Jesse Marinoff Reyes:
LIFE DURING WARTIME: A selection of my WWII (and one WWI) cover designs. In many cases history books (especially military or war) call for BIG type, and often big, generic type which to me is a shame. I was lucky in the examples shown here to skirt around this by arguing for period-authentic design and authentic type forms from the era (or at least type that we have that is unchanged) and being able to use BIG type the right way—to evoke wartime propaganda posters or newspapers and magazines that documented the times as they were unfolding and bring the viewer back to that experience.
JMR Design
A Soldiers’ Tale
Penguin Books, 1998
Design: Jesse Marinoff Reyes
Illustration: Harry Reeks, Fighting on Iwo Jima, 1945
Anne S. K. Brown Military Collection, Brown University Library
“V-Mail” courtesy Nathan Gluck Collection
Manuscript page courtesy the author (Samuel Hynes)
Art Director: Paul Buckley
This is a collection of war writings by soldiers—either as memoirs, from journals, or letters home—spanning both world wars and Vietnam. The cover artwork was painted by a soldier in the field, Harry Reeks, of the hell he was witnessing at Iwo Jima. “V-Mail” was a type of military correspondence (kind of hard to describe), sort of a system to move a uniform mail format quickly from remote locations back Stateside. My old friend Nathan Gluck was stationed in the Pacific Theater with Army communications and intelligence trailing the frontline troops (where my father was), and had later collected a piece of mail he’d sent via “V-Mail.”
JMR Design
Miracle At Midway
Penguin Books, 2002
Design: Jesse Marinoff Reyes
Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Art Director: Paul Buckley
This is the third title, so elements and treatment common to the first two were brought back here. Unlike Pearl Harbor, there were no extant photographers—civilian or soldier—documenting the carnage. This is pretty much what all of the (post) War Department imagery looked like. However, it is the real thing.
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