The Look of the Book: Jackets, Covers, and Art at the Edges of Literature

by Peter Mendelsund, David J. Alworth

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

How many book lovers picked up a book because they were intrigued by the book jacket design? Probably, lots. It goes without saying, a lot of time and energy is spent designing a book jacket that conveys just the right amount of information while being pleasant to look at. Can the "look of the book" make all the difference or, at the very least, form the complete package of beauty, utility and content? You'll never know until you pick this up.

Why do some book covers instantly grab your attention, while others never get a second glance? Fusing word and image, as well as design thinking and literary criticism, this captivating investigation goes behind the scenes of the cover design process to answer this question and more.

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

As the outward face of the text, the book cover makes an all-important first impression. The Look of the Book examines art at the edges of literature through notable covers and the stories behind them, galleries of the many different jackets of bestselling books, an overview of book cover trends throughout history, and insights from dozens of literary and design luminaries. Co-authored by celebrated designer and creative director Peter Mendelsund and scholar David Alworth, this fascinating collaboration, featuring hundreds of covers, challenges our notions of what a book cover can and should be.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780399581021
Publisher:	Clarkson Potter/Ten Speed
Publication date:	10/06/2020
Pages:	292
Sales rank:	167,745
Product dimensions:	11.20(w) x 8.70(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Peter Mendelsund is the former art director at Alfred A. Knopf, the creative director of The Atlantic, and the author of a design monograph called Cover, as well as What We See When We Read, which has been translated into fourteen languages, and the novel Same Same. His writings have appeared in the New York Times, the Paris Review, and other magazines.

David J. Alworth is the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. He teaches and writes about modern and contemporary literature, media, art, and design. He is the author of Site Reading: Fiction, Art, Social Form and his essays have appeared in Public Books and the Los Angeles Review of Books, as well as in various scholarly journals.

Read an Excerpt

Judging a Book by Its Cover


We’re not supposed to do it, but we do it anyway. The book cover is the outward face of the text, the all-important first impression of the text, but it’s also incidental and easily replaced. The same text can take many different covers without losing its identity.

These contradictions started to intrigue us the more we thought about them. Eventually, they got us thinking about the book cover as a specific medium of communication, graphic expression, design, and perhaps even art. There really is no other medium quite like it, but as is the case with all media in the twenty-first century, the book cover is being transformed by the digital revolution. Until recently, talking about book covers meant talking about physical books: either hardbacks (with or without paper jackets) or paperbacks. In the era of e-books and audiobooks, however, book covers exist as digital images that can float free of the texts that they cover. These days, we are likely to see a new book in the form of a publicity image before we can purchase it. As visual designs, book covers must accomplish a nearly impossible task: they have 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. For this reason and others, the look of the book matters now as never before.

Editorial Reviews

Praise for The Look of the Book:

“A book about books that deserves a spot in every bibliophile’s collection.”—Kirkus Reviews

Praise for Cover:

“In the past decade, Mr. Mendelsund has designed about 600 book jackets, ranging from a sober, sophisticated cover for Tolstoy's War and Peace to his whimsical Pop Art-like treatment of Kafka's novella Metamorphosis, to the hypnotic fluorescent swirls on Stieg Larsson's thriller The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.”—New York Times

“Cover is foremost a visually enticing tour of some of the most important books of recent times, made even more memorable by Mendelsund's daring covers.”—Washington Post

Praise for What We See When We Read:

“A playful, illustrated treatise on how words give rise to mental images.”—Alexandra Alter, New York Times

“Mendelsund, throughout this thought-provoking book, helps the lay reader contemplate text in ways you hadn't thought about previously.”—Los Angeles Times

“A welcome and fascinating new book.”—New York Review of Books

From the Publisher

★ 2020-08-18
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 Nesbø’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.

Kirkus Reviews