This post is inspired by the article “Seventy-five years of richly illustrated literary classics – in pictures”, which celebrates the work of The Folio Society. This is a British independent publisher, established in 1947, which has so far published 2400 beautifully designed editions for book lovers. Not knowing anything about them, I was astonished not only by the selection which the article offers but also by the catalogue you can browse on their website. Take a look and enjoy! And buy, if you can, for some of the volumes, which run from the highly literary to the popular, are really pricey. Not all , though.
Going further down this road, you might like to admire LitHub’s “The 25 Most Iconic Book Covers in History”. This is really a different kettle of fish since the article on The Folio Society highlights the first-rank artists that have collaborated with this publisher, whereas LitHub celebrates book covers whose artists are far more anonymous. I had no idea, for instance, that Leslie Holland is the author of the iconic cover for the original 1932 edition of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, or that the not less iconic cover for Mario Puzo’s The Godfather (1969) was designed by S. Neil Fujita and illustrated by John Kashiwabara. In fact, I wonder how come I recognize these book covers since I have read other later editions and the textbooks I read as a student had no pictures in them. I do own some of the books reproduced in the article, but even so I wonder how the images in book covers circulate. I assume matters have changed because of the internet, or that I have forgotten press articles that do carry those covers.
A peculiarity of book covers is that translations often use a different one, which in my view makes sense only partially depending on whether you believe that translations are a completely separate text (as translation specialist Laurence Venturi does) or a version of the same text. I assume that book covers must be negotiated separately, like translations, hence the variations. This means that each book has a different public image depending on the language version, which is not something we tend to consider. A singular case are the covers that publisher Silvia Sesé of Destino commissioned from Catalan-Mexican artist Gino Rubert for the Spanish translation of the Millennium trilogy by Stig Larsson. As José Antonio González Puentes reports in his blog, the artist suggested using some of his already existing work. Sesé chose a series in which Rubert’s then girlfriend, Argentinian artist Tamara Villoslada, was portrayed and the Photoshoped images showing Villoslada as a sort of anorexic femme fatale clad in red attracted a huge readership even though the book covers had little to do with the novels’ content. I wonder if she has got any royalties for lending her image though I think this is unlikely.
Covers, on the other hand, can be an obstacle. It took me years to get past the colourful covers by Josh Kirby for the novels by Terry Pratchett, stubbornly believing that Kirby’s quirky caricatures of the characters could only be advertising trash. My PhD co-supervisor David Punter was astounded by what I can only call my stupidity and ordered me to start reading Pratchett at once. I must clarify that possibly what flabbergasted me about Kirby’s book covers is that they ran from front to back, hardly leaving room for the title and the back blurb. They felt a bit too much, but as I say I love them now. Once I learned to enjoy the beautiful correspondence between Kirby’s and Pratchett’s satirical spirits I had to accept, like the rest of his fans, the equally great work by Paul Kidby, once Kirby passed away in 2001. I have seen this weekend an exhibition of illustrations of Pratchett’s characters by other artists and I have this feeling that they are intruding into someone else’s territory. Their version of the characters does not seem real, which is contradictory considering that Kirby’s and Kidby’s illustrations cannot be called real either, because they are illustrations (not photos!) and, anyway, reproduce imaginary individuals.
I cannot write a post about book covers without paying homage to the two best Spanish designers of book covers: Daniel Gil and his, so to speak, successor Manuel Estrada. Estrada himself offers in a blog post a celebration of Gil, whose conceptual covers usually featuring enigmatic photos of no less enigmatic objects is tied to the magnificent experience of reading Alianza’s series ‘El libro de bolsillo’ in the 1970s and 1980s. I was asked to read, aged 14, John Holt’s El fracaso de la escuela, and that cover with the picture of a faceless girl student has stayed in my memory for many years. Manuel Estrada renewed many of Alianza’s book covers from 2008, following in Gil’s steps but also contributing his own strong, personal vision. I cannot think of any other publisher in Spain that has been blessed with such wonderful book cover artists, though the pity is that few readers can name either Gil or Estrada as the authors of the covers.
My own experience as regards the covers of my volumes can be subdivided into two areas: the covers I have chosen or designed, and the covers that others have chosen. Academic publishing works in mysterious ways and, so, I cannot explain why Routledge does not have a different cover for each book. They have now gone past their blue period (for their uniformly dark blue covers) and authors can now choose between about 25 variations, all with nice geometrical patterns and colours but quite repetitive. There may be dozens of books with the same cover as that for my book Masculinity and Patriarchal Villainy in the British Novel: From Hitler to Voldemort, which is not something I am very happy with. In contrast, the Universidad of Zaragoza has accepted my proposal of a book cover that fuses the main features of Hitler and Voldemort in one caricature for my forthcoming self-translation. For my other books I have also been able to choose the book covers. My favourite needs to be the one for Representations of Masculinity in Literature and Film: Focus on Men, which shows a lovely selfie of my nephew Alex. For Typescript of the Second Origin, my translation of Manuel de Pedrolo’s Mecanoscrit del segon origen, my publishers ended up using an image which I myself found: it comes from a trailer for a zombie movie that was never made and shows Barcelona’s Plaça d’Espanya absolutely devastated, which goes very well with Pedrolo’s theme of an alien invasion.
As regards the e-books I have self-published, this is a completely different panorama. I have never published on Amazon but I know that there is a booming industry offering design services to self-published authors that want to go a little bit beyond the basic standard. In my case, I have published 10 e-books gathering together my students’ work, and a volume with my academic articles on science fiction. If you look at the books by the students you will see that my skills are totally amateurish but I have made an effort to improve and experiment with different looks. I think my favourite is the cover for Gender in 21st Century Animated Children’s Cinema. For my e-book on SF, I learned to design the book with a font that immediately suggested this genre, for beyond the book cover I have been trying new designs for each volume. I wanted very much a picture of a nebula on the cover (NASA has many copyright-free images), but my husband showed me that the stunning nebula I had initially chosen had been used ad nauseam in Amazon self-published books. I switched then to another, less popular but equally stunning nebula.
I enjoy very much the process of editing text, designing a look for each book, choosing a cover. My father used to be a printer in a company specialising in advertising (leaflets, catalogues and so on) and I seem to have imbibed something from his job, particularly from his annoyed comments when some aspect of a job had gone wrong. I learned the lesson that how printed paper looks does matter though, ironically, I am applying those lessons to digital works (and I’m not at all a bibliophile that treasures particular editions of any volume). In any case, since I am myself designing books, if only in the most amateurish way, I have a high appreciation for the artists who do that professionally, and who should be much better known. Since I cannot afford their services, I wish I had the time to learn a bit more and make my modest productions better-looking. Considering how much text we academics are constantly editing, perhaps that kind of training should be part of our jobs… Right, colleagues?