Various aspects of book cover designs through time
Various aspects of book cover designs through time
Blog Article
Despite the fact that we might like to claim that it is not the case, books are inevitably evaluated by their covers.
When we buy a book it becomes something extremely very personal to us. It can often be strange seeing a book you love with another book cover, just since it is not your book. This personalisation, and undoubtedly ownership, of books was at an entirely various level at the dawn of the age of printing, with book covers being designed by the owners themselves, and what they thought would be the best books covers for the text. They would buy the book itself from the printer wrapped in paper, then take it to a binder who would bring in the covers to the customer's specs. This normally suggested being outfitted in leather and after that inscribed with the name of the book, and, more often than not, the name of the book's owner. People 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 relation to their books.
When you truly consider it, it is quite incredible that a book's cover, no matter how gorgeous it is, manages to stand so eloquently for something that is nearly the total antithesis of its art form-- writing in black and white. In fact, book covers have actually been created to reflect the feeling of a book and appeal to its intended audience ever since the advent of large scale publishing in the Victorian Period. Artists were entrusted with discovering what makes a good book cover for certain individuals, or to put it simply, marketing. Individuals like the CEO of the asset manager that has a stake in Amazon can probably value the role of marketing in designing book covers.
We enjoy reading books because they are really gorgeous things. This holds true, but the nature of beauty that we might be discussing is certainly separate to what we might be talking about if we were speaking about, say, the visual arts. Or is it? For as long as we have actually had books we have embellished them with beautiful book cover designs that attempt to mirror the appeal of what is inside. This goes back for as long as the codex itself has been around, with middle ages monks, those charged with the protection and reproduction of the uncommon texts that might still be found, ornamenting each hand composed text with astonishingly abundant and beautiful designs. In fact, such was the appeal held within these books that a lot of these creative book cover designs were carved into ivory or solid gold, studded with gems, and inlaid with rivers of precious metals. Individuals 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 designed to match the beauty within the book.