The Look of the Book: Jackets, Covers, and Art at the Edges of Literature by Peter Mendelsund & David J. Alworth

Author:Peter Mendelsund & David J. Alworth [Mendelsund, Peter & Alworth, David J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: @minified, #drawing
ISBN: 9780399581038
Google: DANIDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Clarkson Potter/Ten Speed
Published: 2020-10-05T22:00:00+00:00

Book covers fail whenever they rely on problematic stereotypes to represent the subject matter of the text. Books “about Africa” whose covers employ a visual cliché, the acacia tree, for how Africa looks through Western eyes.

Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi, Alfred A. Knopf, cover design by Peter Mendelsund. Scan the image from the top left to the bottom right, “reading” the horizontal bands of visual signifiers as you would read lines of text.

This question invites us to consider the “code” of the book cover: the unspoken assumptions that determine the look of the book. Just as there are clichés associated with specific literary genres—the alcoholic private eye, the priest who’s lost his faith, the damsel in distress—so too are there hackneyed visual conceits for representing a new novel and for positioning it in the marketplace. Whether online or in the bookstore, a new book needs first and foremost to catch a browser’s eye, and in order to do so, the cover must stand out in some way. Many covers in a given season, however, tend to imitate each other. Instead of looking original, they look like what came before, or worse, they look like whatever their genre is supposed to look like. In many cases, publishers want covers that they think are safe bets, which is to say covers that resemble those that have worked in the past. Unfortunately, by dictating that designers produce genre-ready, copycat covers, publishers are ensuring that their books will get lost amid the clones.

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