Book Cover Moods

Book covers are a slice of art I am entranced by and I’ve often thought it would be a great niche moneymaker for publishers—sell framed copies of iconic cover—or any covers. (You are welcome to steal this idea, anyone—just put me on your mailing list.

A beautiful collection of Alice in Wonderland covers, from 1898 to present all capture a different mood of Alice, including this beauty:

Another striking “Alice” cover (a homage to Alice) is the cover to Alice I Have Been, Melanie Benjamin, a novelization of the real Alice’s life:

My favorite cover mood of upcoming books, is the cover to Kitchen Daughter by Jael McHenry:

For those as fascinated by covers, as I am, a visit to the book cover archive is worth the trip—expect to stay awhile. I enjoyed a self-interest moment, looking up other covers done by The Murderer’s Daughters’ photographer Marc Yankus (whose work I love) and noticed connective tissue with mine, boardwalks and daughters:

And these by designer Steve Snider illustrate mood-catching.

A fascinating post on book covers in Smashing Magazine states “Book covers are hard to design and nice to look at. An effective book cover manages to catch human’s eye and convey the idea behind the book on one single page. However, it’s getting even harder: to make a book really hard to forget, designers need to design the cover in a unique, creative and striking way. That’s not that different from Web where it’s important to build a sound information architecture upon a rather restricted design layout” and follows the post with images of what they consider effective covers.

Of course, publishing, like everything in this world, is rife with inequities, and when it comes to book covers, no exceptions are made. When I looked a site after site putting forth ‘great book covers’ the scales leaned heavily towards books written by men and covers designed by men. No one has written a better essay about covers and women authors than Lionel Shriver posted in the Guardian which includes:

“. . . gauzy covers with shy titles signal that the literary establishment needn’t take this work seriously. Little wonder, then, that the language of extravagant regard in that New York Times Book Review write-up of Jonathan Franzen – “Like all great novels,” Freedom “illuminates, through the steady radiance of its author’s profound moral intelligence” – is rarely lavished on female novelists. Little wonder that admiration of Franzen’s focus on “family as microcosm or micro-history” would invert to disdain should a woman choose the same subject: look, just another bint stuck in her tiny domestic world.”

So if one does judge a book by its cover, will cover art determine the readership? Do books limit their readership by fronting it with a ‘girly cover’ or a severe one?

The difference in the covers below, all for Lionel Shriver’s (breathtaking) book We Need to Talk About Kevin is striking. Are the targeting different audiences?

This site (netwrite-publish)  tells us that the color of their book cover will attract or repel different readers.

And this post on Abe Books showcases the books we should buy for the cover alone. Put to the test, I did find one compelling enough to go check it out, but the description didn’t drive me to purchase. Which, I suppose, leads me to this: you can’t judge a book by it’s cover, but perhaps it will certainly lead to pick-ups.