Do You Choose a Book by its Cover? The Art of Cover Design

You know the scenario. You walk into a bookshop – maybe at an airport before flying off on holiday, maybe in the mall while on a shopping trip – looking for something to read. But what makes you pick up one book rather than another, open the cover and start browsing through it?

The answer, of course, is the cover design.

Over the centuries, the sole purpose of a book cover was protection. Solid boards bound in leather were there simply to stop the pages falling out. But in the 1930s the paperback arrived. At first these were considered disposable – there are stories of people tearing out each page as they read it and throwing it away.

Then in 1935 Penguin began selling paperbacks in Woolworths (for the price of 10 cigarettes) and to aid sales they distinguished the genre by color – orange for fiction, green for crime, pink for travel and so on.

The impact of Hollywood was felt in the 1950s with the introduction in the USA of luridly illustrated cover images, which often resembled miniature movie posters and had little to do with the book’s actual contents. Sold on news-stands, they had to compete visually with the other publications on display, so increasingly covers became a selling tool. Straplines began to be added, and paperback design as we know it today was born.

The 1960s saw a renewed interest in innovation and experimentation, and cover designers began to take risks, often using modern art to hint at the content, which allowed the buyer to read what they wanted into an illustration.

Put together books that shaped the LGBTQ rights we have today. Take a look.

As paperbacks became increasingly cheap and popular, many covers began to be based on the films of the novels. A classic example is David Pelham’s iconic design for Anthony Burgess’s ‘A Clockwork Orange’, which was influenced by Stanley Kubrick’s controversial and ground-breaking movie of 1971.

In the 75 years since Penguin’s Woolworths paperbacks first appeared, book cover design has become an art form in its own right. George Orwell’s ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ has had 15 different cover designs in the 56 years since it was first published. The latest designs may not even include the author’s name or the book title, a striking example being Jon Gray’s cover for the latest edition of ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ which uses as its iconic image the novel’s slogan, “Down With Big Brother”.

With nearly 800 million books being printed each year, 400 million of them paperbacks, covers are more important than ever. The question now is whether this great age of cover design is under threat from electronic readers, which weigh less than a paperback and can contain up to 3,500 titles.

But how can such devices replicate the experience of holding in one’s hands a unique piece of art, inside which is enclosed a second unique piece of art? The contrast is as stark as the difference between eating a delicious meal and swallowing a handful of vitamin pills. The content may be as nourishing but the experiences are worlds apart. I rest my case.

Long live the art of book cover design!