The gorgeous, psychedelic work of Iris Alba, the genius book designer you’ve never heard of

The book covers are a bit unlike anything you’ve seen before. They radiate with electric neon, bursts of vibrant psychedelia. They call to mind the pop work of Milton Glaser or Push Pin Studios at large, but depart in enigmatic directions all their own, with white space deployed to curious and emotive effect.

And speaking of enigmas: No one could really tell you who, exactly, created these covers—until now. 

Leandro Castelao and Francisco Roca are editorial detectives. They founded their imprint Flecha Books in 2018 to shine a light on overlooked or forgotten Latin American designers and artists, and so far have rolled out volumes on such subjects as Juan Ángel Cotta’s lost book covers and the process work of Norah Borges (long overshadowed by her brother, Jorge Luis Borges).

After the Cotta book debuted, a man named Emiliano Bustos got in touch with Castelao and Roca and they met with him in a coffeeshop in Buenos Aires. There, he revealed the story of his mother, Iris Alba—and he showed the pair some of her work, including a series called Vertice, which feature the vibrant covers described above.

“The faces, the eyes, the expressions look so personal and different,” Castelao says. “I just remember seeing that and having a feeling of like, Wow, this looks quite unique and interesting—but also, I felt like I had seen some of these covers somewhere …”

And he probably had. Because though Alba’s name had been forgotten, her work was utterly ubiquitous to an entire continent, so much so that Castelao has dubbed her a “missing link when trying to understand Latin American book cover design.”

After that initial meeting with Bustos, the team delved deeper down the rabbit hole. 

Alba had gotten married at 22 to a photographer, and the two had left Argentina for New York City in the late ’50s—a move that would turn out to be critical to her output. There, Castelao says Alba thrived in the city’s creative scene, and also studied under the Modernist painter Stuart Davis and worked at the agency J. Walter Thompson. By analyzing archival photos and matching them to locales around the city, the Flecha team was able to reconstruct bits and pieces of her life in those days. (“We go pretty hard,” Castelao says. “You never know sometimes where these things are going to take you.”)

The Flecha team is unsure if Alba ever crossed paths with Glaser, Seymour Chwast or others—but Castelao says he can definitely see their influence in her work, such as her type arrangements, use of dimension and color palettes. One thing that is certain: When she got homesick and returned to Argentina after a few years abroad, she brought all those influences back with her. 

At the time, Castelao says there was no pop psychedelia in his native country—and it’s fair to say Alba played a key role in importing it to South America. Moreover, he says creative production was heavily siloed in Argentina at the time—one person would create a logo, another would handle illustration, another the type work, and so on. When she returned home, Alba brought what she had observed in the States and redefined the notion of a multifaceted creative who did it all, perhaps offering a working model.

“The really interesting thing about her legacy is that she was like a true modern designer,” Castelao says.

The place where she would do it: Sudamericana, a giant of Spanish-language publishing, which would thrive in the literary boom of the ’60s. Seeking to connect with younger consumers, the company hired Alba, who would help build out a design department. Her output was expressive, cerebral, and lacked discernible formula. Book by book, as Max Rompo has detailed, “Iris helped forge the visual language of a golden era for contemporary literature across the entire continent.”

On the recent occasion of an anniversary of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Castelao says the editorial team at the publisher (which is now owned by Penguin Random House) was trying to figure out who created the cover of the first edition, featuring an illustrated ship floating atop what appears to be a photograph of trees. Perhaps unsurprisingly: It was Alba. And when they dug into her work, per Castelao, they began to see her influence and style reverberating throughout so much of the publisher’s output in its heyday. 

“No one knew who these people were—they almost don’t exist in the history books of visual arts,” Castelao says. “And so when you start putting faces and names [together], you start seeing the hand and the point of view …”

Given the vast reach of Sudamericana and the scores of books it was putting out into the world, it’s wild to ponder the depth of Alba’s influence.

Ultimately, history would intervene. Following a 1976 coup, a military junta took over Argentina. Alba’s husband at the time, the poet Miguel Ángel Bustos, was abducted, along with many others. Alba would leave Sudamericana and lay low. After democracy was restored in 1983, she continued to fly under the radar. 

“We don’t know exactly what happened,” Castelao says, noting that the political conditions at the time could indeed be the reason her name was previously lost to history. “[She did leave Sudamericana] at the time where people weren’t allowed to talk about certain people.”

Flecha is currently in the process of crowdfunding the first book on Alba, who died in 1993. Featuring a prologue by Ellen Lupton, it is set to offer a kaleidoscopic curation of Alba’s collective output. 

As for what drives his team at large, “Latin American or South American visual culture is still pretty unknown for a wider context,” Castelao says. “We want to make sure that these makers are heard, that these makers are seen. We want to make them visible—and hopefully inspire future generations, because I think that’s what it’s all about.”