NEW GRIT

LITTLE ROCK — The occasion of a Charles Portis reissue - like the new Overlook Press printing of True Grit, with an afterword by Donna Tartt - is an opportunity, of course, to revisit the Arkansas author's droll prose and spend time once again in the company of the gimlet-eyed Mattie Ross. But it's also a chance for a new graphic designer to interpret afresh, via book-cover art, Mattie's vengeance and the odyssey on which it dispatches Portis' saddle-leather-tough, seen-it-all 'tween.

The work, a standout from Portis' other novels in that it's a point-blank classic - no "cult" qualifier needed - offers several shades for the artistic palette: A lawless, sagebrush landscape; Mattie's determination as she tracks her father's killer; and the mercurial, no-country-for-old-coots U.S. marshall named Rooster Cogburn, who lends an air of battle-tested, rotgut-pickled authority to Mattie's quest.

The book has spanned four decades and inspired at least twice that many designers. (And that's not even counting thedust-jacket designer for the cookbook True Grits: Recipes Inspired by the Movies of John Wayne.) Quick on the heels of Stan Galli's painterly vignettes illustrating the work's original appearances serialized in the Saturday Evening Post came the seminal cover art for the Simon and Schuster first edition, published in June 1968. Paul Davis' folk-art, earth-tone treatment of Mattie as a gun-toting stoic remains the gold standard in True Grit covers.

"This is a design nerd kind of thing, but the original cover is one of the coolest things I've ever seen, and much better than mine," says David Shoemaker, the 29-year-old Overlook Press designer who took his turn with the new edition.

For his part, Shoemaker conjured an aesthetic blend of the two schools of previous True Grit cover artists: the suggestive and the representational, with a hint of the Mattie character on horseback dwarfed in an arid landscape. As Shoemaker's new vision for the book's cover hits shelves, here's a look back at major True Grit designs through the years, and where they fit in each artist's frame of reference and body of work.

Stan Galli, a poster designer now collected for his campy, frolic-filled travel posters for United Airlines in the 1960s, depicted the murder of Mattie Ross' father on the streets of Fort Smith for the serial's first installment, published in the May 18, 1968, Saturday Evening Post. Galli also contributed a curiously Nancy Drew-like bust of Mattie to give readers a peg on which to hang their visualization. On a subsequent page, illustrating Mattie's first meeting with Rooster Cogburn, Galli dresses the nononsense Mattie as if she's headed for an ice cream social in the Good Ole Summertime.

Meanwhile, the magazine cover includes no mention of the Portis serial beginning inside.

(The cover story is "Stealing for Thrills: The billion-dollar scandal of teen-age shoplifting.") The letter from editor Bill Emerson reflects on the burial of Martin Luther King Jr., held the week before publication. And magazine readers insulated from the heyday of literary serialized novels would be jarred to see Portis' text broken up by advertisements for Betty Crocker German chocolate cake mix and the Kodak Instamatic color camera. It "makes a neat little gift," reads the copy.

Any dust-jacket designer will tell you a cover is essentially a poster meant to sell the book.

Appropriate, then, that Simon and Schuster turned to poster designer Paul Davis to create a cover for True Grit's first edition. Davis took his cues from primitive and American folk art, which he admired.

"It was a rejection of Norman Rockwell, who was at his best a great Flemish painter and at his worst a bad cartoonist, as well as of the entrenched Westport style of romantic illustration," Davis once told an interviewer from the American Institute of Graphic Arts to describe his unsentimental style - a perfect complement forMattie's cheerless, prairie-born pragmatism. Davis' most enduring works are posters for the New York Shakespeare Festival and an iconic, high-design take on the famous Che Guevara photograph that also inspired T-shirts and dorm-room art.

For the 1969 film version of True Grit, a Signet promotional paperback version appeared with a miniaturization of the original cover on the front and, on the flip side, a mostly faithful "re-telling" of the Paul Davis design, with Mattie represented in the image of her cinematic portrayer, Kim Darby. Mattie is still leading a horse, but has lost the gun, and the severe bangs and braids from Davis' vision have been replaced by Darby's pageboy. For purists, this twist on Davis' work now looks as derivative as attempts to contemporize Grant Wood's American Gothic with a modern man and woman and higher-techversions of Wood's pitchfork.

For a 2002 reissue of the entire Portis catalogue, Overlook emphasized the author's name, in a swinging-'60s-style cursive, while only vaguely referencing the book's themes of trekking and cross-purposes in the Old West, via an inky, woodgrain directional sign of hands pointing opposite ways.

"I wanted to do something that didn't shout 'little-girlin-the-Old-West,'" says David Shoemaker, cover designer for the latest printing by Overlook. "I think the book's been pigeonholed enough in its life." Instead of opting for a photographic collage in which the images were treated to become indistinct silhouettes, Shoemaker found a horseback rider that still leaves Mattie to the imagination. "I feel like it's just female enough, but it's also a little more iconic." More fun facts: The canyon-wall feel to the backdrop comes from photos of cacti Shoemaker found in an old textbook and magnified to distort their scale. And, while the author didn't offer specific input about Shoemaker's True Grit design, Portis did mail the artist a Xerox of the kind of flat-nosed tour bus he always envisioned as The Dog of the South, which Overlook has also reissued.