Has judging a book by its cover gone too far?

One thing is apparent from this story: I should know much better than to so sweepingly judge writing by my very particular aesthetic tastes. I often feel as though I’m in an eternal flip-flop between telling myself to grow up and choose a book because I like the sound of it rather than its nice cover, before realising that critiquing and appreciating a book cover is respecting a designer’s hard work, which is, as a design writer, fundamentally my job. I’m sure there’s many reading this article who suffer from the same book cover snob affliction as I. So, where do we draw the line? Have we gone too far in our fixation on the cover and how it looks in our hands while reading on the train, rather than on what lies within? And what impact is this having on the book design industry as a whole?

To dig deeper into the world of cover design today, I spoke to two people who are doing it really well: the New York-based designer, art director and painter Na Kim, who designs in-house for the American publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux (FSG) and is creative director of The Paris Review; and David Pearson a London-based designer and teacher who specialises in book design and previously worked in-house at Penguin Books before setting up his own company, Type as Image, in 2007 working with the likes of Granta, Scribe and Daunt Books among others.

Both Na and David agree on one thing as causing the biggest shift in the industry and their specific line of work – social media. While David affirms that it’s “positive that platforms like TikTok have encouraged young readers to take an interest in books” he does fret about its impact on the book’s creative world. “I worry that our tastes are being homogenised through social media and such platforms leave even less room for independent voices to be supported, seen and heard,” David says. On such platforms, David continues: “Books tend to be seen as props, trophies or interior decor through this lens, which can create a very superficial understanding of what books are meant for.” Inevitably, it’s in response to shortened attention spans and reliance on instantaneous visual satisfaction and recognition that houses resort to trends, whether purposeful or serendipitous, like books on a similar publishing timeline all sporting the same hue. I have a friend who works at a literary agency who says when a new colour of popular books emerges it’s referred to as ‘Pantone-ification’. In 2023 and 2024 it was yellow, like Butter, R.F Kuang’s Yellowface and Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting, whereas this year it seems the be a toss up between (or mix of) orange and pink, see Benjamin Markovits’ The Rest of Our Lives, Oisín McKenna’s Evenings and Weekends and Emma Jane Unsworth’s Slags.

It’s true – as a regular book buyer, it feels harder and harder not to fall into the dangerous realm of do I want it, or do I want to be seen with it? But this reliance on the ‘photographability’ of a book doesn’t just lead to trend-led buying, but the more worrying instance of texts being misrepresented. In 2022, Claire-Louise Bennett’s 2021 novel Checkout 19 was released in paperback, and in its transition from hardback it had undergone a rejacketing, something that tends to happen when a book isn’t selling as well as hoped. The original hardback cover – a small, painted portrait of a woman surrounded by a mess of scribbles and handwritten type upon a black background – felt true to the book, its stream of consciousness style and the sometimes dark, suffocating places it uses depict one woman’s psyche. Its paperback jacket was entirely different: a white background is divided by a cropped woman’s painted face staring at the holder, and large, confident type on the other half. In my eyes it clearly felt (alongside a handful of other paperback releases at the time) like a mimic of Coco Mellors’ best-selling 2021 cover of Cleopatra and Frankenstein, and I couldn’t help but worry for the people who may have been duped into picking up Bennett’s fragmented, psychological book looking for the sharp-eyed humour, romance and levity of Mellors.

There are publishing houses that have broken away from the confines of genre entirely. It’s remiss to write an article about book covers without giving a nod to Fitzcarraldo Editions, which, in the more commonly ‘European way’, jackets every book it publishes with its now-modern-classic royal blue covers, relying on its readers’ faith in the publishing house’s sensibilities and curatorial tastes rather than other marketing tactics. It’s a bold move. There’s a good chance that if I’d been lead by the fact Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over The Bones of the Dead is best described as a ‘crime eco-thriller’, I would probably never have picked it up and would be missing out on one of my favourite books. Interestingly, the UK-based independent publishers And Other Stories has recently opted for a similarly linear approach; now every single one of its off-white covers is solely adorned with the title, name of author, its small ampersand logo and a small chunk of text taken from the book.

