Who says you can't judge a book by its cover? You can learn all sorts of things about a book just by looking at the cover. The title of the book, especially a non-fiction book, will often give you a hint: Hivemind: The New Science of Tribalism in Our Divided World tells us exactly what the book is about. Titles like Murder With Mirrors or The Body in the Library let you know that the books might well be mysteries, and the author's name (Agatha Christie) clinches the deal. If a book doesn't have a dust jacket, you can still learn something about the book from the author (popular? award-winning? one of your favorites? or someone you have never heard of before and might not want to take a chance on) and the title.
A dust jacket, of course, offers up a lot of information: title and author on the spine and the cover, a blurb describing the book on the front flap, information on the author often printed on the back flap, and reviews or testimonials from other authors may be on the back cover. Enough information by which you can judge a book, wouldn't you say?
What really attracts people to a book, though, is the cover design. There is a reason why bookstores display books with the front cover facing out. Back when I was in graduate school and doing my field work at the Skyway Library (King County Library System), I spent a morning pulling books to display one or two at the end of each shelf. There is an art to creating displays. The books I selected for each section had to have attractive, artistic covers, preferably in coordinating colors. I even tried to find books with a consistent theme so maybe I focused on blue covers in one area and tried to find as many with an ocean or lake pictured on the cover. Well, when I had finished, I took my break. When I came back into the library, I was dismayed to find that my beautifully curated display had been ruined! I immediately realized that the display had been a great success, and all the missing books had been checked out. One man told me that he would never have checked out the stack of books he was carrying if he hadn't seen the front covers. The head librarian added a new job to my duties!
If you look at the photos above, you will see some examples of trends in jacket design. Non-fiction books can get away with simple, graphic covers. Fiction books usually benefit from a pictorial cover. A trend that I have been noticing in recent years is shown in the second photo. Do you notice something the designs have in common? The people pictured are shown from the back or with only part of the face showing. When you read a book, you may build up a picture in your mind of how the characters look. Sometimes the depictions of the characters on the cover do not match up with the author's description or with your mental image. That is not an issue if you can't see the faces! I like a jacket design that has been drawn or painted, but increasingly, publishers are using stock photos on the covers. Once, I was looking through a catalog of books from many different publishers, and on one two-page spread there were three books, by three different authors, that all used the exact same stock photo of a man from the Victorian era. The photo had been superimposed on different backgrounds. I have noticed other photos which have been used repeatedly as well as paintings by famous or obscure artists. There are so many other trends, but I don't want to be accused of geeking out on the topic!
The last two photos show some examples of covers which really miss the mark for me and a group of books (mostly from my "to read" stack) whose covers attracted me. The less successful covers are not horrible (there are a lot of books whose covers do fall into the horrible category), but they are boring (I am on the fence about the Fay Weldon book - its cover does hint at the subject matter which is an important facet of cover design). The last photo has covers I could frame and hang on my wall. They provide valuable information. You can tell which books are serious literary fiction and which are light and humorous. Hmmm, which will I read next?