{"id":1993,"date":"2011-11-28T22:25:02","date_gmt":"2011-11-29T02:25:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www3.arts.umich.edu\/ink\/?p=1993"},"modified":"2011-11-28T22:35:51","modified_gmt":"2011-11-29T02:35:51","slug":"on-anthologizing-covers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/2011\/11\/28\/on-anthologizing-covers\/","title":{"rendered":"On anthologizing covers"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Jane
Cover speak.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t judge a book by its cover.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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 clich\u00c3\u00a9s, I remember my class sitting and waiting to be turned loose among the shelves of children\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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<\/i>, 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t say for sure whether I have been better or worse for it. I realized much later that things shouldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t be taken quite so literally, that books that were pretty did not disqualify them from being valuable, and that pretty is far too subjective.<\/p>\n

Nowadays, if I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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 \u00c2\u00a0insisted in the publisher\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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.\u00c2\u00a0This move towards a witty simplicity or minimalism resonates with me \u00e2\u20ac\u201c 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 \u00e2\u20ac\u201c it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s but a taste of what\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s to come, an art that is incomplete until you delve into its counterpart.<\/p>\n

Book cover design is often an overlooked art shadowed by the immensity of the text. Regardless, there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a coterie of appreciators online; the following are a few interesting links to websites that treat them as the main attraction.<\/p>\n

The Archive of Book Cover Design and Designers<\/a><\/p>\n

The Pelican Project <\/a><\/p>\n

Twenty Classic Novels’ First Covers<\/a><\/p>\n

Lovely Book Covers<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t judge a book by its cover.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1993"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1993"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1993\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1998,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1993\/revisions\/1998"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1993"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1993"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1993"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}