We are said to be living in a new golden age of great book cover design, and part of the reason is that book discovery is becoming ever less serendipitous. Space for books in bookshops, whose financial survival is itself under stress, is declining — and the effort to grab the reader, target or casual, needs to be better focussed.
But book covers have always been integral to the communication between publisher and reader, and Roberto Calasso in his recent collection of essays, The Art of the Publisher (Penguin, £5.99), revisits the decisions that had to be made when he and his colleagues set up Adelphi, a leading (and iconic) Italian publishing house. At the heart of the book is the question: what makes a publisher great? The answer: “The capacity to give form to a plurality of books as though they were the chapters of a single book.” Adelphi, in this regard, had decided that it would publish “singular books”, and when it came to the next step of deciding on a look, “We immediately agreed on what we wanted to avoid: whiteness and graphic designers.”
Cover design, he explains, “is an art on which there is a heavy onus”. It must convey the essence of the book. It must “be perceived to be right” by potential readers who may know nothing about the books, but “at the same time the cover must look right after these unknown people have read the book”.
A great deal of effort goes into designing the cover, and also into re-jacketing, printing a book with a new cover. (As an aside, isn’t it curious how our relationship with a favourite text evolves with the change in book cover? Who said don’t judge a book by its cover!) At Adelphi, they decided to strike a separate pose. Images for covers would not be commissioned based on the text. Instead: “We felt, at the outset, that with a little perseverance we could find something each time from the sea of existing images — whether pictures or photographs or designs — that would be appropriate for the book we were about to publish.”
So may I suggest a little game? Take a book you know well, and find existing paintings or photographs that would be appropriate for a front cover.
