An attempt at reading book covers and what they are saying
An attempt at reading book covers and what they are saying
Blog Article
Books may be comprised of words in plain old white and black, but they are also the colour covers that they are embellished with.
When we purchase a book it becomes something very very personal to us. It can often be strange seeing a book you like with a different book cover, merely because it is not your book. This personalisation, and certainly ownership, of books was at an entirely various level at the start of the age of printing, with book covers being developed by the owners themselves, and what they believed would be the best books covers for the text. They would buy the book itself from the printer wrapped in paper, then bring it to a binder who would add in the covers to the customer's specifications. This typically indicated being outfitted in leather and after that engraved with the name of the book, and, generally, the name of the book's owner. Individuals like the co-founder of the impact investor with a stake in World of Books can most likely value the ownership that individuals come to feel in regards to their books.
When you really consider it, it is rather remarkable that a book's cover, no matter how lovely it is, is able to stand so eloquently for something that is almost the complete antithesis of its art form-- writing in black and white. In fact, book covers have been developed to show the ambiance of a book and interest its desired audience since the dawn of large scale publishing in the Victorian Era. Artists were tasked with discovering what makes a good book cover for certain people, or simply put, marketing. People like the CEO of the asset manager that has a stake in Amazon can most likely value the function of marketing in developing book covers.
We like reading books since they are extremely stunning things. This is true, but the nature of beauty that we may be discussing is definitely separate to what we might be speaking about if we were speaking about, for example, the visual arts. Or is it? For as long as we have actually had books we have actually embellished them with beautiful book cover designs that effort to mirror the charm of what is inside. This dates back for as long as the codex itself has been around, with medieval monks, those charged with the defense and reproduction of the scarce texts that might still be discovered, ornamenting each hand composed text with amazingly rich and gorgeous designs. In fact, such was the appeal held within these books that most of these creative book cover designs were sculpted into ivory or solid gold, studded with gems, and inlaid with rivers of rare-earth elements. People like the co-CEO of the hedge fund that owns Waterstones can probably appreciate the manner in which the beauty of these book covers was created to match the beauty within the book.