One of the best demonstrations of the fickleness of genre is Elena Ferrante’s lauded Neapolitan Quartet, a series I was persuaded to read by a customer at my old bookshop (gratefully so), despite, in their words, them “looking like something someone’s mum would read”. The original UK covers of the series are (without exaggeration) often referred to as some of the worst in living memory – people simply can’t match the layered story of one girl’s life from a hectic and deprived neighbourhood in Naples to famous writer of relative wealth, with the powder pastel hues and cheesy stock imagery of the covers: a cookie-cutter wedding, to a twee shot of two girls wearing fairy wings – all, depicted for some reason, looking wistfully into the distance.

What further confused some readers was that the mysterious author (who remains anonymous by choice) had personally given them the seal of approval, as revealed in an interview with the book’s designer, who said the “vulgarity” of the covers is an intentional nod to the story. Emily Harnett’s Atlantic article, further argues that the design choices were even more aware, led by the desire to draw attention to (and disparage) the sexist tendencies we have as readers to scoff at domestic fiction by older women. If you think about it too hard it can leave you in a mind boggling cycle of wondering whether we might be leaving so many books we could love unread because the marketing is actually holding it back – visually limiting its appeal to those who will most obviously and easily ‘relate’ to it (and because we’re all stubborn aesthetic creatures).

While David and Na work in different environments – Na has worked in-house at FSG for ten years and David is independent – both have developed one core tenet that informs their approach: never treating one project the same. For Na, it’s one of “best and hardest” parts of being a book cover designer, and David says: “We should bring as little baggage as possible into the design process. There is very little room for dogma within book design. We all have personal defaults of course, but being able to reset and regenerate with each job is one of its unique pleasures.” Good book covers, David summarises, “look like nothing else they’re sharing a shelf with”. As Na entered the industry from an illustration background as opposed to the more traditional design route, she wasn’t familiar with technicalities like typography, and so she originally spent much more time working on research and planning. Whereas now she describes her process as “much more intuitive”, one helped by the close working relationship and mutual trust she has developed with FSG.

It begins with her reading the book – fiction cover to cover, and non-fiction dipping in and out, letting images and questions come to mind in the hopes of finding a natural starting point (Na does know of some designers who don’t read the book and still do an “amazing” job). But, she says: “I think maybe we don’t talk about how the writer’s style shapes what the books look like, too. The more distinct the voice, the easier it is to create a visual world.” She’s particularly fond of working on Yiyun Li and Sheila Heti’s works because of the uniqueness of their voices. Being able to use style and function as a jumping off point allows Na to break away from creating a “plot driven” cover which ultimately leads to something more “interesting”. Na says: “It’s hard to put it into words, but it’s about narrowing an image down to the essence of what the book is.”

Clearly, so much work goes into creating a good book cover. So rather than rejecting the idea of ‘judging’ at all, maybe we just need to be more considerate about how and why we appreciate and critique covers. Alongside his day-to-day creative work, David founded and runs The Book Cover Review, a website dedicated to giving a space for different voices from across the world to review their favourite book covers in around 500 words – for the appreciation of designers and non-designers alike. His reasons for creating it were many – some broad: he felt it was something missing from the internet, and he wanted “to try and improve on the current level of book design discourse and help provide a deeper understanding of the book design process,” he says. And, on a more personal level, he simply wanted to know what covers were lasting for people, and why.

From Jodi Hunt’s brilliantly incisive review of Bobby Seale’s Seize the Time, to Matt Curtis’ rhythmic reflection on Rob Campbell’s children’s flap book Dear Zoo and Richard Turley’s on-brand ode to Madonna’s metal-bound Sex, the website is a treasure trove of insightful criticism. David is particularly fond of how many of the reviews interrogate the book’s physicality, their “three-dimensional properties”. He says: “Such discussions are fairly non-existent online and I’m often left feeling like a jpeg is the most meaningful conclusion of the book design process.”

