Vertebrate Paleontology and Evolution. [Inspiration For Jurassic Park].

First edition this standard modern textbook on paleontology, containing the very first drawings in the development of Knopf senior designer Chip Kidd's design for the iconic dust jacket of Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park, a design that would come to define one of the most recognizable logos in modern popular culture. Quarto, original boards, illustrated. Signed by Chip Kidd on the front free endpaper, "Source of the J.P. Logo! -C." With Kidd's original drawings and annotations to page 296 which contain scientific illustrations of the skeletal anatomy of the Tyrannosaurus. Kidd has sketched beneath the tyrannosaurus skeletal profile in blue and red pen, "Jurassic Park Michael Crichton" an almost exact replica of the final dust jacket design. He has also highlighted the terms "Jurassic" and "Tyrannosaurus" and added creative notes, "Just the head?" and "Or Upper/Whole Body?" Kidd has also added his initials "C.K." beneath the design. Jurassic Park, published in 1990, is among the most famous and influential works of modern science fiction. Blending themes of genetic engineering, chaos theory, and the ethical implications of scientific advancement into a thrilling narrative, it launched a major franchise encompassing sequels, films, and adaptations across multiple media. The artwork for the dust jacket of the first edition, which would later be adapted into the iconic emblem of the film franchise, was created by Chip Kidd in 1989. Kidd was just 25 years old and a junior designer at Alfred A. Knopf when he was entrusted with producing a jacket design for a new manuscript submitted by Michael Crichton. His brief, in essence, was to create for Jurassic Park an image as impactful as the cover of Jaws, which had subsequently been used for the famous film poster. With the novel already optioned by Steven Spielberg, the enormity of the task was not lost on Kidd. Nevertheless, he set to work and, in the present drawings, found the basis for his now-famous creation—a skeletal design, stark and minimalist in black, white, and red, foreshadowing the dangers inherent in the reanimation of prehistory. For inspiration, Kidd visited the American Museum of Natural History to study its Tyrannosaurus rex specimen, and in the bookshop purchased what he describes as “a large, thick, scholarly hardcover tome called Vertebrate Paleontology and Evolution by Robert L. Carroll. As dinosaur books go, this was about as dull and unsexy as you could possibly imagine, but it had a ton of technical black-and-white drawings in it. These I could use as reference.” He took it back to his office. The more than 700-page volume offered a wealth of possibilities, with diagrams of the bones of nearly every conceivable kind of dinosaur. “But I kept coming back to page 296. No matter how elegant the Brontosaurus and pterodactyls were, there was just no getting away from the T. rex. That thing was king.” Back at his desk he ran the page through a photostat machine, taped tracing paper over the enlargement, and went after the skeleton with a Rapidograph pen, simplifying as he went cleaning up the linework, sharpening the silhouette, pulling it toward something that read as both an anatomical diagram and a menacing shape. He extended the design so the body wrapped around the spine and onto the back board, the skull baring its teeth on the front cover. Above it, in heavy Neuland Inline, the title. The proof was faxed to Crichton for approval. The novelist's reply came back in a single line, which Kidd has retold many times over the years and which he remembers as something close to: "Wow, fantastic [expletive] jacket." Jurassic Park was published in 1990 and became one of the year's defining bestsellers. Three years later, when Universal Pictures acquired the film rights, they did something unusual: rather than commission new branding, they took Kidd's jacket art more or less intact and used it as the logo for the film and the entire franchise to come. The skeleton on the side of the Jeep, the patch on Dr. Grant's shirt, the gates of the park itself - all of it traces back, through a tracing-paper sketch on a young designer's desk, to a museum gift-shop textbook and a hundred-year-old set of bones in Manhattan. Near fine in a near fine dust jacket with small losses to the lower corner of three preliminary pages. From the library of Chip Kidd with his bookplates to the pastedown. Housed in a custom half morocco clamshell box by the Harcourt Bindery signed by Chip Kidd on the front marbled panel with a massive original drawing of a Tyrannosaurus skull in profile. A unique piece of history.