I wrote this recently for an arts website and it says everything I feel about books:
WHY NOT JUDGE A BOOK BY ITS COVER?
Books are dead, people in the publishing industry say. Sometimes, it truly feels like a cult of the damned. Authors are earning less and no one is buying print publications. I am amazed that there are not publishers, pigeon-like, teetering with suicidal intent on every window ledge. So does this mean also that the angel of death stands in the corner of every bookshop – waiting for the cull? We are all happy with our Kindles and other virtual devices, right? So many bores out there seem to enjoy boasting how many books they can take on holiday with their devices. ‘Imagine fitting all those in your suitcase!’ they crow, as if books are notches on a bedpost.
Yes, yes – it’s very convenient to see lots of words, lots of books, on a screen: little dancing black symbols that will still light up our lives. Words will always entrance us and writers will always write. Yet is it ridiculously old-fashioned to speak with joy about the opportunity to hold a magazine or a book in your hand? Paper on flesh feels so tangibly good; there should be a perverts’ club for it. Well, if there are fetishists for leather and rubber, why not paper? There is nothing like that new book smell, as potent as a baby’s milky head when you kiss it, which sets off a sense of anticipation that makes reading in the flesh so sensual. Opening a book for a first time, there is a crackle of a virgin spine. You have to be careful not to be too brutal – you don’t want to break it, after all. No one respects people who borrow books and then returns them with cracked apart spines. It’s unforgiveable.
Even a new magazine smell, which is initially chemical in origin as printing inks, glue and other fixatives release their odour, is a joy in itself. Not to mention a magazine where you get to rip off the cover. It’s the same naughty feeling you might get from popping a jar of coffee open with a spoon.
However, before you even open printed matter, it’s your eyes that are engaged. Like any new relationship, we pretend that is not superficial but there will always be an initial attraction, a reason why we run our fingers over the cover. Book design is now an intensively competitive and artistic movement: from the simple, to the classic, to the outlandish or the minimalist. Think classic Penguins – soldierly in their uniformity, lined up on a shelf. I have a few and they are old, foxed like a young girl’s freckles and with that beautiful Penguin logo. They also smell a bit musty, in truth. It’s an absurd marriage in many ways: the symbol of a fish-eating, Chaplin-walking Penguin and the serious business of publishing – yet now, because we have it ingrained in our psyches as a brand, it works for us.
The Internet is also rife with amusingly lurid, rude and daft book covers from decades of dotty design and unintentional innuendo. Innocent days when Dick and Fanny were indeed simply names in an Enid Blyton’s universe, not words that we snigger at despite the fact we are adults. Does it diminish the novels inside? Of course not. But modern production values are now exceptionally tight and sassy – the company Slightly Foxed (foxedquarterly.com/) produces modern books with an edge – they have the quality and look of classic novels, which makes them beautiful things to own and a million miles away from the cheap pulp fiction where the pages fall out like an old man’s hair. It is about crafting something memorable, a fitting frame for the words.
Salt Publishing (www.saltpublishing.com/) is another company who has refused to be beaten by publishing doom. They were of course given a boost when the wonderful Alison Moore was shortlisted for The Booker Prize in 2012 with The Lighthouse. Imagine that! A small publisher who succeeded without the muscle – simply because their author is bloody brilliant. That’s a good world in which that can happen. Looking at some of Salt’s recent covers, they really have considered carefully the market, the need to catch the eye of the buyer. Buyers are now more flirtatious, with less concentration, than ever before. They butterfly their hands over so much in bookshops – a striking image will arrest the flight.
I also know from first hand how difficult it is to choose a cover. I have just been published in an anthology of stories and as a group, we debated, disagreed and dallied about the cover that would best suit a book with the title of Voyages. Eventually, a boat seemed most apt – because it encapsulated the whole concept, rather than drawing on one story. We put as much thought into it, as the words inside. I hope that people who pick it up, will smell the salt of the ocean but feel a sense of wonder. Who should be in the boat? Why is it empty? Where next?
So whether it may be a few simple brushstrokes, an artwork we know or one uniquely commissioned, a cover will always matter. Ultimately, it should make us curious and cause our imaginations to tick. What is your favourite cover of all time? What emotions does it spark in you? Please tell us at The Inflectionist but most of all, go out and buy a book. Hold it in your hands and fall in love. You won’t regret it.