Did you miss our PRINT Book Club with Steven Brower? Register here to watch the recording.
At PRINT’s March Book Club, co-host Debbie Millman welcomed attendees alongside co-host Steven Heller for a conversation with designer, writer, and educator Steven Brower. A former creative director at PRINT and longtime School of Visual Arts professor, Brower has built a career examining the intersections of graphic design, illustration, and cultural history. His work often revisits overlooked figures, restoring them to the broader narrative of visual culture with careful research and critical insight.
The discussion centered on his latest book, Reluctant Modernist, a monograph and reclamation project devoted to the designer Roy Kuhlman, whose cover work for Grove Press helped define the look of literary modernism in mid-century America.
During the talk, Brower described Kuhlman as a quietly radical force whose covers did more than package provocative writing—they visually extended it. At a time when Grove Press published some of the most boundary-pushing authors of the twentieth century, Kuhlman produced imagery that was alternately playful and austere, narrative and abstract, disciplined yet improvisational.
With more than 300 reproduced works, many shown for the first time, Reluctant Modernist reveals the full scope of Kuhlman’s output and argues for his place as a vital, if underrecognized, author of visual culture.
You can order a copy of Steven’s book here and be sure to join us on April 23 at 4pm EST for our next PRINT Book Club featuring Aubrey Hirsch author of Graphic Rage: Comics on Gender, Justice, and Life as a Woman in America.
Register for the April 23rd PRINT Book Club here
The post PRINT Book Club Recap: Steven Brower appeared first on PRINT Magazine.