I’ve always thought that British book covers, generally speaking, are nicer looking than their American counterparts, with the latter seeking to target a demographic rather than to dazzle the eye. With this in mind, the following is an incredibly unscientific experiment in aesthetics. I’ve taken as a sample the Tournament of Books contenders whose American and British editions differ. The American covers are on the left, and clicking through takes you to a larger image. Your equally inexpert commentary is welcomed in the comments.
Judging Books by Their Covers: America Vs. UK
More Books by the Foot
Remeber my post a while back about decorators selling books by the foot to furnish rooms, as an alternative to wallpaper, say? I spotted another book by the foot seller, and this one's got some pretty remarkable prices. Here's Wonder Book's pitch:BOOKS BY THE FOOT: With pricing starting at $6.00 per linear foot, we provide you with attractive "like new" hardback books. These books will display attractively and offer your clients great value. We can also quote you unit pricing should your specs require.BOOKS BY COLOR: The same as above except the books will be unjacketed cloth spined hardbacks chosen to match your swatches or general color scheme.INSTANT LIBRARIES: We create a very inexpensive yet impressive personal or professional library for your specs. This is ideal for senior living, retirement homes, new homes, corporate reading rooms, vacation homes, and even clients too busy to build their own libraries etc. Subjects can be general or specific (childrens, art, encyclopedias, coffee table, sales, motivational, Large Print, etc...).My previous post on the topic referred to an article that profiled a "a California company that sells foreign books by the foot for the express purpose of looking at them rather than reading them. Danish books cost $100 a foot, German are $150 a foot and French are $200." So this is quite a bargain... if you're in the market for lots and lots of books that you have little or no interest in reading. Next time I go to the bookstore I'm going to bring a yardstick, and I'll ask if they have any sort of "by the foot" pricing scheme.
●
●
Penguin Classics Deluxe Editions – Nilsen, Spiegelman, Chast, Seth, Burns, Ware
A new edition of Voltaire's Candide with a cover by Chris Ware came out a few months ago. At the time, it was announced that there would other books in this series with covers by other famous artists, and I've been waiting to see them ever since. The other other day Penguin's Summer 2006 catalog arrived, and I was excited to see that the covers are in there. I was going to wait until the pictures were up online somewhere before posting them, but it was taking too long, so I scanned them. Candide is already out, the rest are out on March 28:Fairy Tales by Hans Christian Andersen, Cover by Anders NilsenThe New York Trilogy by Paul Auster, Cover by Art Spiegelman Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons, Cover by Roz ChastThe Portable Dorothy Parker, Cover by Seth The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, Cover by Charles BurnsCandide by Voltaire, Cover by Chris WareSee the full-size pictures hereUpdate: See Part Two
●
●
●
The Private Library: What Books Reveal About Their Readers
On a page of Charles Darwin’s 'The Voyage of the HMS Beagle Round the World,' Mark Twain wrote: “Can any plausible excuse be furnished for the crime of creating the human race?”
●
●
●
7 comments:
Add Your Comment: Cancel reply
Judging Books by Their Covers: U.S. Vs. U.K.
Last year we had fun comparing the U.S. and U.K. book cover designs of a sample of the Rooster contenders, so I decided to do it again with this year's batch. There are all sorts of marketing considerations behind these designs, and it's interesting to see how designing for these two similar markets can result in very different looks. The American covers are on the left, and clicking through takes you to a larger image. Your equally inexpert analysis is welcomed in the comments.
I love the U.S. version here. The line drawing is exquisite and it draws the reader up to the tightrope walker and into the book. In fact, the design is a wonderful visual representation of McCann's book, which revolves around the story of Philippe Petit's tightrope walk but is not really about it. I don't understand the U.K. design at all. McCann's book is soulful and serious; the U.K. cover says "silly and strange."
The American cover wins again here. The cartoonish, half cut-off head draws you in, while the U.K. version feels more like a movie poster. Although, the illusion of movement in the U.K. design is nice and something you don't often see on the cover of a work of literary fiction.
This time I prefer the U.K. cover. There's something weirdly sleepy about the U.S. cover. I love the red title script on the U.K. cover.
These are both very nice for totally different reasons. The American design is bold, intriguing and eye-catching. The U.K. cover is intricate.
This is really a case study in the "exotic," no? I'm not sure I like either of these much at all.
The American version doesn't do much for me - a little too coy. I love the U.K. version here. I like the idea that you might paint your book cover on the side of a barn.
These are both nice and bold, but for different reasons. The U.K. cover gets the nod, though, for the string, for the wavy, watery stencil, and for those horses; for all of it, really.
If you've read this book, you'll know that the American cover is ridiculous. The U.K. cover, meanwhile, is close to perfect.
I don't love either of these, but the U.S. cover is better. The U.K. cover looks like a made-for-TV movie, and this book has very little in common with a made-for-TV movie
The U.S. cover is muddled and confusing. I love the U.K. cover. There's something intoxicating about all those things hanging off the vines.
Judging Books by Their Covers: U.S. Vs. U.K.
Like we did last year, we thought it might be fun to compare the U.S. and U.K. book cover designs of this year's Morning News Tournament of Books contenders. Book cover design never seems to garner much discussion in the literary world, but, as readers, we are undoubtedly swayed by the little billboard that is the cover of every book we read. Even in the age of the Kindle, we are clicking through the images as we impulsively download this book or that one. I've always found it especially interesting that the U.K. and U.S. covers often differ from one another, suggesting that certain layouts and imagery will better appeal to readers on one side of the Atlantic rather than the other. These differences are especially striking when we look at the covers side by side. The American covers are on the left, and clicking through takes you to a page where you can get a larger image. Your equally inexpert analysis is encouraged in the comments.
The American cover is especially striking, with the bird and skeleton looking like something out of an old illustrated encyclopedia. And the wide black band suggests something important is hidden within. The British version feels generic, with the beach-front watercolor looking like a perhaps slightly more menacing version of the art you'd have hanging in your room at a seaside motel.
●
●
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]
I agree with all your opinions, especially about trying to be too much. So many American covers have that look about them: nothing offensive to the eye, but looks like something done by a scrap-booker.
I'm definitely with you on the Hensher and the Lahiri, both of which seem really tame. I quickly looked up a few of my other least exciting hardcover jackets on Amazon.uk. Interesting stuff: Paul Beatty's Slumberland, Jonathan Lethem's Fortress of Solitude, and Nell Freudenberger's The Dissident.
The penguin classics in the UK have far more interesting covers than the US counterparts
It's interesting how different the covers are. It seems most of the American covers are just begging for that "Oprah Book Club" sticker.
The UK Northern Clemency is hideous.
Thanks for the perfectly lovely post! Spot-on observations! My favorite bit is your praise of the anthropomorphic waves.