Artist Dawne Michelle Watters has created a set of book jackets bearing fake titles. So now you can fool public transit eavesdroppers (like myself) into thinking you’re reading classics like How to Overcome Nymphomania, Laser Eye Surgery at Home and Fast Track to Prison – Exploring the Many Benefits of Life Behind Bars.
Book jacket silliness
The Physical Book Will Surely Endure: But Will It Endure for the Right Reason?
As an empirical matter, reading on a tablet cannot remotely approach the sensual literary experience offered by an old-fashioned book. The latter is, I’d venture, intrinsically more pleasurable than the former, not unlike the intrinsic difference between high quality toilet paper and the sandpaper stuff used in bus stations.
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Books as Objects: Golden Books in China
I happened across an odd little story today. Apparently, books made of gold are a fad among the super-rich in China. There is also concern that the books, which cost upwards of $1,000 are becoming a “means of bribery,” according to a story from Xinhua, as they are given as gifts to public officials. None of the English-language stories had photos of the books so I did some searching to find out what they look like. You can see pics here and here.
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Ink on Paper: On the Beauty of Typewritten Book Covers
The reason these typewritten book covers have caught my eye and captured my heart is because they’ve so ingeniously captured the essence of the writing process -- and the central truth that no piece of writing is ever truly finished.
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Books as Objects: Limited Editions
Skimming through the bestsellers and new releases at Amazon, you may have spotted the “limited edition” of Michael Chabon’s new novel The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. “This special limited first edition is personally signed by the author and numbered. The jacketed hardcover is packaged in a handcrafted wooden slipcase which is shrinkwrapped. A must-have for collectors,” says the description. The book retails for $150, though Amazon has it for somewhat less.The phenomenon of “limited edition” books is ostensibly an odd one considering the prevailing belief that the publishing industry isn’t in great shape these days, but from an economic standpoint it makes sense as an extension of “price discrimination.” Price discrimination also explains why books (on this side of the ocean, anyway) come out in hardcover before they do in paperback. To borrow from an earlier post of mine, “The way the book publishers see it, there is a certain percentage of the population out there for whom getting a book as soon as it comes out is worth the premium of ten bucks or so. These people are willing to buy the book at this higher price, so the publishers take advantage of it. Once the demand for the higher priced edition has dried up, they put out a lower priced edition and then they can sell the same book to a second group of people for whom owning the book is worth less.”But since the limited edition typically comes out at the same time as the hardcover, there must be more to it than just paying to get the book early. With limited editions, buyers are paying for the exclusivity of the edition, for the ability to own something that very few other people have and that has a distinct look to it, setting it apart from, for example, the copies of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union that everyone else is walking around with. And while limited editions are often signed by the author and will often include some extra content – perhaps an exclusive afterward by the author or some special illustrations – these books are mostly bought as objects, as signifiers of fandom that can be bought by the uberfan. Either that or they are meant to be bought as extravagant gifts – again, paying for the uniqueness.It should come as no surprise then that limited editions are exceedingly rare in the world of books as compared to music and movies, where fans are much more willing to go to great lengths to express their devotion. As such, limited editions are most commonly put out for books by authors with cult followings, whose fans are willing to pony up the dough for the exclusivity of these special books. For example, Chuck Palahniuk’s new book Rant is available in a limited edition and the original, 3,352-page version of Rising Up, Rising Down by William T. Vollmann can be viewed as a limited edition.There are also the authors whose fan bases are so huge that publishers assume that the with all the demand for their books, the limited editions will get bought as well. John Grisham’s last effort, The Innocent Man came in a limited edition retailing for $250 and, of course, the “limited” editions of the Harry Potter books have been bestsellers in their own rights. The Deluxe Edition of the new Harry Potter book, retailing for $65, is currently the 21st most popular book at Amazon. $65 is apparently a small price to pay for “an exclusive insert featuring near-scale reproductions of Mary GrandPre’s interior art, as well as never-before-seen full-color frontispiece art on special paper.” And don’t forget that the edition’s “custom-designed slipcase is foil-stamped and contains a full-cloth case book that has been blind-stamped on front and back cover with foil stamping on the spine.”There are also limited editions that seem to exist because they would make easy, yet extravagant gifts. I can imagine that the limited edition of Bill Clinton’s memoir was a hot gift in certain powerful circles a few years back.As for me, I tend to be more interested in the words inside the books rather than the nifty packaging, though I’ll admit to having been seduced a time or two by snazzy slipcovers and exclusive illustrations, though never quite enough to shell out the extra dough.(Thanks to Brent for the idea for this post.)
