For anyone with an eye for design, stepping into a bookstore (or wine shop, or stationery shop, or soap aisle) might as well be stepping into a diverse and awe-inspiring art exhibition. An art exhibition where almost all of the works fall within your budget. And you want to take everything home because it just looks so good (although your husband informs you that you can’t). The bookstore is a designer’s inspiration heaven, brimming with spectacular typography, illustration, composition, and storytelling — all charm and wit. So yes, when I compulsively buy books, I always choose the ones that I like to see sitting next to me on the couch (when I’m not reading) — that way I can enjoy them all the time, inside and out.
Plus, you have to hand it to book cover designers. It’s a job that I imagine is extraordinarily challenging, but incredibly fun. Because — whatever our mothers tell us – it is human nature to literally judge books by their covers, and that means the cover design has to say everything that you need to know to subconsciously decide whether it’s even worth considering, while trying to stand out from all the other covers.
For example, I don’t often gravitate to the Mystery section, but the spines of this series offered a stark contrast to your predictable dark cover with foil-stamped serif type. That contrast drew my eye and my interest with it. The synopsis and early paragraphs carried them over the finish line to my wish list.
I carried Of Bees and Mist around the store for a good thirty minutes until I realized that I couldn’t go home with a half dozen new novels (somewhere between Keith begging me to stop getting distracted and threatening to restrain me from dashing all over the store) it came down to a battle of synopses and first pages, in which Bees lost out to Mathilda Savitch. But I still love watching those rose vines come to life with all the little images hidden in plain sight. In the end, four good-looking books have earned a new home on my bookshelf for ogling, and ahgling, and feeding my imagination.
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Now wait just a minute! I’m not the book police!
All I was trying to do was enlist some assistance finding some books in a particular genre. And about trying to leave: it was more like, lets get out of this store before we (you and I both) buy all the books that we were looking at for their covers.
Speaking of books and their covers, I think that you would have a lot of fun and would be very good at designing them.