Jorge Luis Borges, Fictions
1951, book cover,
Éditions Gallimard
A beautiful book cover for a great mind.
The design is not specific to the book but was common to all those printed in Gallimard’s La Croix de Sud collection of South American writing, selected by Roger Caillois.
Irritatingly, we don’t know who designed it.
The famous Gallimard book designer Robert Massin only joined the firm in 1958 and rose to the post of artistic director which he held for two decades.
This isn’t Massin’s style, however, and the book was printed years before he arrived anyhow.
More likely it was designed by Roger Parry, who did design some covers for Gallimard around the time Fictions was published.
Parry is also suggested by the researchers Brigitte Adriaensen and Lies Wijnterp in their recent attempt to interpret Borges through his book covers.
https://www.borges.pitt.edu/sites/default/files/wijnterp4.pdf
Brigitte Adriaensen y Lies Wijnterp
Borges leído a través de sus cubiertas.
Un estudio de las ediciones y traducciones tempranas de Ficciones y El Aleph en el contexto de la recepción
Borges read through his covers.
A study of the early editions and translations of Ficciones and El Aleph in the context of reception
Borges’s first book in France, Fictions (1951), was published by Gallimard in the Latin American literature series La Croix du Sud. This series was directed by Roger Caillois, who spent World War II in Argentina and later served as a sort of ambassador for Latin American literature in France. La Croix du Sud included diverse authors, such as Jorge Amado, José María Arguedas, Graciliano Ramos, Rómulo Gallegos, Alejo Carpentier, Julio Cortázar, Juan Rulfo, Ernesto Sábato, and Jorge Luis Borges. The cover of Fictions shows a yellow cross on a green background—which the publisher eventually made black—with white stars within a green square in the center. The image seems to illustrate the small constellation of stars called the Cross, or the Southern Cross, as a symbol representing the southern hemisphere. Since the constellation has always been an important reference for both European navigators and the astrology of some indigenous cultures, there is also an association with the foreign or the distant. Its authorship is unknown: the publisher indicates that it could have been Roger Allard, a Cubist poet and art critic who, after World War II, replaced André Malraux as artistic director at Gallimard (Massin, Massin 49), or Roger Parry, a photographer, illustrator, and reporter associated with Surrealism who also designed covers for Gallimard at the time.
In contrast to the rather figurative covers of books in Argentina, the Fictions cover is abstract and geometric in nature, although the stars do reference the Southern Cross and therefore South America. This reference to the continent is clearer in a model from the collection showing the profile of South America, which was later discarded. At first glance, the cross and the square might be associated with the mathematical or cerebral nature of Borges’s book, but it is important to emphasize that this is not a cover specific to this book, but rather common to all the books in the series. It is not so much through the cover, therefore, but through the preface by Néstor Ibarra, an old friend and critic of Borges, that the denationalized dimension in the French reception of Borges begins to take shape. The first lines of the preface present him as a European without a homeland:
Writer, web designer, etc.; born in New York; educated in Argentina, Scotland, and South Africa; now based in London. 
