I love the old mid-century dust jacket cover design. It’s the color scheme and abstract design element that stands out on the 1965 cover of Scholem’s On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism. The soft electric pastel colors are very mod. We lose a lot of information in the new updated editions of these old scholarly works, especially as they try to update the the cover art. (Sometimes the publishers don’t even try to do that.) There’s a lot to learn from graphic design about style and the reception history of Jewish Studies scholarship and its contemporaneity. The publication of this little text by Scholem in 1965 is a signal of what’s to  come on the postwar American and American Jewish religious scene and the turn to mystical consciousness. Jimi Hendrix and LSD are right around the corner, but for right now the cover art is restrained and respectable. In the study of Kabbalah it seems especially fitting that the medium should be very much the message.