Judging books by their covers

My first post here included a list of books I hoped to review. Those books are now stacked on a corner of my work table where I can see them out of the corner of my eye as I type. Or rather, I can see their covers.

We’ve all been told Never judge a book by its cover—but we do it anyway: in bookstores, in libraries, even online. How often, when you choose a book, do you already know it inside and out? (If you do, you’re probably replacing an established favorite and so likely to be that much pickier about getting one that looks nice.) We have to judge books, at least in part, by their covers; publishers know this and design covers that make us want to buy books. It’s not rocket science.

Hold that thought, and add this: Part of the “common knowledge” about translation is that American readers are afraid of or somehow intimidated by works in translation. The giant New York conglomerates point to publishing disasters like Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones to show what can befall the foolish editor who dares venture into that terra incognita. And yet there are many small presses which seem to make a go of it with translated works, surviving year after year (if at times precariously) to produce exciting, original, award-winning books. These books find readers who are not afraid of translations. What do these presses do differently?

Maybe it’s the covers.

Here are four small presses. All are strong in translation, and all produce books with not only strong cover designs, but a consistent design identity across every book they publish:


Europa Editions: Europa publishes mainly books in translation, but quite a few English originals. The covers are photographs or illustrations, usually simplified, reduced to a few colors, or otherwise abstracted/posterized, in a 1/4" white frame. The title and author are presented conservatively: top of the cover, usually centered, usually in a serif face, caps and lowercase; the publisher's name and mark appear at the bottom of the cover. The translator—even the fact of translation—is never indicated on the front. All books are paperback, all the same trim size, all with flaps. (Covers designed by Emanuele Ragnisco.)


Open Letter: Open Letter publishes works in translation exclusively. No single visual element unifies the design, but Open Letter covers are all highly abstracted, with saturated colors and simplified images. Author and title are presented in large, clear type, usually all-caps sans serif, integrated into the design; the translator is always listed on the cover* (though in much smaller type). All books are paperbacks (now), all the same trim size except for special publications like The Wall in My Head. (Most covers are designed by Milan Bozic.)
* Except for William Weaver on Elsa Morante's Aracoeli: wha'ppen, Chad?


Archipelago: Archipelago also publishes only translated works, with the exception of a few books by the South African author Breyten Breyenbach written in English. Their covers are very formal: a single image, not simplified, centered on a background of rich color, with author and title centered above and translator information below, caps and lowercase, almost always in a classic serif face. The covers use laid paper with a noticeable texture. Archipelago publishes both hardbacks and paperbacks, in a variety of trim sizes; paperback covers often have flaps. (All covers are designed by David Bullen.)


New York Review Books (NYRB Classics): Translations make up, at a rough guess, about two-thirds of the NYRB Classics list. The cover is an edge-to-edge image (relevant art or photography), with title and author in a contrasting-color box, always in all-caps Meta Sans. (The color is repeated on the spine, giving a shelf of NYRB books a distinctive look.) The author of the introduction is credited on the cover, but not the translator (unless it's the same person, or a highly visible translator like Richard Howard, above left). All books are paperbacks, no flaps, same trim size. (Covers designed by Katy Homans.)

The two books in my to-be-reviewed stack are from Clockroot and Dalkey Archive; I’ll talk about those publishers when I get to the book reviews. I'll cover Melville House sometime, too. These four publishers are just a sample.

The point of all this is branding. If you're not reading a brand-name author, you need some other way of picking what to read next. There are reviews, sure, but a lot of dedicated readers still go in person to bookstores, where they can become overwhelmed by choice and desperate for something familiar—such as a book that looks just like one they recently enjoyed. As one bookseller blogged about Europa books: "The distinctive look of their books—all paperbacks with a clean cover design, front and back flaps, and their distinctive bird insignia—make them easy to find." In other words, the visual brand offers a possible foothold of predictability in a disorienting profusion of choices.

