Have book covers become too pretty? Look at books like The Eat-Clean Diet: Fast Fat-loss That Lasts Forever! and you might say no, but that doesn't stop Emily Keeler from saying yes in a recent article for the Toronto Standard. Two series in particular are too sexy for her bookshelf: Jillian Tamaki's Threads collection, and Coralie Bickford-Smith's redesigned Fitzgeralds, both produced for Penguin. I read the article reluctantly, ready to be offended. If you're a longtime reader of my blog (I think there may be six of you by now!) you probably know that I like book covers. I like them a lot. I'll point out ones I think are particularly pretty on a semi-regular basis, and Bickford-Smith's work has appeared twice. So I tried to strain the petty bitterness out of any meaningful critique I could offer on Keeler's piece, but by the end my most coherent thought was still "GIRL, PLEASE." Time has cooled my ire, though, and allowed me to expand on that emotion.
My first issue is Keeler's apparent belief that the book as design object, or even a marker of taste, dates to Penguin hiring Tamaki. But the book as fetish object has a longer history than the book as utilitarian good. The latter needed several factors to appear and collide for it to become a phenomenon. Mass production, greater literacy and more disposable income, among others. Before, people who learned to read, then found time to do so regularly were generally either religious or rather rich. Sometimes, they even farmed out the pages to professional bookbinders, who returned beautifully tooled and gilded pieces of art. This process persisted even past the automation of bookbinding. If Keeler believes The Last Tycoon is overdesigned, she may want to avert her eyes from this pyrotechnic book cover, circa 1900. And when it comes to taste, as Bourdieu said, "Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier." He also said this in 1984, 27 years before the "beautiful books" which Keeler sees as becoming "consumable objects that describe the taste of the reader who proudly, tastefully, displays them" were getting laid out in InDesign.
I'm also not sure that "The lush redesigns fetishize these books, render them décor rather than literature." Do they? Really? Are publishers the new authors, back when it was assumed that the author packed meaning into the text, which readers then decoded to find the One True Interpretation? A company may say a book's collectible in the copy, but that doesn't guarantee that it will never be read. Books are multi-functional that way. They'll always be "literature" if they can be opened, contain words, and if you're not using the highest-browed meaning of the term. The only guaranteed way of turning books from literature to décor is to strip the covers and sew the pages together in a stack, which is exactly what Restoration Hardware did in 2010, but isn't what Penguin did here. Michael Maranda might know a little something about décor though. Keeler likes his work on Selected Business Correspondence, where a "whole sheaf of letters is bound and placed in an embossed manilla folder." That sounds like an object guaranteed to become décor, if only because once you've spent $40 on it, you'll want to limit your chances of bending the letters or tearing the envelope as you stuff them back in. Perhaps it's better just to click through the free PDF online.
For the record, each of the Fitzgerald redesigns costs less than $30, and all of them will survive a few readings out here in the physical world.
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