Is the cover a part of the actual book?
I mean sure, with an audiobook or an e-book, the answer is probably no, or at most a very small part. You aren’t forced to stare at it every time you pick it up, and depending on the layout or reading device of your choice, the cover might be naught but a few grainy blobs the size of your pinky nail.
But how much a part of the actual book is the cover on a physical copy?
Does it play to the same importance as other aesthetic notions, like font choice or chapter titles?
Common convention says the cover is just an advertising tool. It’s there to get you to pick the damn thing up and buy it, and that’s about that. What’s actually written in the blurb or even the title itself doesn’t matter much, so long as you have a good enough cover to pique people’s interests, right? Boom pop bang, another buck in your pocket. But then again, the cover exists even after you’ve bought the book. This isn’t to say you can’t use a cover as a marketing tool, but rather than it isn’t just a marketing tool. Again, the cover exists even after the book has been bought.
Conversely, the book could exist without the cover as a pdf or a pile of printed pages. So what is the cover without the book?
Is it just another piece of artwork? Is it really actually an advertisment?
Except, then again, the cover is made specifically for the book. Even if the cover is a famous art piece, the minute you slap a title or author’s name on there, it ceases to be just that art piece. It’s become a cover. Which, I suppose, is more of a formatting gripe than anything, but I still have the sense that what makes a cover a cover is the fact that its attached to a book.
Aight, so let’s pretend that a book can exist without a cover, but a cover can’t exist without a book.
We still haven’t said anything about the state of the cover as a piece of the book.
Well, to back track, the cover exists even after you buy the book, right? It might be able hook your interest, but it isn’t quite the same thing as an advertisement. Sure, a cover might have advertising elements (Bestseller! Now adapted into a movie!! Buy me please!!!) but other than that, most covers are mainly made up of some sort of artwork, and any necessary information for the reader, like author and title. You know, those formatting gripes.
And yes, I know I’m being a little ridiculous with all this specificity, but really think for a minute: we’d call a cover that has the wrong title or author listed a bad cover. It doesn’t give us the specific elements we’re used to, and might go so far as to confuse or enrage us. Note that a book with no author or title on its cover can be a different story. That sort of book has an air of mystery, or is immediately recognizable by flipping it open. Or, maybe, it is just as bad. Regardless, a good cover (one that doesn’t needlessly disturb us) will have some sort of artwork and any necessary information.
But ahah! you might say. I’ve simply assumed there will always be art on the cover!
I have.
You want to know why?
Any color, image, or words on the cover could arguably function as art. It might be bad art, but its still art. We’ll talk more on this later.
Okay, so the cover is a piece of art with necessary information regarding the stuff on the pages. Except, if I’m arguing that all that necessary information can (not will, mind you, but can) function as art as well, then what’s the difference between the two parts? In fact, are there even two parts at all?
If I put something memorable, say a red umbrella, on the cover of a book, you’d likely expect that red umbrella to function as some object or symbol in the story. If I design a cover to be green and black, you might expect green and black to feature in the story, whether as set design, important to characters/plot, or simply representative of the overall tone of the book. The cover of the book, and the aesthetic notions overall, are a part of the book itself, to the point that they can impact a reader’s experience.
“That’s insane,” you might say. “You have no proof of this.”
Which of course means that I do have proof, and am going to continue to be an annoying asshat and ramble onwards. Hey, it was your decision to read this!
Cover redesigns happen, to my knowledge, for two main reasons: there’s a special occasion regarding the book (think an anniversary, or a new edition being printed), or a movie adaptation gets made. Let those two things stew in your brain a minute, and chances are you’ll get some stray memory of the one time you were at the bookstore with so-and-so and you were both devastated by the movie cover design being slapped all over a childhood favorite, or debated which cover you liked best between two editions of some classic.
I’d posit that we feel enraged or devastated when books have their covers altered, particularly in the case of a movie cover, because said new cover was designed not to describe or be a piece of the book, but instead to be a piece of (you guessed it) the movie. Making an altered movie poster and slapping it on top of a bestseller doesn’t sit well. This, in truth, is one of the few cases when a cover functions almost entirely as an advertisement, and it’s uncomfortable as fuck. At least, it usually is.
Similar things can be said about new covers on reprints: often the aesthetics publishing companies predict will market well have changed, and so on goes a completely different cover, sometimes less indicative of the insides and more indicative of the prestige of having multiple editions.
It’s also important to note that there tends to be a certain attitude towards the people that prefer one cover over another. For example, if you prefer the movie cover of a book, then you’re Wrong (hah!). This almost certainly happens because someone’s attitude towards the different covers a book has have already been set and decided upon the minute they see some different cover. This cover is cool, that cover sucks, this cover just doesn’t fit the book at all, what were they thinking, and so on.
So okay, book covers obviously play a part in the whole reading thing.
But how much?
We still haven’t answered that pressing question, how much a part of the book is a cover?
It impacts us, but to what extent?
The answer to that, I think, is personal. It relies on taste, and interpretation. Jokes aside, there is no one right or wrong cover for a book, only one that appeals to the aesthetic likings of some people and another that appeals to some other people. The garish colors of some self published book that put you off might draw another reader in, the photoshopped ladies with swords, dresses, snakes, and a variety of flowers that make me roll my eyes might be your favorite things in the world. No one here is right, we all just have different tastes.
The same can be said about the extent that we place importance on a book cover.
Some people might be turned off completely from a book if it has a ‘bad’ cover, no matter how tantalizing the blurb is. Some might take no notice of the cover at all, physical copy or audiobook or pirated pdf.
But no matter how your tastes land, I think it’s, I dunno, important/interesting/fun to think of covers as art. Doubly so if you happen to involved in the making of books. The little aesthetic notions, the cover, font, flow of paragraphs, word choice, format, chapter titles, and really anything that isn’t character and plot, do play a part in making a book what it is.
There’s plenty of more here to discuss, like how movie covers work in contrast, or how album art is often allowed to just be art, or what techniques there are in conveying the insides of the book on the cover, or how titles function in all this, or even how a cover can be an addition to the story, rather than a reflection of what’s inside.
But I think that’s a conversation for another day. It’s grey and snowy here at the moment, and I think the weather and time call for copious amount of tea and maybe a very cautious walk (more on that another time, it involves a number of moose).
Ciao!
TGM 