“Don’t judge a book by its cover.â€
It’s an adage pummeled into young elementary school students, a worn dictum whose extremity in triteness is likely to cause a self-conscious writer to hesitate using it even in irony. But in third grade, when the vast majority of us were unaware of the literary faux pas of clichés, I remember my class sitting and waiting to be turned loose among the shelves of children’s literature, or more accurately, wide expanses of Goosebumps, The Magic Treehouse and Animorphs genre of chapter books. In particular, I recall promising to myself I would never, in my life, ever, judge a book by its cover, lest I suffer a most unpleasant death by a swallowed watermelon seed (a recurring nightmare at the time, in which the seed germinated). I sat there legs folded, jaw clenched, and looking ambitious. If a shadow of desire to do the aforementioned crossed my consciousness, it was treated as a moral failure, and recompense, in the form of doubling all efforts to not judge, should follow promptly. I’d like to think that behind the hyperbolic sentiments towards inanimate objects was a somewhat misplaced effort of sympathy and an overshot desire for not letting preconceived notions get in the way of a good relationship. Or, it may have just been an early symptom of neurotic behavior. Regardless, in my eight-year-old mind, that’s what I believed. With that credo, I took it upon myself to deliberately find the ugliest, most ragged looking books I could dig from the shelves. I would read them, out of a mixture of pity and misguided moral rectitude. I did this for years, selecting amongst piles of books the ones that were most dog-earred, most sepia tinged (before nostalgia became an aesthetic), and truly most lamentable in terms of cover art. In the end, I can’t say for sure whether I have been better or worse for it. I realized much later that things shouldn’t be taken quite so literally, that books that were pretty did not disqualify them from being valuable, and that pretty is far too subjective.
Nowadays, if I’m browsing through an array of unfamiliar books, it is in fact the allure of its frame, its colors and shapes that initially draw me if its title or subject matter initially does not. The art of design has proliferated, and even old friends are getting renovated. Out of indulgence, I recently purchased a copy of Jane Eyre from Penguin’s hardcover classics collection, simply because I thought it was beautiful, crisp, and captured a lasting quality that would weather gracefully. The move to more abstract design, away from an artist’s depiction of a scene or character from the work, I believe, is a desirable change, as it does not put in place, before we can draw in our mind’s eye what is unfolding before us, a bias regardless how subtle. Interpretation, then, is left wholly to the reader. Salinger too, believed this to some degree, as he  insisted in the publisher’s contract that only the text of the title of the book and his name were to appear on any future editions of his work, with absolutely no images so as to not flaunt or broadcast itself unnecessarily for profit. This move towards a witty simplicity or minimalism resonates with me – geometric with a good-typeface can actually inspire me to pull it off the shelf and investigate further. Its gaping, unassuming initial impression leaves me to the duty of drawing out the complexities – it’s but a taste of what’s to come, an art that is incomplete until you delve into its counterpart.
Book cover design is often an overlooked art shadowed by the immensity of the text. Regardless, there’s a coterie of appreciators online; the following are a few interesting links to websites that treat them as the main attraction.
The Archive of Book Cover Design and Designers
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