The fact of translation might be said to contribute to that disorientation, in its intimidating suggestion that we don't know enough about other languages and literatures. (At Thomas Riggs, a blogger commented: "Somehow, it makes literature in translation seem a bit sexy." Note the "seem.") Open Letter and Archipelago make it clear that they are publishing translations; Europa and NYRB Classics might be said to hide the fact. So if these covers don't necessarily scream Translated Work!, what do they indicate? The visual brand implies a certain consistency of editorial direction—of quality, certainly, and probably style. Judging books by their covers means choosing books based on your experience with the editor as a curator, even though he or she is probably not a visible personality. Publication with the familiar cover is the outward sign that this book has appealed to a familiar and trusted taste: that of the editor.

European publishers are typically much more uniform in their design. Most publishers have a distinct "look" like the four above, and the large publishers maintain a multitude of distinct imprints and series. Bookstores are often organized by publisher and series. Translated books are not segregated per se, but a publisher specializing in translations will form its own niche. (Europa Editions, in fact, is affiliated with the Italian publisher Edizioni E/O.) So in Europe, it's easy to find more books chosen by the same editor/curator.

Given that American bookstores are usually organized by genre and author, a strong visual identity is a simple necessity—to help the browser find the books! Europa's white trim, NYRB Classics' colorful spines, Open Letter's bold poster-like graphics: these are all easy to spot from across a room, crowded among other books on a shelf. (Archipelago's designs may be too elegant and subtle, unless they are stocked facing out on the shelf; their variable size also doesn't help.) The first step to getting a reader to buy an unfamiliar book is to get him or her to pick it up and think this looks like something I'll enjoy.

It still works online: Amazon shows book covers in search results, in customer lists, in site recommendations. Okay, it's not easy to begin to browse visually, but once you've gotten going you can easily jump from one cover to another. The publisher is listed but not prominently; there's absolutely no indication of the editor who curated the collection, the person whose tastes you follow. The main information you have to go on is the visual correlate, the cover design.

It gets a little more complicated with e-books. Some commentators treat the physical experience of a book as unimportant and like the way electronic platforms let the reader choose design attributes, but I would counter that not everything worth searching for can be tagged with a keyword. Speaking of Google, Cory Doctorow—in discussing the “boring” covers included with the public domain books in Google Book Search—suggests “there's plenty of room for stores to add value with their own covers.” As others have noted, here's an opportunity for a return to the model of bookstore-as-publisher: The actual live person whose name you know and whose hand you can shake becomes the editorial curator of a series of visually distinct books. The cover becomes part of how a bookstore can build its (ahem) local character.

There are plenty of small presses that do an excellent job of cover design without creating any specific identity—anything more specific than that excellence itself: New Directions, Copper Canyon, many university presses. But even those presses recognize the power of uniformity in creating a brand to sell an author: viz. Copper Canyon’s Neruda series, or New Directions’ Bolaño. (Or maybe it’s just Chilean authors?) This is, of course, a strategy widely applied with brand-name authors, as The New Yorker's books blog recently observed—although, as those Faulkners show, it's not always easy to find appropriate design correlates for a given book or author.

What all of this comes down to is that I find it necessary to judge books by their covers. Unless I already know the author—usually not the case for translated works—I depend on a strong cover design to tell me what kind of book it might be. The cover is one of many tools publishers can use to get past the bias that says that Americans don't read translations. Strong and consistent cover design can teach us to trust the editor, even if we're intimidated by an unknown culture or context. But for the New York conglomerate publishers, that just seems to be another casualty of the blockbuster-at-all-costs culture: maybe editors don't want to be saddled with the responsibility of being trustworthy. Fortunately—at small presses and tucked away here and there at the large ones—there are editors and book designers who do get it.

I also wanted to discuss how cover design is related to another of my interests, car design, but I've rambled on too long as it is; instead, I'll just leave you with a link to Car Design News, a site dedicated to the topic.

The indispensable site for cover design is The Book Design Review.