A try at reading book covers and what they could be saying
A try at reading book covers and what they could be saying
Blog Article
Books may be comprised of words in plain old black and white, however they are also the colour covers that they are decorated with.
When we buy a book it ends up being something extremely personal to us. It can in some cases be strange seeing a book you love with a different book cover, just because it is not your book. This personalisation, and indeed ownership, of books was at an entirely various level at the origin of the age of printing, with book covers being designed by the owners themselves, and what they believed would be the best books covers for the book. They would buy the book itself from the printer covered in paper, then bring it to a binder who would incorporate the covers to the customer's specs. This typically meant being clad in leather and then engraved with the name of the book, and, usually, the name of the book's owner. Individuals like the co-founder of the impact investor with a stake in World of Books can probably value the ownership that people come to feel in regards to their books.
We like reading books because they are really lovely things. This holds true, but the nature of beauty that we might be speaking about is definitely different to what we might be speaking about if we were discussing, say, the visual arts. Or is it? For as long as we have actually had books we have embellished them with beautiful book cover designs that attempt to mirror the charm of what is inside. This goes back for as long as the codex itself has been around, with middle ages monks, those charged with the protection and replication of the rare texts that could still be discovered, ornamenting each hand written text with remarkably rich and stunning designs. In fact, such was the charm held within these books that many of these creative book cover designs were sculpted into ivory or solid gold, studded with gems, and inlaid with rivers of precious metals. Individuals like the co-CEO of the hedge fund that owns Waterstones can most likely value the manner in which the beauty of these book covers was designed to match the beauty within the book.
When you truly think of it, it is quite fantastic that a book's cover, no matter how beautiful it is, is able to stand so eloquently for something that is almost the complete reverse of its art form-- writing in white and black. In fact, book covers have been developed to show the feeling of a book and interest its intended audience ever since the advent of big scale publishing in the Victorian Era. Artists were charged with discovering what makes a good book cover for specific individuals, or in other words, marketing. People like the CEO of the asset manager that has a stake in Amazon can probably appreciate the function of marketing in creating book covers.