Tere LoPrete, Book Designer
Tere LoPrete, a book designer whose credits included the first edition of Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood” and books by Julia Child, Tom Wolfe, and James Michener, died at home in Wainscott on Dec. 27 surrounded by friends and family. She had overcome breast cancer years ago, but had a recurrence about two years ago, friends said. She was 90 years old.
Ms. LoPrete grew up in Brooklyn and began working in publishing after graduating from Grover Cleveland High School in Queens in 1944. Her first job was to file author correspondence, and she used her earnings to pay for night classes at the Art Students League. But “the only way to learn design in those days was to do it,” she told The Star in a 2006 interview. “There weren’t any classes that taught book design, only book production.” She eventually began to work on advertisements and finally book jackets. At Alfred A. Knopf, she oversaw a range of imprints from college textbooks to works of fiction. It was for Knopf that she designed the cover of “In Cold Blood,” published in 1965.
“Truman said he wanted to use a photograph on the cover — not the faces, just the eyes,” Ms. LoPrete recalled in the 2006 Star interview. The jacket included grainy black-and-white images of the eyes of Richard Eugene Hickock and Perry Edward Smith, the men convicted of the 1959 murder that is chronicled in the true-crime novel.
Ms. LoPrete was one of the first women in the field at the time, and also was the first book designer to have her name on a front jacket along with the author. She is recognized on the website Fonts In Use, an independent archive of typography, in the “most discussed” and “staff picks” categories, and she was much praised by the writers she worked with over six decades.
“The thing I learned as a designer as I went along is that, in general, the simpler the better. Less is more,” Ms. LoPrete said in 2006. Kim Shipman, a friend, said Ms. LoPrete had always said, “ ‘If a book is designed well, you don’t notice it.’ ” Her attention to detail, to the look and feel of a book and the many elements that enhanced the reader’s experience though he or she may never have been conscious of them, such as “never ending the page on a preposition,” are talents largely lost in the digital age, Ms. Shipman said.
From Knopf, Ms. LoPrete went on to such prestigious publishing houses as Lippincott and Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. She loved working for the latter because “they have more Nobel Prize winners than anybody else in literature, and they cared about the design of their books,” she told The Star. She designed the first unauthorized biography of the painter Georgia O’Keeffe at Playboy magazine’s newly formed book division, Seaview Books.
Ms. LoPrete bought land on West Gate Road in Wainscott not long after visiting the area with another friend in publishing, and built a house there in 1993. She moved there full time after retiring in 1999. A talented artist as well as a designer, she was an illustrator for children’s books and enjoyed oil painting and teaching plein air and still-life painting until just last year.
She took up golf after retiring and played on a women’s league until the age of 88. She also volunteered at the Parrish Art Museum and had helped with the layout and design of books containing artists’ collections, as well as working in its archives.
She celebrated her 90th birthday on Aug. 14 at her favorite restaurant, the American Hotel in Sag Harbor. She is survived by two sisters, Susan Moxley of Indianopolis and Lee Meyer of Asheville, N.C., and by a niece.
A celebration of her life will be held on Jan. 29 from noon to 3 p.m. at 48 West Gate Road in Wainscott. Ms. LoPrete was buried at Most Holy Trinity Church Cemetery in East Hampton.
Contributions in her name have been suggested to the Animal Rescue Fund of the Hamptons, P.O. Box 901, Wainscott 11975.