MotherSister Brooklyn

There have been some interesting articles on the death of compelling magazine cover design recently, but I wish someone would take up the torch for good book cover design. Maybe it’s just me, but it seems book jackets are truly terrible now, especially in the United States.

I’ve become much more deliberate about my book acquisitions for my personal library, more of a true book collector. I don’t want any old edition taking up valuable shelf space in my home, and I don’t want any old ugly edition, either. And yet, that’s what’s being churned out: Even esteemed hardcovers by name authors — what, Murakami can’t get no love?! — are being published with jackets that look better suited to your average $5.99 drugstore-rack pocketbook. An example?

I set out to purchase a copy of Christian Jungersen’s enticingly well-reviewed The Exception. This novel of considerable heft, which tackles man’s inhumanity to man head-on, is jacketed for U.S. sale thusly:

I mean, seriously. The plot has four women at its center, and there’s a crime involved — so of course there needs to be breathy, imperiled-looking women on the cover with blood-red slashes and stains. My goodness, who would pick it up otherwise? It’s so cheap, and so cheapening, that there was no way I was going to support the sales/marketing genius (and based on first-hand knowledge of the inner workings of book cover approval in your average NYC publishing house, believe me when I tell you that’s who is in charge) who rubber-stamped it. So I did what I’ve often found myself doing: searched for a U.K. edition, since historically they’ve maintained some sense of refinement, some respect for the reader’s intelligence. I was a little discouraged to see this paperback edition, though.

Does it need the “Office Politics Can Be Deadly” tagline? The bodies in chalkline? If I’m literary-minded enough to pick up this 500-plus-page book, does your design need to spell out a reductive summary for me like the 11 o’clock news? It’s just as well, as I’m trying not to buy paperbacks, but man! how the mighty have fallen. Et tu, my peeps in Ol’ Blighty? Anyway, this is what will be on my shelf in a couple of weeks:

Le sigh.

If you care about this stuff as much as I do, get lifted by visiting Book By Its Cover.

[ETA: It’s interesting to see the various worldwide covers for The Exception; the original Danish cover is to the far right on the shelf. The French cover is even worse than the U.S. cover, for crying out loud. Can’t wait to see what the Italians do with it; the good folks at Minimum Fax know from cover design, but it’s in Mondadori’s hands.]

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 24th, 2007 at 11:37 pm and is filed under la vie quotidienne. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.