When images speak: why it is difficult not to judge a book by its cover
Publishers experiment with colours, paintings, typography, illustrations, graphic design and even film stills to promote books. Sometimes multiple editions with different covers are brought out, but to find out the quality of a book, the statutory warning
ever judge a book by its cover’, remains an old maxim. Yet, a reader’s first organic point of contact with a tome is its cover, be it the visual recognition of that wrapping page or the rational expectation of what may lie in store within those flaps.
Covers with their visual stimuli goads us into a tactile pursuit. We hold the book, observe the cover, read the title and then flip to see the blurbs on the back. At times there is an olfactory indulgence too as a few of us smell the book with its notes of sawdust and faint traces of ink.
This is our endeavour to figure out whether what we hold is hot off the press or something imbued with age, dogears and the odd silverfish burrowing in. The cover stays vital and judgements are made.
Within the Indian context, Harper Perennial, which issues English translations of Indian vernacular classics, caught the eye with the way the publisher added a lovely touch to the covers.
Eye on aesthetics
Vivek Shanbhag’s Kannada masterpiece Ghachar Ghochar, translated by Srinath Perur, had a simple cover high on aesthetics. There was the title credit and on the fringes and sides, a collage of the Kannada alphabets were laid out. It is a template that Harper Perennial has used for its entire translation series with the alphabets linked to the author’s mothertongue and all shaded with different colours. It could be green for one book, yellow for another and the third could have the letters in purple. The feel is earthy, like traditional curry left simmering in clay pots by our grandmothers.
Book covers arrive in many types. All of us are exposed to vintage publications with their dark covers and their tinge of rustbrown and darkred tropes. Penguin, worldwide, used to have a black spine and a black frame on the cover with the title placed in the centre with its white base. These packaging efforts became a subject of research in Phil Baines’ Penguin by Design, A Cover Story 1935-2005.
These old covers are perhaps our first link to books, be it in a home library or at college. Usually the reputation of the book prevails and be it Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations or Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native, you would reach out even if the cover is like those curtains in old cinema theatres, bland, dark and just doing its job. Even now these covers remain in vogue and for proof, just saunter into any neighbourhood bookshop and head to its classics section.
Just as paper, a product of sighing trees, evolved into different types ranging from the plain to glossy, covers too evolved and acquired character. An image became essential to make the book stand out among its papyrus cousins. A century back or even a few decades ago, the cover was often a painting hinting at what lies in store.
Hat-tip to illustrators
Take for instance John Steinbeck’s The Pastures of Heaven. Its old cover features a lady with a hat, leaning backwards into a wooden pillar. The effect is pastoral and it sets you up for some literary foraging.
Even Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s classics had covers that featured illustrations. Vintage Publications offering the Latin master’s classics in their old iteration along with newer packaged versions, is actually a hattip to the illustrators and designers of a bygone era, plus it taps into our sense of nostalgia.
Closer home, we had R.K. Narayan’s Swami and Friends, with the cover striking the right feel thanks to deft touches by the author’s cartoonist brother R. K. Laxman. The output exuded childhood’s magic laced with a naughty streak. Just as covers began to break into three patterns — classical, paintinglaced or just a bold text with a bright palette as base, another type emerged which leant on photographs.
Often autobiographies lean on the subject’s face and it is the same with a few books of famous writers. Like for instance Ruskin Bond, who as a younger version is holding a cat in a black and white montage or is smiling into the camera with 89 summers blessing his visage.
Then there are these atmospheric covers too like Sherlock Holmes, The Complete Novels and Stories by Arthur Conan Doyle, in which the detective striding away into an old London street, serves as the visual magnet. It is a device used in modern day lore too as reflected in Amor Towles’ A Gentleman in Moscow.
But the laziest endeavour is the use of a still from a movie that is based on the book. Be it One Day, Nights in Rodanthe or The Horse Whisperer, cinema is used to sell the book and it leads to another related query: What did you prefer, the movie or the book? This bookmovie symbiosis altering covers happened with Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children too as the old one was replaced with its filmy interpretation as Shreya Saran twirled her dress! The tales around covers are many but to know the quality of a book, the statutory warning should be: always read.