#206 Book Covers

 

 

#206 Blog Post   Wednesday, 5 February 2025

Posted by Denny Hatch

http://dennyhatch.blogspot.com/2025/02/206-book-covers.html

 

 

You Can Judge a Book Designer by the Cover.  

On average The New York Times reviews 1300 books a year.
Below: the Times' Critic's Choice for Best Book Cover of 2024.

                      Title: Alphabetical Diaries
                      Author: Sheila Heti
                      Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux
                      Cover Design: Na Kim
                     Cover Design: Success or Failure? Catastrophe!!!
                      Published: 2024
                      Hard Cover: $27.00

By: Matt Dorfman, designer, illustrator and an art director of The New York Times Book Review since 2015.
"This cover is both an instruction manual for how to read a book and an audacious language experiment. Interlocking the author's name with her title in the style of a word search, the design demonstrates how the cover's behavior rhymes with the author's alphabetical project by singling out an "A," "B" and "C" with pops of a different color. And the type choice clearly signals that this is an experiment we're meant to have fun with. It's easy for such distinct tasks to conflict on the face of a book. It's Hard to harmonize them this playfully. —Matt Dorfman

 
Matt Dorfman saying "This cover is both an instruction manual for how to read a book and an audacious language experiment..." is preposterous!
The cover is the publisher's formal announcement to the world that this new book really exists. The cover is the most important advertisement for the book itself. It will be seen in bookstores and libraries. It will appear in all ads, promotional brochures, press releases, book reviews, newspaper feature stories, author's bios and catalogs in print and online. In short, the cover is how people recognize this new book for all time. Not a treatise on how to read it!

Four Hard and Fast Rules for Successful Book Cover Design.

Rule #1: Title and author's name must stand out and be immediately easy to read.

Rule #2: Title is the most important element on the cover.  It identifies the book, making it unique, special and standing apart from the other 189 million books in print.

Rule #3: Occasionally the author's name may be larger than the title. If the writer is a show-biz celebrity, politician, best-selling author — a name that is instantly recognized and would be a huge sales hook... yeah, give this star top billing on the cover and title page.

Rule #4: No Limits. The cover is the main salesman for the life of the book. It can feature exciting colors, jarring type fonts and gripping illustrations to give a flavor of the goodies that await readers. Anything goes, so long as the title and author are obvious and easy to read.

Okay, why is this Times' winning cover design a colossal flop? Shoppers are busy people. In this book cover the title and author are totally hidden somewhere in a smarty-pants designer's word salad. What's the name of the book? Who wrote this thing? Designer Na Kim is trying to force me to drop everything and spend precious time solving the puzzle of the title. I ain't got the time. In short... this #1 New York Times' Best Book Cover 2024 is strange as hell and an instant deal killer.

 

Another Terrible Runner-up Cover from the Dozen
Chosen by the Times as Best Book Covers of 2024.

                        Title: Body in the Library/Memoir of a Diagnosis
                        Author: Graham Caveny
                        Publisher: Bahamut Media Ltd. (UK)
                       Cover Design: David Pearson
                        Published: 2024
                        Paperback: $18.25

By: Matt Dorfmann, "If it weren't for the oblique clue in the subtitle, you would have no idea that cancer is the driving agent of this memoir. In all other respects, the design smartly widens its aperture, using one of mankind's cohabitants in the natural world — a swan — to hit an existential note about anticipating the end of a life and how one might (literally in the swan's case) bow out with grace. —Matt Dorfman

A Truly Bizarre, Difficult-to-read Cover Design. 
At the very top left-hand corner is author's name in strange, very small and difficult-to-read cartoonish script font.

Meanwhile across the very bottom of the cover is the title/subtitle in the this same teennsy difficult-to-read cartoonish script .

Title/sub-title are separated by the orange bill at the end of the massive wrap-around neck of a swan that seems to be to be in extremis. 

 

 

Compare These Weird-o 2024 Designs with the
Most Successful Book Cover in Modern History!

                   Title: GONE WITH THE WIND
                   Published: 1936
                   Author: Margaret Mitchell
                   Publisher: Macmillan
                   Jacket Design: Alas, couldn't find anywhere.
                   Hardcover: $3.00

 Design Wizardry.

