Spinal Exam

Recently, both Fuse #8 and PRINT magazine in its article "Cover Girls" discussed the covers of particular children's and YA as they've been redesigned over the years. Jacket Why and Collecting Children's Books are two more of my favorite blogs that address the trends and changes in children's/YA book cover design.

I love this kind of stuff. Book jackets are the clothes books wear; they grab your attention and make you give that book the sly up-and-down look. It's interesting to see what fashions (if any) hold up over time and which are as hopelessly out of date as that orange and avocado flowered sofa you picked up at a yard sale for $10. (I really did once buy a sofa of said description, back in college. It was six feet long and the most comfortable piece of furniture EVER. But boy, it was ugly as sin.) I believe an unattractive cover can staggeringly reduce a book's readership. It doesn't matter how often we say not to judge a book by its cover; readers of all ages will.

Something I haven't seen discussed, though, is the face books present to potential readers once they're on the shelf. In libraries and bookstores, where face-out shelving is at a premium, readers' first impression of a book isn't the cover. It's the spine.

My general impression is that books have improved immeasurably in spine design in the past couple decades. When I think back to my childhood, most of the hardcover spines I remember had plain printing in a stately serif font; the paperbacks bore the title and author's name in simple, black caps. I think we're seeing many more wrap-around jacket designs now, more artistic typography, and generally more creativity in book jacket design, spines included.

When readers are faced with rows upon rows of spine-out books, what draws them to a particular volume, causes them to pull it off the shelf so they can then be enticed by the cover design and the jacket copy?

I believe it's two interrelated variables: the title and the spine design. The title is the spine's most important content. First and foremost, the title should be easy to read. Readers should be able to identify the book without squinting or pulling it off the shelf. That's something the old-style, no-nonsense, K.I.S.S. spines had going for them: pure functionality. Artistry is important, but it should come in a rather distant second.

Here are book spines that score high on both title legibility and artistic design, making them magnets when I was looking through the stacks:

In contrast, here are some things I don't like to see:

• Print that wears off the binding after a few reads. Yes, Series of Unfortunate Events, I'm looking at you.
• Low contrast between title and background.
• Highly stylized writing, whether it's print or cursive.
• Gold or silver foil, which is very susceptible to shadow and glare. (Orphan of the Sun actually liked the light in my office, but I no longer have a bloody clue what the foil-lettered book beneath it is.)

Another thing that drives me crazy, from my library-centric point of view, is titles that are placed near the bottom, rather than the top, of the spine:

Most libraries place books' location stickers within the two bottom inches of the spine. For functionality's sake, libraries cannot simply move those stickers around on a book-by-book basis. The only exceptions we'll make are for a book like, say, The Invention of Hugo Cabret.

It would be far better if publishers simply avoided placing vital information in those bottom two inches of spine. From readers' point of view, I'd say the least vital spine information is the publisher's seal. If that's a blow to the publisher's ego, too bad. From the library's point of view, the author's name is second-least important, since the location sticker—especially for fiction books—generally includes the author's name. If one thing should be legible, without a question, it is the title.

The situation worsens when you take genre stickers into account. Now, genre stickering is a discussion piece of its own (do genre stickers ghettoize the collection?), but a great many libraries use them. My library's practice is to place the genre sticker immediately above the location sticker, effectively covering the bottom three inches of spine. We could reduce that space by placing genre stickers below the location stickers, but that's where our "new book" labels go:

But even when we switch the stickers around, we still run into problems with many books:

I've suggested that my department reduce the problem by adopting a different stickering practice for its fiction collections, something more like this:

But in general, I think the world of books would be better if publishers simply kept titles higher on the spine. Even a long title can be made to fit in a compact space, with high points for legibility and artistic design:

That's my soapbox rant, a week late and, as promised, not particularly controversial. But again, it's something I haven't seen discussed, and it bears consideration.