the same kind of book as Mixing Up the Medicine, the former having far fewer texts and a much smaller archive to draw from, and the latter’s vast collection winnowed by an arbitrary tally, both allowing for a more disciplined sequencing and layout. They do however demonstrate the potential of ensuring the design is equal to the other creative contributions.

The best of the book’s essays use the Archives’ manuscripts and other records for revelatory excavations of Dylan’s work. This great round-up tempts readers to curate their own wish lists: how about Nick Cave, Salman Rushdie, and Haruki Murakami, or Patti Smith, Stephen King and Molly Ringwald? The texts, accompanied by images of related artifacts, support a re-evaluation of previously neglected or denigrated periods. Griffin Ondaatje’s investigation of Dylan’s relationship to Joseph Conrad, and the way Conrad’s novel Victory regularly surfaces in Dylan’s songs, is exciting, convincing detective work. Raymond Foye’s reflection on “Dirge” from 1974’s Planet Waves goes to the manuscripts and uncovers Leonard Cohen as the initial “animating spirit behind the song,” even though the final lyric erases the explicit namecheck. For Foye, the Archive manuscripts also reveal a “long-standing interpretation of any given album to be diametrically opposed by the drafts in the notebooks.” With Planet Waves, what he had assumed were songs informed by fond childhood memories of Dylan’s Minnesota youth were manifestly forged as a “dark lament for a country where things have gone seriously wrong.” Larry Sloman’s more instinctive, personal take on “Handy Dandy” from 1990’s Under the Red Sky charts the evolution of the song’s lyrics on pages of painstakingly reworked drafts. Entries such as these are an overdue expansion of Dylan’s popular anthology, illuminating dark corners of his oeuvre. However, many of their accompanying images deserve to be treated with greater respect and sensitivity. For example, some of the smaller images just don’t work at their reduced scale, and an artificial, overbearing drop shadow has been grafted onto many of the images, clumsily signifying three-dimensionality. This lack of finesse doesn’t do the material justice.

For many readers, the publication’s encyclopaedic, chronological structure will be an invitation to leaf straight to a personal watershed album or period. For this reader, that album was Oh Mercy. Coming out of an eclectic diet of late punk, early hip hop, and top forty radio, I fell into Dylan’s ocean in the late 80’s when I was 16 or 17 years old. And it was a deep and mysterious abyss to get lost in. But with his last three records being Down in the Groove, Dylan and the Dead, and Knocked out Loaded, it was also an unflattering period in which he’d been widely written off (“dismissed, derided and misunderstood” as Amanda Petrusich writes in her essay about Tarantula) – when his previous eminence was diminished, and future multi-generational canonization was implausible. Nevertheless, for a hungry teenager in working-class suburbia there were still a couple of decades of potent music to explore, and just a short train ride away, the local library had most of it on cassette. Then one day, while skipping Uni to browse for records, popular music’s past warped into my personal present when I came across a newly released album of Dylan originals at my local record store. Oh Mercy was a revelation and felt like a vindication. The songs were at once sublime and uneasy. Amid late 80s Australian radio dross, I was getting my head around “Most of the time / I can’t even be sure / If she was ever with me / Or if I was ever with her,” and “There are no mistakes in life some people say / And it’s true sometimes you can see it that way.” That extraordinary voice didn’t sound like a cornered “legend,” it sounded like a seething spirit: “Whatever you wanted / What could it be / Did somebody tell you / That you could get it from me?”

That sustained rejection of conditional acceptance, that endless creative struggle, is part of Dylan’s story, perhaps even the heart of it. Any narrative twisting of Dylan’s art towards infallibility betrays legitimate artistic triumph. There is so much that is remarkable about Mixing Up the Medicine, yet as a designed object, it could have gone further in mirroring its subject’s creative ambition and inventiveness. The two paradoxical sides to Dylan’s creative process, so powerfully evidenced by the Archive’s manuscripts and recordings, are persistent iteration and inexplicable inspiration – a good method for making books as writing songs.