BENGALURU: Studies show you only have eight seconds to persuade the reader to take a chance on your book. How do you make it count? The answer lies in the book cover. It is not surprising that some readers buy a book just for the uniqueness of its cover. It is why my wife has often bought multiple copies of the same Agatha Christie book, especially vintage editions. Classics like Gone With The Wind, Pride And Prejudice, and Wuthering Heights are often released with new covers. 1984 by George Orwell has seen more than 42 different covers, my favourite being the one with the Big Brother eyes, designed by Adronauts Berlin.
Classic examples of a cover reinforcing the message of the title are Made To Stick by Chip Heath and Dan Heath, which has an aptly placed, sticky, duct tape on the cover, while that of The End Of Food by Paul Roberts has an image of an empty styrofoam package.
Some covers of Nabokov’s Lolita have managed to take ‘suggestive’ to a whole new level. There are many book covers that show sexually explicit content in subtle but provocative ways, like that of Tampa by Alissa Nutting which has a buttonhole turned into a vagina, and of Sex And The Citadel by Shereen El Feki, which shows how sex is all wrapped up in religion, tradition and culture.
Artist Archie Ferguson makes a visual pun on the title of Kevin Brockmeier’s The Brief History of the Dead with his cover design of disembodied hands, their creepiness accentuated by the black-and-white colour scheme. A book I bought for the sheer genius of the cover was Look Who’s Back by German writer Timur Vermes, a satire about Adolf Hitler.
But as hard as it is to imagine, there was a time when books had no covers. Up to about the mid-eighteenth century, hardcover books only had boards. Later, publishers began issuing these books wrapped in plain paper covers, their function being merely to keep the hardboards of the book free from dust. It was in the nineteenth century, when publishers began to aggressively compete to sell books, that the idea of making such plain wrappers attractive came into being. Interestingly, at first these blank covers were imprinted with not illustrations but advertisements for future books from the publisher!
The book jacket has evolved into a variety of styles. One significant transition was what Chip Kidd brought into being – the photographic collage. Kidd began experimenting with a marriage of letters and photographic objects and has since become one of the most famous book-cover designers. His most notable was for Michael Crichton’s novel Jurassic Park, which was so successful that it was carried over into the marketing for the film adaptation. Chip Kidd: Book One is a collection of all his book covers and designs, as well as hundreds of developmental sketches and concepts; it is annotated by Kidd and many of the best-selling authors he’s worked with. One study of Kidd’s work notes that he “uses every surface of a hardcover jacket – the spine, the back, the flaps – to escape the two-dimensional world of graphic design”.
When it comes to magazine covers, the New Yorker is unbeatable. I have over the years collected issues of TIME magazine that have Indians on the cover. Cover Story by Steven Heller and Louis Fili showcases memorable magazine covers that are the result of successful collaborations between graphic designers, writers, and marketers. This is commercial illustration at its most alluring and sophisticated. Hence it is no surprise that many collect rare magazine covers in addition to rare and unique books.
Some collect yellowbacks, a cheap novel published in Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century. Developed in the 1840s to compete with the “penny dreadful”, they were marketed as entertaining reading and had brightly coloured covers.
Among Indian books, I had always loved the simplicity of the covers of Ruskin Bond and RK Narayan books; their artwork resonated with the characters in the stories. Speaking of Indian books, I spent considerable time with my graphic artist Sriram Jagannathan when we were making the cover of GRIT: The Major Story. A book cover should stir the curiosity of buyers and lead readers though the story. It is heartening that there are several talented book designers working in India today, some as full-time in-house graphic artists for publication houses, and others who freelance. While many of them are influenced by the work done at US and UK publishing houses, they also bring their own desi slant to their design work.
There are so many books being published that it is hard to keep track of all the covers. But the real good ones will remain with you for a long time. It was Orhan Pamuk who said: “Book covers are like people’s faces: either they remind us of a lost happiness or they promise blissful worlds we have yet to explore. That is why we gaze at book covers as passionately as we do faces.” And whoever said, don’t judge a book by its cover!
The author is a technologist based in Silicon Valley, and is gently mad about books.