Book Covers - Paratextual Activity

The key to understanding metaphors is realizing that the literal meaning rarely has anything to do with the intended meaning. For people like college-me, where the text is the only part of a book that has any merit, I think we hear ‘don’t judge a book by its cover’ and get stuck in that childish phase of not realizing how metaphors work. We can’t get past the literal meaning applied to books, when the saying is really talking about people. When properly applied to people, the metaphor is working out of scarcity: not everyone can present themselves in the way that they wish, so it is important to view them as valuable regardless. But that doesn’t mean you should apply the metaphor literally. Books aren’t people, and for the most part books can present themselves in exactly the way they want (or how they’re publishers want). It’s fine to judge books by their covers, because they're more like fashion than mere clothing. They exist to complement, and give a glimpse of the world in the book.

The earliest book cover that I can remember sticking with me is on the paperback version of the Last Battle by C.S. Lewis. I’d go to and sit cross legged on the worn orange and brown carpet in the big kids section of the elementary school library, pull the Last Battle off the shelf and just stare at the cover. I might have had the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe read to me by then, but I certainly hadn’t read the Last Battle yet. All the same, the cover was a story in and of itself. An enormous unicorn looks back over its shoulder at something, I’m not sure what, that’s out there but looming out of the frame of the book cover. And bright red against the gathering black storm clouds, a huge bead of blood hangs from the unicorn’s horn. The cover of the Last Battle felt transgressive. Here was a unicorn, the epitome of all that was unbecomingly girly to elementary-school me, dripping the hypermasculine blood of war. I didn’t know what to make of it, but it was transfixing. When I eventually read the last book in the Chronicles of Narnia it was full of that same thorniness. A pretender claims to be Aslan, invaders overrun Narnia, and unicorns gore men through their chests. The book cover brought me into the world, but in the end I came away with the hope of restoration and resurrection. 

I bought the book Once and Forever by Kenji Miyazawa exclusively because of the painting on the cover, Foxes meeting at Oji by Utagawa Hiroshige. The cover of the New York Review Books Classic edition is a painting in traditional Japanese style, and it shows a meeting of glowing yellow fox spirits under a deep navy night. I glimpsed the cover when I was browsing NPR books and had to know what kind of stories could be contained by such a dazzlingly otherworldly cover. The stories, fairy tales that are as beautiful as they are dark and funny and insightful, did not disappoint.

Another book cover that perfectly captures the spirit of the book is the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin (even if I prefer Evgeni to the aglization Eugene). It’s a detail from the painting Aleksandr Sergevich Pushkin with his wife, Natalya Goncharova, at the Court Ball by Nikolai Pavlovich Ulyanov. Onegin is a barely fictionalized stand-in for Pushkin, and the painting is remarkable for feeling like a scene from the Office or Fleabag. Amid all the hustle and bustle of the ball, in the center stands Pushkin looking away from the conversation his wife is having, and instead making knowing eye contact with the artist, as if they were painting it in real time and Pushkin knows that they are painting him, just as Jim in the Office reacts for the audience he knows will eventually be there. Pushkin, Onegin, Fleabag, and Jim Halpert are all tragicomedically disconnected from their lives, so that while they turn away from their lives to mock them to an equally knowing audience, they are simultaneous unable to fully escape the banality.

I could talk about book covers all day, from the 50th anniversary cover of Master and Margarita to a grotesque and pulpy cover of the Possessed from the 1930s. I really like the cover of Laurus by Eugene Vodolazkin and the use of Surrealist painter Remedios Varo on the cover of her contemporary Silvina Ocampo’s Thus were their Faces. 

There seems to be a trend in popular literature away from the type of book cover that I like to something that’s probably safer for a publisher. I love when the image on the cover of the book is a first glance into the world contained by the book, especially when that gives me a sense of other art that was happening in the same time and place. Covers that are just the name of the book in a sans serif font is never going to hold me in the way the cover of the Last Battle did. And the metaphor, ‘don’t judge a book by its cover,’ still somewhat applies; some great books have horrible covers and visa versa. Book covers shouldn’t keep you from reading a book, but if they’re done well they can be what leads you to pick up something that you’ve never heard of before. The cover of a book can have a profoundly positive impact on the way you read a book if it’s allowed to be as brilliant and creative as the book itself. So, let book covers be bold, because they could be the thing you remember twenty years later.