Saul Bass: A Life in Film and Design

The first substantial book on Saul Bass, and still the reference: 428 pages and more than 1,400 illustrations, most of them drawn from the Bass archive and many never published before.

Design historian Pat Kirkham, who knew Bass, wrote the text; Jennifer Bass, his daughter and a graphic designer, selected and designed the material, building on the picture research Bass himself had assembled for a memoir he never finished. Martin Scorsese, whose Goodfellas, Cape Fear, and Casino titles Bass made late in his career, contributes a foreword. The book runs from the Los Angeles studio's earliest advertising through the title sequences that redefined the form — The Man with the Golden Arm, Vertigo, Anatomy of a Murder, Psycho, Spartacus — to the corporate identities for AT&T, Quaker Oats, United Airlines, Continental, and Minolta, and the short films, among them the Oscar-winning Why Man Creates.

Bass (1920–1996) trained at Brooklyn College under Gyorgy Kepes and moved to Los Angeles in 1946. From the late 1950s he worked in partnership with his wife Elaine Bass, a collaboration the book documents in detail and one that had long been under-credited.