Above: Cover of The 48 Laws of Power, designed by Joost Elffers
I’m a pretty active reader. I mark up many of my books, magazines, newspapers, and after having done so that’s when I feel they really belong to me, beyond the fact of possession. It’s when the object’s picked up an additional layer of meaning from the generic text I got in the bookstore. Now there’s a relationship between what the author’s saying and what I as a reader am responding to. The name of this site, Lined & Unlined, could refer to the mixing of plain text and hyperlinked text. “Flagged Passages” adds text of another kind: highlighted text. This occasional series of posts will comprised entirely of highlighted text from a specific article, remixed and rereleased. For this first post in the series, I’ve chosen “Fresh Prince,” an article about the book The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene and Joost Elffers. It was written by Nick Paumgarten for the 6 November 2006 issue of the New Yorker. —RG
On Robert Greene, the book’s author
[Robert] Greene does exist, although perhaps not in the state of diabolical radiance that his admirers sometimes imagine. [P]eople arrange meetings with Mr. Greene, and they end up encountering an understated, somewhat geeky guy whose implementation of his own teachings is, if anything, very subtle. Whether by design or by nature, his reserve comes off as self-possession, and his reputation remains undiminished. […] While in New York, Greene, in defiance of Law 40 (“Despise the free lunch”), stayed in one of several apartments belonging to Dov Charney, who owns American Apparel. Charney reckons that he has bought four hundred copies of “The 48 Laws” which he calls “the Bible for atheists.” (He likes to give the book to employees before he fires them.) […] “He’s like Newton: Newton didn’t invent gravity,” Charney said. “Why should Robert be responsible for the imperfections in humanity?”
On the relationship between Robert Greene and Joost Elffers, the book’s producer
Another master, whom Greene has perhaps allowed himself to out-shine, is Joost Elffers, whose name adorns the covers of the three books, and who is credited, rather mysteriously, as their producer. He is also mistaken, frequently (and to Greene’s irritation), as their co-author. […] In 1995, Greene was in Italy, serving as an adviser at Fabrica, a new art and media school, near Venice, founded by Luciano Benetton and Oliviero Toscani. A friend introduced Greene to Elffers, a Dutch designer who had recently achieved success as the producer of a book called “The Secret Language of Birthdays,” which comprised three hundred and sixty-five fulsome personality profiles. One day, Greene and Elffers went for a walk along the Riva degli Schiavoni. Elffers asked Greene if he had any book ideas. The honest answer would have been “Not really,” but Greene began to talk about one of his pet subjects, the court of Louis XIV, and then about Machiavelli. Elffers was intrigued. They fixed on the idea of a book about power, and Elffers wrote out twelve postdated checks, one per month. Now, as Elffers put it, “Robert could sit on a mattress on the floor and read a thousand books” without having to worry about money. […] “I start with a nobody and work with him for years,” Elffers told me. “The subject and the way it is done are bigger than the writer. Now the writer is climbing the mountain on the shadowy side and one day will stand on top of it, on top of his own book. Right now more people know the book than the guy. But that is changing. The moment he is asked to comment on why Israel has lost in Lebanon, then he is not on top of his own book.” […] “The book is an engine,” [Elffers] said. “My role is to build the engine.” […] If a book like Greene’s is an engine, its primary function, you could say, is the aggrandizement of its author, and its readers are instruments in the writer’s bid for whatever it is—power, success, money, immortality—that he is supposedly helping them acquire.
On the book’s design
The design is stately, with great-man quotes in the margins, in red ink. Greene would say that the laws are not so much pieces of advice as they are observations of behavior—the fruit of research, if not quite revelation. Greene’s next two books, “The Art of Seduction,” a lush guide to inveigling, published in 2001 (the marginalia are lavender-hued), and “The 33 Strategies of War,” a concordance of tactical thinking, sold well too. […] [T]he chapters break down into modular sections, delineated by red or black type. […] The main component is the book’s design, which is essentially Elffers’s. The cover’s genesis was a source of some sour feelings at Viking Penguin. The art director spent weeks developing a cover, and then Elffers showed up for a meeting with his own version in a brown paper bag. “They came up with a cover, and I showed mine, and the whole meeting was over in a second,” Elffers said. (“Joost didn’t have to do that,” the book’s editor, Molly Stern, recalled. “I wouldn’t let that that situation happen again. I have a lot more power now, by the way.”) Elffers’s cover was modelled on the heraldic shield of Amsterdam: two vertical red stripes flank a royal-blue one, and in the middle, in place of Amsterdam’s three stars, the word “Power” reading top to bottom. “It’s an amoral design,” Elffers told me. (You might say that the cover of “Seduction,” an elongated pink ovoid on a black background, has an anatomical design.) […] Elffers believes the book should resist a modish redesign. […] “This book is built for a century in print,” Elffers told me. “It has no time or place. It is from all cultures. It roams three thousand years of history.”
On the number of Laws
Originally, Greene wrote fifty-two laws, although now, in his eagerness to foster the impression that they were writ in stone, he is reluctant to admit this. The publishers felt fifty-two was not a good number—too pat an invoaction of weeks in a year or cards in a deck. Greene relented, integrating the four extraneous laws (for example, “Create an air of mystery” and “Stay above the fray”) into others.
On certain kinds of adornment
There is a long-established American tradition of adorning ill-begotten gains and undernourished minds with classical and Continental acoutrements: Doric columns, a Bentley, the compleat works. In a way, Greene’s parables are a form of aspirational camouflage.
