Though most people might not recognize Saul Bass by name, his impact on American postwar visual culture was transformative. The AT&T logo--his design. United Airlines, his. The Girl Scouts, United Way, Quaker Oats, Special Olympics, Boys Clubs, Rockwell, Dixie Cup--all his. Then there's his work on movie posters and film credit sequences, from classic Alfred Hitchcock (Vertigo, Psycho) and Otto Preminger (Anatomy of a Murder) through Billy Wilder, John Frankenheimer and Stanley Kubrick, up to Scorsese's Cape Fear and Goodfellas. Whatever the medium, his visual style/aesthetic was unmistakable--simplicity, abstraction and ambiguity, all pushed to the limit, yet still readable.
Saul Bass: A Life in Film and Design is a wonder, a joy and a labor of love for graphic designers Jennifer Bass (Saul's daughter) and Pat Kirkham. Weighing in at around six pounds, 400-plus pages and nearly 1,500 illustrations, most in color, this book is also a monument to the graphic designer Martin Scorsese justly describes in his foreword as a legend. The only thing missing is a DVD of Bass's film work. --Tom Lavoie, former publisher