The Look of the Book

Starred review from September 1, 2020
A lively compendium that proves that, at least in some respects, you can indeed judge a book by its cover. The cover or dust jacket of a book does many jobs, write literary scholar Alworth and designer Mendelsund, creative director at the Atlantic: It's meant to sell the book, of course, but it's also ideally a work of art. The latter requires explanation, "since art is usually understood to have no commercial purpose whatever, and there's no getting around the fact that book covers are advertisements." In the most memorable instances, there's no question of the art aspect: Think of the cover of The Great Gatsby, with its all-seeing female eyes, an image that figures at several points in this book. The challenge of doing double duty as art and ad grows greater with the increased digitization of the book, whether as an e-book or as a physical object sold online, in either instance requiring the cover to be "as effective at 1 1/2 inches tall, which is the size of an Amazon thumbnail image, as they are at 9 inches tall, displayed in the window of the brick-and-mortar bookstore." Alworth and Mendelsund range widely in their examples, from pulp fiction to the most elevated literature--Ulysses, for example, whose cover made highly effective use of the then-new Futura typeface. Some covers are accidental, as when the designer of A Clockwork Orange, in its movie tie-in edition, failed to come through, requiring an all-night session from the art director. "Every time I see that image," he says, "all I see are the mistakes." Mistakes or no, the design is brilliant, as are the covers of Jo Nesb�'s The Snowman (its single drop of blood signals the genre) and Lee Clay Johnson's Nitro Mountain, whose designer notes that the photo of "a deer alerted to footsteps" connects to "The premise in film that fear builds in the anticipation, rather than in the thing itself." A book about books that deserves a spot in every bibliophile's collection.

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