“He [Heartfield] now had to employ his increasingly cunning desing skills to make the ‘wallflower that nobody took notice of, the dust jacket, [as Lilly Becher, onetime editor of the Arbeiter-Illustrierte Zeitung, later put it], perform two potentially conflicting tasks. It should operate as an alluring wrapper that would attract buyers and, at best, earn the volume a spot in the bookseller’s show window, the publishing world’s most important stage. It should also function as a political poster, impressing didactic points on sympathetic and unsympathetic customers alike, even those who never glimpsed the book’s contents. On his success rested the press’s very identity and survival.”