Military/political book covers from the 1960s and 1970s

This is Survival, 1977 - a publication from the International Institute for Strategic Studies whose stark simplicity implies that the preservation of the Western way of life was an all-or-nothing game.

These are some book covers - they're the interesting quarter (in terms of cover design) of a mostly-1970s military-political library. Here are five of them; there are another 50 over here.

The Maltese Cross bearing down on the French Army Aviation roundel in The Origins of World War I 1871-1914, 1967. A cross-hair at the centre of the Maltese Cross symbol, and its negative space (do symbols have negative space or counters?) hinting at bombs. It's fantastic.

The book covers use flags and symbols, silhouettes, reportage photography and stylised images of machinery, tanks, planes, ships, missiles, technology, phones. It's all dramatic stuff. For instance: Strategic Forces: Issues for the Mid-Seventies, 1973.

Vitruvian man in a nested, overlapping set of cogs, and an almost-hidden tape reel at the centre of Men, Machines and Modern Times, 1974. This book still looks readable: it's about the inter-relation between society/culture/politics and technology.

The cover designs and titles make interesting reading 30 years on. They're mostly describing binary struggles: the projection of power vs points of weakness, complexity vs co-ordination, doubt and confidence, and, most of all, West vs East. There's little hint of the now-common fourth generation of warfare: asymmetric and networked conflict, irregular and "open-source" war, non-state actors, peace-keeping, global policing, infrastucture-rebuilding...

There are a couple of organisational psychology books in there too. Effective Management, 1972 offers an extraordinary bricolage of symbols, faces and diagrams.

Next time we might visit the Antarctic, travel, home-making and fiction areas of the library.

Comments

[Foe]

Is this a personal library you're documenting? And, if so, whose library?

[rodcorp]

Hi Foe - yeah it's about a quarter to a third of the navy/military/politics bit of my Dad's library. Lots of US material because he was at the Naval War College in Rhode Island for a year.

The Antarctic section is pretty big too but the book covers aren't as interesting because they're late 80s.