Posts on book covers

There's been plenty of talk about the "headless" trend in kids'/YA book covers, but I've never seen a post quite so snarky as Peter's at Collecting Children's Books. On How to Build a House, by Dana Reinhardt:

A group of teenagers converge on a small Tennesse town to rebuild a house that was destroyed in a tornado. By the time the summer is over, the house will be completely built—but several of the young adults will have lost their heads. This novel is a testament to the importance of volunteer work...and the dangers of untrained teens using power tools.

Get lots more snark, and some really awful puns, here!

When I wrote my post about book spine design last month, I thought I was doing nothing more than griping to the ether. Then yesterday I received a comment from the marketing manager of Center Point Large Print, a small publisher based in Thorndike, Maine (that town should ring a bell for anyone who works with large type books). He said that as of this fall, they’ll be leaving the bottoms of their books’ spines blank to leave room for library cataloging information! How about that? Special thanks to my friend Dan for spreading the word to all those ALA members, transforming my rant into an instrument of actual change.

Continuing the theme of book design, editor Alvina Ling posted some interesting thoughts about the challenge of designing books to please everyone, over at Blue Rose Girls. All the book jackets she shows in her post are, of course, highly attractive. But don’t you wonder how some of the covers out there slip through?

As anyone who’s worked in a library knows, weeding the collection (or pruning, withdrawal, deselection, [your euphemism here]) is a bittersweet fact of life. With limited shelf and storage space, we simply cannot keep every book we buy indefinitely. Books that are out-of-date or in poor condition are the first to go. But if the shelves are still too crowded, the less popular books have to go, too. That’s the bitter part: saying goodbye to books that are in good condition and got good reviews (presumably, or we wouldn’t have bought them to begin with) but have sat unmoving on the shelf for years at a time. The sweet part, of course, is having room for new good books.

One of my colleagues is weeding our junior high fiction section right now. The impact of a book’s cover is never more glaring than when you see dozens of noncirculating books all together on a cart. The vast majority of these books have covers that are dark, drab, low-contrast, and/or generally unattractive (blah landscapes, ugly people, too old-fashioned, etc.). They are books that you know even if they were the most amazing stories in the world, you’d never get a kid to crack them without the smoothest hand-selling job in history.

Unappealing covers are enough to strike fear into the hearts of any author who wants people to, you know, actually pick up their books. But it gets worse. Over at the Longstockings blog, Coe Booth has posted about not one, but two, instances of author friends’ books being blocked by a major bookselling chain because of their covers. Apparently, this isn’t an uncommon phenomenon. Yikes! (Of course, I am madly curious what it was about the covers that made them contentious…)

Coincidentally, my husband is currently enjoying Chip Kidd’s not-quite-coffee-table book Chip Kidd: Work 1986–2006. Book One (Rizzoli, 2005), and I’ve been reading over his shoulder a bit. Chip Kidd, as well as being a novelist in his own right, has designed hundreds of book covers, including the iconic cover of Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park. (Ironically, Kidd's book was bound as a strange hardcover/paperback hybrid. Repeated—i.e., library—use has cause the wide, flimsy pages to tear away from the binding. Clever-looking design, but low on usability and durability.)

Finally, interested in book design of yore? How about books that were basically Ping Pong paddles covered with ox horn? I loved Collecting Children’s Books’ post about horn books and battledores, those centuries-old tools for teaching children to read. Peter’s got some great photos and trivia there. For example, did you know that “xylophone,” that classic X-word of alphabet books, wasn’t coined until 1866? (And forget about X-rays, of course!) Follow the link to learn what authors did for letter X prior to that, and more...

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.

We all know the current trend of photographic book covers for novels. Much has been made of trends to show just feet, just torsos, or various other truncated body parts. But lately I’ve been noticing more photographic book covers that show actual faces.

One side effect, of course, is that readers are given a very strong suggestion of what the main character looks like, rather than letting them use their imaginations—like seeing a still shot from the movie based on the book.

I wonder if the trend is part of our society’s general obsession with things that are “real”: movies “based on the true story,” reality television, etc. If the main character of a novel has apparently been captured on film, does that make the story seem more real?

This past week, I’ve been struck by something else about these headshot/full-body photo covers—something that’s made me wonder about just what-all goes into publishers’ decisions about which models they use…

Case Study #1: Suite Scarlett, by Maureen Johnson
Quick, who’s the most famous Scarlett you know? Scarlett O’Hara, you say? Okay, second-most famous, then—and a real person, to boot. In fact, the only real person I can think of named Scarlett. (It’s not a common name, after all.) That’s right: Scarlett Johanssen.

Is it just a coincidence that the model on the cover of Suite Scarlett looks startlingly like Scarlett Johanssen? I’m not saying she’s a dead ringer (okay, it's mostly the hair), but take a look at Photo A and Photo B and tell me there’s not a resemblance.

So, is Scarlett Johanssen unwittingly selling books for Maureen Johnson? Not that Maureen Johnson needs help selling books! And maybe most of her young fans don’t know or care about Scarlett Johanssen anyway—but adult buyers, on the other hand…

Case Study #2: Band Geek Love, by Josie Bloss
Stop me if this rings a bell: “This one time? At band camp?” Yeah, I thought that would be enough. Even if you’re lucky enough to have missed the movie American Pie, a few years back you probably heard that line repeated often enough to feel like you’d been there after all. It’s spoken, of course, by Alyson Hannigan’s character. Alyson Hannigan… the band geek… with red hair… cut in a pageboy.

She played the flute (you probably knew that, too) instead of the trumpet. And again, many/most of this book’s readers haven’t seen American Pie either. But is Alyson Hannigan unwittingly helping sell Band Geek Love to adults?

Of course, Hannigan gained most of her fans through her role in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and I’d bet a very healthy percentage of those fans were band geeks themselves. So, maybe it’s only natural!

Case Study #3: Allie Finkle’s Rules for Life: Moving Day, by Meg Cabot
I’m stretching a bit here, but I can’t help looking at this book cover without thinking of one very famous person. Wait, make that two very famous people. Maybe it’s the clothes. Maybe it’s the hair. Or the complexion. Or the mouth. But all my brain can think is Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen.

(Amazon’s images for this book are pretty crummy, but Meg Cabot’s got a good image on her site.)

This may all be in my head. Or maybe it’s only my astounding television/movie star ignorance that has kept me from seeing celebrities in the faces of all photographic book covers.

What do you think?

ETA 5/30/08:

Case Study #4: How to Be Bad, by E. Lockhart, Sarah Mlynowski, and Lauren Myracle
Tell me you look at this one and don't think of everybody's (latest) favorite British waif, who in various films has played soccer, fought pirates (including undead ones), and worn tight, Victorian dresses in the rain. That's right, I'm thinking of none other than Keira Knightley.