Between the giant title and author's name is this glorious little painting — a charming scene of the pre-Civil War Old South, giving the reader a hint of the wondrous story to come.

 

"Your First 100 Words Are More Important Than the Next Ten Thousand."
—Elmer "Sizzle" Wheeler (1903-1968)
Elmer Wheeler, author of nine books on public speaking and how to sell, was famous for saying, “Don’t sell the steak, sell the 'sizzle'.” Here are the first hundred and eighteen words of Gone With The Wind, the greatest best seller since The Bible. No kidding.

 

SCARLETT O’HARA WAS NOT BEAUTIFUL, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm as the Tarleton twins were. In her face were too sharply blended the delicate features of her mother, a Coast aristocrat of French descent, and the heavy ones of her florid Irish father. But it was an arresting face, pointed of chin, square of jaw. Her eyes were pale green without a touch of hazel, starred with bristly black lashes and slightly tilted at the ends. Above them, her thick black brows slanted upward, cutting a startling oblique line in her magnolia-white skin—that skin so prized by Southern women and so carefully guarded with bonnets, veils and mittens against hot Georgia suns.

 

The year was 1936, smack in the middle of the Great Depression (1929-1941).

Everything about Gone With The Wind was huge... starting with the book jacket design. The giant title on the cover is easily readable in the distance across a large bookstore, library shelf or private salon. It's also perfectly readable in a very small snapshot with the author holding it. Also when reduced to smallest size for a catalog illustration or promotional montage, this tiny book cover is still very readable and jumps out at you!

Metro-Goldwyn Mayer bought the movie rights for $50,000 ($1.1 million today), the most money ever paid for a debut novel.

The 1939 blockbuster film runs a riveting four hours and twenty-five minutes. Directed by Victor Fleming, it stars Clark Gable, Vivian Leigh, Olivia de Havilland, Leslie Howard and Butterfly McQueen (first black performer to win an Oscar). GWTW won a whopping 10 gold Academy Award statues in 1940. 

 

 Only One Petite Element Was Involved
In This Otherwise Gargantuan Saga

 

 

 

Margaret Mitchell (1900-1949) stood 4' 11" barefoot. At age 26 she broke her ankle. To deal with the boredom of confinement in her Georgia home she began writing a Civil War-era novel. Three years later Peggy Mitchell hit the jackpot like no other American writer before or since. Her first and only published novel ran a massive 1037 pages, sold 1.4 million copies the first year. She won the 1937 National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The $3.00 retail price in 1937 was the equivalent of $65.75 in today's dollars. (A prohibitive price in mid-Depression when average taxable income was $890 per year for wage earners.)

 

Ninety years later, total worldwide sales of GWTW was 30+ million books in 40+ languages in 38 countries. Together with international film and TV box office revenues, the Grand Total is an estimated mind- blowing worldwide gross of $4.3 billion. At her passing Mitchell's personal net worth was an estimated $20 million in 1949. That's $250+ million in 2024 dollars.

Now think of it. The very first public appearance of this literary masterpiece was the splendid powerhouse book cover that suddenly appeared in bookstores, libraries, book clubs, and in publicity photos of the author. 

 

P.S. This past end-December 2024 Peggy and I took a three-week Viking cruise around South America. With long days and nights at sea I read Gone With the Wind on my Kindle — all breathtaking 1037 pages. My one-sentence review: "GWTW is the most brilliant, gripping reading experience in my 89 years on this planet. I look very forward to again streaming the 4+ hours film in our living room. My cost will be $3.99. Amazing!"

 

P.P.S. Margaret Mitchell was intrigued by — and did serious scientific research into — the sexuality of women. Deep into GWTW is her vivid description of what may be the greatest orgiastic encounter in the history of literature as Scarlett and Rhett go at it. If you have false teeth, be prepared to swallow them!

 

P.P.P.S. Here's Your Link to the Original Times' Account of

          The Critic's Choice for the Best 12 Book Covers of 2024.

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/13/books/review/the-best-book-covers-of-2024.html

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