The current state of cover art
Saturday morning seduction
When I was young, my dad would take my sister and me to the library on a Saturday morning — just for fun. We were a reading family and got a thrill from picking our stack of books for next week’s reads.
My sister and I would run downstairs to the kids’ section and start the treasure hunt. So much fun browsing those shelves, pulling books off one at a time to see the cover, only then reading the front flap, flipping through the pages, and stacking it in the “Yes,” “No,” or “Maybe” pile. (Without one qualm for the feeling of the rejected books.)
Little did I know then that those Saturday outings would forever seduce me with the lure of literary art.
All I needed to see was a beautiful, rich, picture on a book cover, and I was hooked.
The power of “pretty” book covers
More than fifty years later, I’m still influenced by book covers. Regardless of the fact that I have a Master’s degree, make my living by writing, read about books every single day, it’s the picture on the front that still pulls me in.
“Pretty” or “interesting” gets me every time.
On my last bookstore pilgrimage, I searched for “art.” I sauntered through the shelves, looking for some out-of-the-ordinary book cover to lure me in. I wanted to be seduced by intricate shapes and fonts that flaunted their stuff. I longed to be visually, viscerally, dragged into a picture that promised loveliness, adventure, or intrigue.
This is what I found.
Everything looks like a pastel pop-art poster. And no matter how the artist strives for contrast, a jolt of color and flat, graphic font — they all look the same.
When a trend becomes trite
Tim Kreider, writing several years ago about the “Decline and Fall of the Book Cover” in The New Yorker noted,
“Your product must be bold and eye-catching and conspicuously different from everyone elses — but not too much…which is why the covers of most contemporary books all look distubingly the same, as if inbred.”
He was so right. A trend becomes popular. Then it becomes trite. Publishers have eschewed illustrated covers because they cost too much to commission, and it’s so much easier to create cover art with the plethora of stock photos and graphics programs that cost next to nothing.
Besides…the hundreds of thousands of people who read virtually on electronic readers, (52% of the American reading population in 2019), don’t see color in the electronic book cover images anyway.
Is There Beauty in Black?
I left the store, my new book bevy bagged and paid for, only two of them with interesting cover art…and both of them with BLACK backgrounds.
At least these book covers had something that made me want to look inside the cover. There was some depth, some intrigue here — something below the surface that I didn’t find in any of those sherbert-colored book covers lining the contemporary fiction shelves at Barnes & Noble pictured above.
Hamnet, by Maggie O’Farrell, the 2020 novel that won the Women’s Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award was about the death of Shakespeare’s eleven-year-old son and the impact it had on the lives of his parents. I see that black is a good choice for that topic.
Another book I brought home, and the second-most interesting art of my chosen volumes, is called The Dictionary of Lost Words, by Pip Williams. This is the story of a little girl sitting under the table where the men work on definitions for the Oxford Dictionary. She collects the fallen scraps of paper and the words that have fallen to the ground, only to create her own book of “lost words.”
I haven’t had time to read the book yet, so I don’t know how the somber black cover works with the tone of the story, but I like the artwork. Swirling vines and a trunk — presumably filled with valuable treasures.
I really liked the book, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, another black book cover. Its star-crossed constellation format works with the plot, although I don’t know that I would have bought it if I hadn’t read the reviews.
Granted, these three books are an infinitesimal drop in the buck of the more than a million books published each year, but they represent a definite trend on my shelves.
What a difference a genre makes
Isn’t it strange that children’s books can scream with saturated color and charming pictures on the cover, but mainstream fiction is seldom focused on art or beauty? Doesn’t it seem odd that science fiction and fantasy depict other worlds and lurking creatures in gorgeous colors, but adult “literary fiction” is confined to stark colors and block-print fonts?
Why is it that romance novels can be dressed in richly colored, elaborately positioned characters in period costumes, faraway castles cloaked in mist, and dashing portraits of heroes, but mainstream literary book covers are far less imaginative?
Surely no one believes that literary fiction and the artwork that covers it has to be boring?
As Kreider quipped in The New Yorker essay mentioned above, most book covers display a
“a bland, indifferent background of conformity,”
He also theorized that beautiful, artful book covers will eventually be lost to history, much like dance cards, calling cards, sheet music, and album covers.
Sad, sad thought.
My next literary quest
My next bookstore adventure — and one of my new literary goals — is to buy a book solely because of the artwork on its jacket. To be entranced only by the visual representation of the words inside. To find a book that interests me only because of the picture.
I may even read a YA book, something I don’t normally do, just because the design pulls me in, as in the case of The Firekeeper’s Daughter which I just saw reviewed.
One goal achieved
I’ve got a number of literary goals that I’m far from achieving….to write about at least half of the books I read; to read all the Pulitzer Prize-winning fiction novels from the last twenty years; to consume at least three-four books each month.
But here is one goal I achieved.
I made it to the end of the article without using the old adage, “You can’t judge a book by its cover.” Because in my mind, I can — if not JUDGE a book — — GAUGE a book by its cover.
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