Naked
By David Sedaris
Cover design by Chip Kidd
Little, Brown, 1997

In Naked’s title story David Sedaris recounts his stay in a nudist colony – a nudist trailer court in rural Pennsylvania, actually – inhabited by people whose display of saggy flesh is as worrying as their desire to bare it. Returning home, Sedaris feels that he can see people’s bodies through their clothes, something he had fantasised about as a boy when he ordered a pair of X-ray glasses from a comic book. As an adult, however, X-ray vision no longer seems so desirable.

Designer Chip Kidd shares Sedaris’s wry sensibility and his appreciation for the comic potential of human weirdness. Many of the stories in Naked explore ideas of vulnerability and self-exposure, so Kidd chose for Naked’s cover a photograph of loose white boxer shorts. The title is printed directly on the white book-binding rather than on the jacket, with the too-short jacket just touching the base of the word.

“Somehow,” Kidd says, “the reader needs a cue to ‘pull the pants off’ the book, and they get it from the fact that the jacket doesn’t fully cover it.” When you slide the jacket down and off the book, what you see below the word “naked” on the binding is an X-ray image of what’s inside the boxer shorts: hip, thigh and pelvic bones, with only the ghostliest outline of the body. Your curiosity has taken you too far, and you have seen something even more intimate than flesh. The experience is funny, and also unnerving.

For the paperback cover, Kidd wanted to replace the boxers with a pair of white briefs – Sedaris’s own, in fact, for the sake of authenticity. The author line, “by David Sedaris”, is handwritten on the waistband, as if by an adolescent going off to summer camp. Sadly the briefs were thought “too sexual” and the design was rejected. For Kidd’s story of the evolution of these covers and a look at all the images involved, you have to consult Chip Kidd Work: 1986-2000 Book One, a collection that confirms why he is the most celebrated jacket designer in the US.

Mary Cregan teaches literature at Barnard College in New York