I’m a photographer about to take a graphic arts class. One of the reasons for taking it is I have the idea some of my recent work would make good book illustrations and I thought I would do some book cover mock ups for my portfolio.
So I was thinking about book covers. Given that books, certainly classics, come in many editions with many covers, they’re harder to talk about than, say, album covers.
But- are there particular covers you find memorable? Are there covers you deeply associate with the text? Are there ones, possibly on a book you really love, that you really hate? Why?
Do you pick up a book because it has an interesting cover? What makes an interesting cover?
Also, what do you think would be interesting books to do dummy covers for- “Lolita”? “1984”? “Naked Lunch”?
The one cover that sticks in my mind (other than my own) was the original cover for Ursula K. LeGuin’s “The Dispossessed,” mostly because it is so spectacularly ugly.
One axiom of the paperback book industry, BTW, is that you don’t design the cover to attract readers; you design it to attract the truck driver who puts the books on the racks.
I tend to get naturally drawn to contrast, to things that are different from the things around them. With respect to book covers, I tend to notice those that are significantly different to the immediately surrounding books.
For example, fantasy genre books tend to have colorful pictures of magic or swordplay at work with an ominous background of a crag or dungeon or fortress or forest or ____. If a fantasy book cover is significantly different (all black with strange white runes, for example), I would definitely notice it more, and may be more likely to spend a minute reading the premise (and reviews).
Literary (general fiction) books tend to have color schemes and designs. I tend to notice the ones that actually have colorful pictures on them
In the end, though, I buy most of my books based on past experience with the author, or on recommendation. So cover art helps attract me, but not neccessarily my dough.
I collect first editions, and love dj art anyway, so I really focus on dust jacket art - a few points:
FYI, in case people didn’t know, the pictures of the classic books that Barnes and Nobel has in its stores and on its bags are the first edition dust jackets, so that’s a great way to see how the books were originally presented.
You can see some of the dj’s on eBay. The rare book search engines rarely have listings with pictures, so I will have to resort to descriptions.
Favorite first edition dust jackets include:
Huxley’s Brave New World, first UK - title on the top, with an art-deco drawing of the world with a plane flying around it, with radio waves or something radiating off the world. Not specific to the content, but beautiful and futuristic.
Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby - you actually see the 1st edition art on many paperbacks - the woman’s eyes in a field of night-sky blue looking over a city, where the pupils of the eyes are naked women. Probably the best dj of all time. The book of his “Gatsby Cluster” short stories published the next year, All the Sad Young Men, is amazing in a different way - printed on a brown-bag type of paper with a simple, beautiful Deco woodprint of a woman. (Note: because folks in the 20’s more commonly threw away dj’s, Gatsby 1st’s in dj are rare, even with a first printing of 25,000 copies - a first edition w/ no dj will bring $2,000 - 3,000; a first w/ dj can bring well over $100,000 and climbing.)
Faulkner’s **As I Lay Dying ** - not as well known, but really beautiful in its simplicity. On a dj made of a rough, cream-colored paper the texture of a shopping bag, are the words “As I Lay Dying / William Faulkner / Author of The Sound and the Fury”, but the font is simple and small and book looks really beautiful.
Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms - beautiful Deco design which has a man and a woman - nothing to do with content but truly beautiful and memorable.
I also love To Kill a Mockingbird, more for what the book came to mean to me, and Catch-22 for its iconic simplicity with the big blue square with the little red dancing man.
I like it when a dj has a design to it - in the 70’s, a lot of books just had the book title and the author’s name on it - see Sophie’s Choice or The World According to Garp - I hated that!! Only As I Lay Dying has really done that beautifully, IMHO. Books that have designs tend to stand out more than just title and author. Unless you look at something like “the Bondswoman’s Narrative” by Hannah Crofts which just came out and is designed to look like the 1850’s manuscript the book contains.
In terms of doing dummy covers, it depends on what you are trying to do - if you want to do a cover that interprets content, then doing a classic like Lolita or 1984 could make sense - everyone knows the plot, so you will be judged on your interpretive skills. If you are going for pure graphic design, the title is immaterial - again look at the old Fitzgerald and Hemingway dj’s (with the exception of Gatsby) - nothing to do with the content, but memorably beautiful.
dust jackets definitely matter - I have bought many books on the strength of the dj alone. Also, if I have two books I have heard about and want to pick one up, the dj will influence which one I pick.
I like covers that have good interpretations of the subject matter. One of my favorites is the cover for Larry Niven’s ‘The Integral Trees’. The story has a hard-to-imagine setting (a habitable gas torus surrounding a dead neutron star) and the cover portrayed it beautifully, along with one of the human inhabitants. Not sure what the point was with the Christ-imagery, but I liked it.
