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Joseph Schumpeter. Social classes; Imperialism. Meridian Books, 1955
“Playing on ideas of class distinction in Joseph Schumpeter’s essays Imperialism and Social Classes, Lustig set "Social Classes" in a decorative white script that contrasted with the imposing, all-capital, black, sans-serif "Imperialism". The field of purple invited associations with royalty, while the position and color of the “2” suggested an imperial crown and helped to identify the text as two distinct essays. These typographic covers, with their subtle mixture of typefaces on colored or patterned backgrounds, are simplified but not simplistic, bold but not stark, refined but not sterile. His idiosyncratic amalgams of different typefaces defied a pure modernist idiom and foreshadowed the eclectic use of historical styles in American design of the 1960s and the postmodernist pastiche of the 1980s.”
Ned Drew, Paul Sternberger. Purity of aim: the book jacket designs of Alvin Lustig. Rochester: Rochester Institute of Technology, 2010 (p. 67)