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In Our Parents’ Bookshelves
In late 2001 among the people I knew, cellphones went from being a gadget of the technorati to something that everyone had. I was living in a dorm with five roommates at the time and one consequence of the change was that we no longer ever spoke with each other’s parents. Previously parents had called the room line and whoever was around would pick up. I enjoyed shooting the breeze with my friends’ moms (it was mostly moms who called) and I regretted that there was no longer much opportunity to do that once cellphones allowed our parents to call each of us directly.
Ereaders today feel somewhat like cellphones just before 2001. They are not yet ubiquitous, but they are well past the early-adopter stage and their growth seems poised to go geometric. When the Kindle came out in 2007 I poopooed it as the future face of reading; the hyperactivity of the Internet just seemed like a bad match with the meditative experience of reading a book. But the other day while watching my eight-month-old son knock around a pile of books, I knew suddenly and viscerally that I was wrong. The clunky objects he was playing with seemed like relics.
The Millions has written previously about the externalities of e-readers. Edan has commented on how they portend a drawing down of the public space in which we read—with the Kindle you don’t know what the person next to you is reading, or how far along in it they are, or whether their copy of the book is dog-eared or brand new (because it’s neither).
One of the most prominent losses in this regard stands to be the loss of bookshelves. A chief virtue of digital books is said to be their economical size—they take up no space at all!—but even a megabyte seems bulky compared to what can be conveyed in the few cubic feet of a bookshelf. What other vessel is able to hold with such precision, intricacy, and economy, all the facets of your life: that you bake bread, vacationed in China, fetishize Melville, aspire to read Shakespeare, have coped with loss, and still tote around a copy of The Missing Piece as a totem of your childhood. And what by contrast can a Kindle tell you about yourself or say to those who visit your house? All it offers is blithe reassurance that there is progress in the world, and that you are a part of it.
Of the bookshelves I’ve inspected in my life, two stand out as particularly consequential. The first was my mother’s, which was built into the wall of the bedroom where she grew up. When I would visit my grandparents in the summer I would spend hours inspecting that bookshelf. The books were yellowed and jammed tightly together, as though my mother had known it was time to leave home once she no longer had any room left on her shelves. In the 1960s novels, the Victorian classics, and the freshman year sociology textbooks fossilized on the bookshelf, I got the clearest glimpse I ever had of my mother as a person who existed before me and apart from me, and whose inner life was as bottomless as I knew my own to be.
And then there was my wife, whose bookshelves I first inspected in a humid DC summer, while her parents were away at work. The shelves were stuffed full of novels—Little House on the Prairie, The Andromeda Strain, One Hundred Years of Solitude—that described an arc of discovery I had followed too. At the time we met, her books still quivered from recent use and still radiated traces of the adolescent wonder they’d prompted. In the years since, on visits home for the holidays and to celebrate engagements and births, I’ve watched her bookshelves dim and settle. Lately they’ve begun to resemble a type of monument I recognize from my mother’s room. They sit there waiting for the day when our son will be old enough to spend his own afternoons puzzling out a picture of his mother in the books she left behind.
It remains to be seen how many more generations will have the adventure of getting to know their parents in just this way. One for sure, and maybe two, but not much beyond that I wouldn’t think. To the extent that bookshelves persist, it will be in self-conscious form, as display cases filled with only the books we valued enough to acquire and preserve in hard copy. The more interesting story, however, the open-ended, undirected progression of a life defined by books will surely be lost to a digital world in which there is no such thing as time at all.
[Image source: David Goehring]
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Judging Books by Their Covers 2016: US vs. UK
The London Book Fair starts on April 12th. As a kick off, we thought it would be fun to compare the U.S. and U.K. covers of a few notable titles from last year, a task previously taken on by our much-loved outgoing editor, Mr. Max Magee.
