Good thing you can’t
JUDGING A BOOK BY ITS COVER:
Fans, Publishers, Designers, and the Marketing of Fiction
Edited by Nicole Matthews and Nickianne Moody
191 pp. Ashgate $99.95
Reviewed by Jane Woodward Elioseff
It is hard to know what to say first about Judging a Book by Its Cover: that it is a valuable collection of thirteen original articles relating to the marketing of books as material objects, or that the book’s own visual appearance is at war with its content. Given its high cost, I had expected an arresting book jacket and many, many color plates. Instead, the book designers have created an artifact for those of us who are so print oriented we can read an entire newspaper without later recalling a single photograph or illustration.
All eighteen figures in Judging a Book by Its Cover are in black and white. Six of these have been scattered strategically between page 5 and page 39, but beyond this point we find sixty-three uninterrupted pages of dense print. Eventually, on page 102, we come to a photograph of the cover of a 1967 reissue by Penguin Books of The Wind from Nowhere, J.G. Ballard’s science fiction classic. Here, black and white works. Were this scene of destruction presented in its original color, I think I would not have noticed that the roaring waves and tumbling buildings are arranged to suggest the helmeted head of a Greek warrior—with black empty space where there might have been a face.
The illustration so alarmed me that I ordered the novel.
The dust jacket is a drab affair in nude pink with purple print. Everything about it says, “Academic work—Ignore me,” despite the large single eye staring out at us from a 2.5 x 3.75 inch reproduction of the front cover of Philip K. Dick’s Eye in the Sky— actually two 2.5 x 3.75 inch versions of the front cover, both from Ace Penguin in 1957, set side by side for comparison, each with an eye, so that the book held at arm’s length acquires a skewed kind of face.
But there is little to compare between the two versions. Each Eye in the Sky cover shows several people fleeing from the eye across a plain. One cover is for readers who prefer their space hero in pants, with no women in sight. The other is for readers who prefer their space hero in kicky footwear and a short pleated skirt. Colors in the reproductions vibrate unhappily against each other, and against the book jacket’s purple and nude pink. The no-pants cover conveys more information: a few lines of print tell us that the author of Eye in the Sky deals dexterously with the theme of alternate universes. Even so, I was not tempted to buy it.
The book’s detailed early chapters, each by a different scholar, are organized to tell the story, from four perspectives, of the advent and growing success of English-language paperbacks first in Germany in the 19th century and then, by the 1930s, in the United Kingdom. Paperback covers have slowly evolved from a respectful, reassuring branding of the publishing house, in which all of a publisher’s books were given a similar appearance, to full-blown American-style marketing of individual titles to identifiable groups of readers.
During the early phase of paperback marketing, the brand, rather than the title, was being sold. Tauchnitz (1841-1936), Albatross (1931-1938), and Penguin (1935- ) are major examples. In the opening chapter, Alistair McCleery tells us that Penguin Books provided “huge quantities of brand-oriented display materials” to bookshops: “Show cards . . . in two colours; streamers in three colours; penguin cut-outs 15 inches high; and long window strips.” Much of this effort was intended to draw new readers into the shop.
Expanding literacy during the first half of the 20th century potentially enlarged the market for books, but many of Britain’s newly literate readers were too timid or too class-conscious to enter a bookshop. In her comprehensive introduction to Judging a Book by Its Cover, Nicole Matthews explains that a 1900 agreement with the force of law protected UK publishers and booksellers by prohibiting the sale of books in other venues. In the US in the same period, books were being sold in places where people already shopped. Only in 1997 did a UK court rule against those who benefited from the Net Book Agreement. Until then, the sole exceptions to the prohibition had been WHSmith’s railway book stalls and book sales in Australia.
In the US, Pocket Books (1939), in imitation of Penguin’s success, put a kangaroo on its cover to appeal to a similar group of new readers of literature and the classics—who were reassured by the cover’s restraint that a book was appropriate to read. At the same time in the US, the covers of pulp novels were as lurid and sensational as the censors would allow.
A great deal is known today about how to sell a book. In his chapter, Angus Phillips tells us that the perennially popular Agatha Christie, “the queen of crime,” wrote more than seventy detective novels and that her name is “synonymous with the genre.” Even so, her books periodically require repositioning. “In the 1980s, her publisher, Collins, faced with a decline in sales, commissioned research into her readers and their views of the [paperback] covers.” Focus groups told Collins that the covers were repelling Christie’s natural market and were “unrepresentative of the qualities of the author.” Gory artwork had moved the books in the direction of the horror genre, rather than presenting them as mysteries. Phillips writes, “Sales of her novels increased by 40 per cent in the first year of the new covers.”
Each chapter of this book is rich enough to deserve its own review. There is a chapter about publishing in Australia, by Elizabeth Webby. Another discusses literary prizes and awards. One looks at the Internet bookstore and the ways in which WHSmith and Amazon.co.uk have tried to recreate the browsing experience for their customers. Co-editor Nikianne Moody’s chapter incorporates a history of science fiction as a genre, emphasizing the gradual separation of fantasy and science fiction as distinct branches of this specialized literature, each with its own marketing iconography, further subgenre divisions, and all the games and accessories that flowed into the bookshop with the creation of Dungeons and Dragons.
Moody writes that in order to learn how feminist fabulist and cyberpunk novels were sold, she “took up the ethnographic practice of ’lurking’, watching the cultural practice of book browsing and buying, first as an observer and then gradually through interaction with booksellers and their customers.” In case we missed her joke, she goes on to explain Malinowski’s total immersion method of longitudinal fieldwork.
The cover of The Wind from Nowhere appears in the chapter “Pop Goes the Paperback.” This is the first article in an entertaining section called “The Record of the Film of the Book: Cultural Industries and Intertextuality.” Its authors, Gerry Carlin and Mark Jones, tell us,
In the 1960s, the book as an artefact, and literature as a project, seemed to be in crisis . . . But intimations of the death of the book actually augured a rebirth, of the literary paperback in particular, as the decade saw books entering new markets and contributing to the formation of new cultural environments . . . The book came to function as an ‘accessory’ in the pop environments of the sixties, but an accessory that also signalled access to culture [and marked] iconic reference points on an emerging bohemian cultural map.
It had taken a while for the paperback to find its right size, but now it was small enough to be slipped into a jacket or coat pocket and carried around. People read on park benches, in cafes and coffee shops, or anywhere they were just hanging out. I recall, in the mid-1960s, going to a movie theater in the afternoon and reading while waiting for the lights to go down. At some point, I looked up from my book and turned around in my seat. Everyone sitting in that half-empty theater was reading a newspaper, magazine, or paperback.
Jane Woodward Elioseff is fiction editor of
The Internet Review of Books. She lives in Houston.
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