When Alcorn came to work for the Italian publishing house Rizzoli in 1973, he was asked to restyle the presentation of its paperback collection. Enlisted by Mario Spagnol, whom he had met the previous year at Mondadori, Alcorn had exactly what it took for this challenging assignment. Not only was he a well-established professional designer and illustrator, but with his personal brand of the Push Pin Style, which was then considered at the cutting edge of commercial communication, he represented something that was totally new for Italy.

As for Alcorn, the chance to completely redesign one of Italy’s main publishing brands, in tune with Spagnol’s own fine visual taste and passion for figurative arts, was the ideal commission.

The Rizzoli books which he was about to transform were then published in two main versions: the identical grey, monochrome covers of the Rizzoli’s original affordable series BUR (Biblioteca Universale Rizzoli), launched in 1949 and suspended in the 1960s, and the hardback editions featuring graphics by Mario Dagrada. Entrusting Alcorn with the task did not just mean sweeping away the previous solutions: it was a total overhaul, in contrast to the most sober Italian design tradition.

With Alcorn, Italian bookshops became populated with characters and compositions which reflected his broad, varied stylistic spectrum. Colors, styles, pop and comic-strip references were used to draw together a very varied selection of titles and authors, from Achille Campanile to Saul Bellow. More atmospheric solutions created in watercolors were chosen for certain writers, such as Carlo Cassola, alongside evocative “views” and depictions of contemporary Italian society such as the jacket for Paolo Levi’s Ritratto di provincia in rosso.

Also typical of Alcorn’s oeuvre were certain purely graphic and typographical solutions, created using nothing but lettering he designed himself: using brown paper and deliberately letting its texture show – for Radici (Roots) – or by animating the characters, such as for the Italian edition of Breakfast of Champions, or for Giorgio Manganelli’s A e B.

Once he had received a commission for a new book cover, Alcorn would sketch out his initial idea in graphite on parchment, later developing the final idea directly in watercolor over a light box. He would then send the definitive original illustration to the publishing company by messenger. Thanks to his direct link with the publisher, Spagnol, this was generally accepted unconditionally.

However, if the first design did not prove satisfactory, Alcorn would spend a long time trying to find the right visual approach: as was the case with Carlo Castellaneta’s L’amore lungo, which he solved by depicting the Italian peninsula as a prostitute’s bed in a composition packed with artistic references, from Magritte to de Chirico.

For the BUR paperbacks, Alcorn designed a series that was clearly identifiable and distinct from Rizzoli’s hardbacks, through a serial graphic style that was rich in visual and chromatic connotations. Here Alcorn brought all of his virtuosity as a visual inventor into play, first through the creation of a series of graphic templates consisting of ornamental frames and typographic elements, then by the creation of small pen-and-Indian-ink illustrations: these faux-engravings were lit up at the printing stage by Alcorn’s refreshing and decidedly modern use of flat, non-local, complementary color combinations. The twelve volumes of Anton Chekhov’s short stories are deliberately serial; for them, Alcorn designed modern icons inspired by the Russian author’s characters, juxtaposed against an unchanging, austere white heading.