Covers as "Advertisements"

On the Smart Bitches, Trashy Novels site, SB Sarah's entry on Books Covers, Celebrity, and 'Dumbing Down' discusses the branding involved in book cover design; both the entry and the comments include some interesting discussion. (The entry also includes lots of links to other webpages that discuss the issue.) I agree with Sarah's basic points, especially regarding how current cover design trends indicate less 'dumbing down' than an increasingly blatant treatment of book covers as advertising products. In another discussion of the redesign of the book Zuzu's Petals, the initial cover's sales are described as tepid, "while the redesign ... was a hit with retailers, two of whom tapped the novel for in-store promotions" (GalleyCat's Ron Hogan). Hogan's wording suggests that the redesign encouraged the retailers to promote the new cover more aggressively. At the level of the buying public, then, the way retailers handled in-store promotion after the redesign could have prompted better sales, rather than the new cover itself.

When commerce drives art and/or make art available to its consumers, I suppose that might be symptomatic of a particular form of dumbing down, in the sense that readers are not using their discretion in choosing their reading material, but are relying on advertising to guide them towards what they want to consume. It's "dumbing" in the sense of encouraging passivity. This is not exactly an entirely new element in packaging books. In my entry on Sayers covers, a commenter pointed me to this cover of Strong Poison, with its sleazy-pulpy illustration that would be too lurid for a James M. Cain book (although not for a Mickey Spillane, if the characters' hair/ outfits were slightly updated). That cover seems like a blatant grab for an audience that otherwise would never pick up a book featuring a titled British fine book collector who investigates minimally lurid, if not downright mannered, crimes i.e. the sellers are fooling a wholly new audience into consuming material they don't want, on the strength of its 'advertised' contents, rather than the actual content.

In contrast, books intended for a more specific and academic public may take a very different approach to deciding what selling points belong on the covers. Most of my theory books avoid cover illustrations entirely--Hayden White's Metahistory actually involves a pretty fancy design sensibility, when compared to an average theory anthology like Michael McKeon's compilation, Theory of the the Novel. Others will use a painting or vintage photograph if the content is relevant to that particular period of time. Prominent theorists or philosophers might get their own kindly mustachioed faces on their book covers, as on Benjamin's Illuminations. These are not books that people will pick up out of curiosity in a big-box bookstore, though; most of them are listed in bibliographies or field examination reading lists, prompting students to track them down in libraries or second-hand bookstores or, if they're lucky, through online retailers. These books aren't sold in quantity, and they aren't sold in ways that make the cover images matter. The covers communicate only the hard facts that ensure the book is the one the student was looking for.

In other cases, an academic book's cover design will emphasize that it addresses issues, representations, or content that hinges on offensive behaviour or thinking. Eric Lott's Love and Theft features a prominent image of the performer in full blackface, reinforcing the subtitle's reference to minstrelsy and blackface--no one could be surprised that Lott discusses the historical implications of the appeal and popularity of such performances.

Of course, in such cases, whoever is packaging the book is at a disadvantage from the get-go. My next example isn't quite the same as the Lott book, because it is fiction rather than analysis, but most readers of Carl Van Vechten's best-selling novel are not reading his fiction in a casual way. They are studying the book for contexts re: the Harlem Renaissance, modern(ist) primitivism, portrayals of African Americans in fiction, etc. My edition of the book uses one of two Aaron Douglas illustrations associated with the original version of the book on its cover. The publishers chose the illustration that was actually designed with a specifically African-American audience in mind--it was used in advertisements for the book that ran in periodicals like The Opportunity. Thus, it is a historically accurate and apt approach to designing the book, and one which alludes to crucial concerns regarding the audience for the white author's portrayal of African-Americans. However, no amount of care in design can overcome the fact of the title, which was inflammatory in the mid-1920s, and is only more so now. 1

Books like Lott's and Van Vechten's are packaged with rigorous honesty regarding the contents. This honesty disregards the future of the book as a potentially offensive artifact, out there in the world. It's sort of the polar opposite of choosing a pastel-hued, butterfly-ridden cover for a Jane Austen book--the content is all-important, since there's no way to make the (sometimes or often offensive aspects of the) content appealing, in a marketing sense. Hence, as 'advertisements' they are literal indications of content rather than attempts to appeal to someone who never knew that he or she wanted to read the book, unlike the more "designed" covers cited at the beginning of this entry.

Footnote:
1. The publishers may have made a choice not to partially censor the title, as did the designers of Elektra/Wea cover for Ol' Dirty Bastard's CD, or to try to swap in an inoffensive substitute title for the cover (e.g. no publishers issue Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None under its original title). As awful as the title is, it is crucial to understanding the role of the book in the contexts I cited above, and in understanding the cultural responses to it after its publication. In addition, the choice of title and its imagery regarding the position of African Americans in American culture was pretty crucial to its creator, despite his knowledge that it was going to hurt some of his personal friends.