Scottish writer and illustrator Alasdair Gray (Poor Things, Lanark) was a strong proponent of the physicality of books. He didn’t only write his books, but illustrated every element, from their covers and titles, to each individual ornate dropcap. For him, books were more than just a house for a story, but objects that held clues and narratives within them too – made to be appreciated and explored, as outlined in this interview with his archivist Sorcha Dallas. The spine of my copy of Lanark is probably the most broken on my bookshelf, because the best way to view the epic Dante’s-Inferno-meets-eighties-Glasgow illustrated montage he’s created in all its glory is by lying the book flat.

Likewise, when I ask Na if she ever buys books for their covers, after saying she no longer does, she quickly backtracks and says that whenever she sees a specific secondhand copy of Zen and The Art of the Motorcycle Maintenance she will always buy it to gift on, because, she says: “there’s something about picking it up, the smaller trim, and the copies are often a little old, so the pages are yellowed against the purpley pink cover. I don’t even know if the design is particularly ‘great’,” she continues, “but it’s just about the overall feeling of it as an object in the world.”

David perceives an increasing lack of appreciation for the book as an object, which has allowed physical aspects of a book’s design to “fall into disrepair”. Budgets are being slashed (due both to economic downturn and top-level decisions that money is better used elsewhere, for example in marketing) and now, David says: “non-standard print specs are being seen as either frivolous or a hard-to-justify business risk”. He continues: “There is also a depressingly common trend of print finishes being tacked on at the end of the design process, as opposed to being an intrinsic part of it, which to me feels a bit like adding icing sugar to finished dishes regardless of their flavour.”

Financial cuts aren’t only evident in print runs, but team structures too. Nowadays, David is more often briefed by editors as opposed to art directors. While this does come with its positives – “direct access to a book’s editor, who is often much closer to the author and their aspirations and intentions, can grant you a truer reading of the book, or one that’s less driven by marketing expectations”, says David – it can leave you without what David describes as a “protective buffer”. He continues: “An editor is trained to spot mistakes and inclined to correct them quickly. Without an art director present to mediate this process, it can result in quick-fire, visual fire-fighting which rules out opportunities to sit with something, slowly make sense of it and allow non-conformist ideas to take hold and grow.” He also says that a certain big publisher is no longer using freelance designers, as “they haven’t the time to feed back and manage an external workforce” – which will no doubt put more pressure on the already stretched in-house team, and bring less fresh perspectives into the system.

Whereas in your typical design studio or agency you’re rubbing shoulders with other creatives, in the book world you’re more likely to be surrounded by and in conversation with people whose role is more closely tied to the text on the pages than its visual appeal. So here, for Na, lies the onus on the designer to recognise how important these working relationships are, but also to be “confident” in their vision: “At every step of the process [editing, marketing, etc] there is a responsibility to fight for what you think is right.”

Right now, both Na and David see that one of the only ways to protect the industry and to prevent it from descending further into derivative design is to take more risks, to put more faith in unorthodox ideas. As Na points out, the industry is brimming with talented creatives, but that very same industry is bound up in the conventions of selling through genre, playing it safe with trend-led design, and thus is often not giving its designers the chance to “flex” their skills. David recognises this also isn’t new, and so echoes Na’s call for the designer to rock the boat: “Publishing tends to avoid difficulty and friction, and groundbreaking thought is viewed as a business risk since it cannot be supported by the data that soothes stakeholders,” says David. “But it is part of the designer’s responsibility to challenge these expectations, as unpopular as this can make us!”

But maybe (and now it’s time I find a mirror) it’s also on the buyer, the appreciator and the reader to take some more risks, to break out of our self-imposed rules, surface level judgement and stop picking up a book because it looks like another we enjoyed. Rather than neglecting ‘judgement’ at all, if we do choose to be led by covers, maybe we just need to change how we judge – taking note of how a book feels in our hands, its weight, its texture, how its embossed title interacts with different lighting. Who knows, maybe we need to pick up more books not because we necessarily even ‘like’ the design, but because something about it intrigues us. Not only will this give us a more eclectic bookshelf (come on, it matters), it will help more unconventional design get the appreciation it deserves, and, of course, introduce us to a richer and more diverse array of stories.

And, if all fails? You could just read the blurb.