I’ve lived in both the U.S. and the U.K. and always felt that if I could pinpoint the reason why the soap operas are so different — the kleenex-lensed, pearly hues of The Young and the Restless vs. the gruff, flattened grays of East Enders as one example — or articulate why marmite sandwiches appeal in one place when peanut butter and jelly is preferred in the other, I would finally understand where the two cultures divide.
Sometimes I look to book covers in an attempt for clarity. Why is a cover in the U.S. replaced with another in the U.K. when the words inside are exactly the same? I may not like marmite, but I do have a taste for books. I sat down to see if I could finally develop the overarching theory that has eluded me so far.
It’s notable that many covers are the same. Some of the biggest books, like Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between The World And Me, and Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels sport the same jackets in the U.S. and U.K. “It often comes down to differences in cultures and tastes. What appeals to people in one country doesn’t appeal to others,” says my literary agent, Denise Bukowski. “But if the book has been published first in one country and has been successful there, subsequent publishers often choose to capitalize on that success by using the original cover.”
But many others titles still have completely different covers, which is fortunate as it means there is still plenty for us to argue about.
Below I present just a few of the choice examples. U.S. covers are on the left. U.K. covers are on the right. Your equally inexpert analysis, baseless opinions, and sweeping generalizations are encouraged in the comments.
Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff
These covers are intriguingly similar and yet so different. Swirls vs. angles, blues vs. reds, swishes vs. swipes, almost like a mirror of the two halves of the book, the first told by the husband, Lotto, and the second by the wife, Mathilde. I had trouble making sense of it all until I consulted an article called “How to Use Color Psychology to Give Your Business an Edge” and understood that there is subliminal messaging at work. The U.S. cover designer is on team Lotto and emphasized blue for grief, sadness, and distraction. In the U.K., the designer was on Mathilde’s side, hence anger, rage, and ecstasy.
Hausfrau by Jill Alexander Essbaum
I love the U.S. cover for this book, but how does it relate to the story? Flowers are sex organs. This book is about sex organs. Then what of the U.K. cover — embroidery is about not having sex. Or not messy sex. Maybe strictly missionary? Or if you get up to more, you have to make the bed perfectly afterwards, including carefully smoothing the bedspread so that no one will suspect what you’ve been up to. Which is exactly what this book is about.
The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins
These two covers clearly illustrate one big difference between the two countries, their respective outlooks on the events leading up to the U.S. presidential election. If you are a drunk woman in the U.S., the primaries feel like you are on a train and with all the antics, both comic and tragic, hurtling around you in an incomprehensible blur. If you are a drunk woman in the U.K., you watch from the outside and find yourself unable to take your wavering eyes off the speeding train — the question that holds your attention is not if it will crash, but how.
Purity by Jonathan Franzen
Only a fool would think these covers came from different countries. They were clearly designed in alternate dimensions.
Did You Ever Have a Family by Bill Clegg
Both designs take inspiration from the publisher’s description of the inciting incident: “This book of dark secrets opens with a blaze.” However each seem to have decided that a different element of that incident is more enticing. In the U.S., readers might like dark, mildewy, water-damaged secrets, whereas in the U.K., a good house fire will make the book fly off the shelves?
A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara
It’s hard for me to imagine A Little Life without the ecstasy and agony conveyed by the iconic photograph on the U.S. edition, Orgasmic Man by Peter Hujar. I was struck by ecstasy every time I picked up this book and collapsed into agony after each reading session. I understand the reasoning behind the U.K. cover; it makes sense to put forward an image that evokes life in New York, but it doesn’t echo the experience in the writing, as does Hujar’s art. I wonder, are orgasms not a universal experience? Perhaps people in the U.K. do not have them.
Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee
Finally, the clarity I seek. This one is straightforward. The U.S. cover lets you know the name of the book you are buying. The U.K. cover lets you know that you are buying a draft of a sequel that you won’t enjoy unless you keep To Kill a Mockingbird in the back of your mind at all times while reading.
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Up in the Sky, It’s…
The upcoming paperback edition of Netherland looks suspiciously like the 10 year anniversary edition of Infinite Jest. What say you?
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