Posts on weeding

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 Books that are out-of-date or in poor condition are the first to go.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...