Image & Narrative, Vol 11, No 1 (2010) 137 Book Review:
Judging a Book by Its Cover: Fans, Publishers, Designers, and the Marketing of Fiction Nicole Matthews & Nickianne Moody, eds., Judging a Book by Its Cover: Fans, Publishers, Designers, and the Marketing of Fiction. Aldershot/Burlington: Ashgate, 2007.
ISBN: 978-0-7546-5731-6
Thomas Van Parys K.U. Leuven
With their collection Judging a Book by Its Cover: Fans, Publishers, Designers, and the Marketing of Fiction, editors Nicole Matthews and Nickianne Moody successfully bring more attention to book covers, foregrounding their part in the marketing of books as well as their relation to the texts themselves. The volume emphasises “the centrality of the covers of books in shaping the response of readers, markets and booksellers to the texts within them” (xii), thus marrying their materiality to the meaning of the books. Moreover, books are considered here “not just as literary texts but as material objects, and most especially material objects with a visual dimension” (xvi), or even “as visual media” (xix), as Matthews argues in her introduction. Not surprisingly, then, the focus is on popular twentieth-century fiction, on books for leisure reading, so it is not the critic‟s preference that is central to this discussion, but “the perspective of the reader and the book trade” (xviii).
Judging a Book by Its Cover is divided into four sections. The first, “Approaches to the Book Cover”, has a large methodological fingerprint. In “The Paperback Evolution: Tauchnitz, Albatross and Penguin”, Alistair McCleery gives a detailed historical account of the modernisation of publishing companies and how the modern European paperback and paperback cover came to be. Angus Phillips, in his essay “How Books Are Positioned in the Market: Reading the Cover”, examines how covers fit into the larger marketing strategies behind the books, his remarks on author brands being particularly illuminating. The central question here is if and how covers can “be „read‟ to reveal the assumptions […] that publishers make about the markets they are targeting” (19). Val Williamson‟s contribution, “Relocating Liverpool in the 1990s: Through the Covers of Regional Saga Fiction”, deals with the covers of saga novels, specifically the Liverpool group of saga fiction, and explains “how the discourses and semiology of their covers become developed between the tensions posed by the exigencies of the London-based publishing industry and the superior local knowledge of local authors and artists” (31). Nickianne Moody‟s very interesting article, “Empirical Studies of the Bookshop: Context and Participant Observation in the Study of the Selling and Marketing of Science Fiction and Fantasy”, analyses the evolution of the genres of science fiction and fantasy in the bookshop. It is based on intensive empirical research, on “the ethnographic practice of „lurking‟”, i.e. “watching the cultural practice of book browsing and buying, first as an observer and then gradually through interaction with booksellers and their customers” (47). In this way, she arrives at significant insights into sf and fantasy novels as cultural products, and shows how cover design and marketing influence the cultural practice of reading and book buying.
Image & Narrative, Vol 11, No 1 (2010) 138 The second section, “What Makes a Book Popular?”, concentrates on how book covers shape the popularity and consumption of novels. Writing about “Literary Prizes, Production Values and Cover Images”, insider Elizabeth Webby is concerned with the reasons why the covers of Australian novels are often altered in Britain and the USA, and analyses how the differences between the various covers affect the readings of the novels. Claire Squires almost seamlessly continues with a discussion of “Book Marketing and the Booker Prize”. By examining the function and influence of the strapline “Booker Prize Winner”, she makes insightful remarks about the role the Booker Prize plays in the continuing negotiation between, and debate on, literary and popular fiction, as the Prize itself is apparently caught in a paradox between literary authority and popular accessibility. Susan Pickford, in her essay on “Jerome K. Jerome and the Paratextual Staging of Anti-elitism”, tackles a kind of blurb that seems to be the opposite of the Booker Prize strapline, namely the negative cover endorsement. Significantly, her case study of the negative blurb on the cover of Trois Hommes dans un Bateau opens up a larger discussion of the literary canon, resistance to democratisation, and cultural value.
Part three, aptly entitled “„The Record of the Film of the Book‟: Cultural Industries and Intertextuality”, takes a closer look at the connections between book covers and the surrounding cultural industries. In their article “Pop Goes the Paperback”, Gerry Carlin and Mark Jones put paperbacks and paperback covers into the context of 1960s popular culture, relating them to the emergent cultural fields in that period. They argue that “only a culturally sensitive attention to packaging could allow the book to be reborn” in the new multimedia environment (103), of which it became a contributing feature. The relation between book covers and record sleeves indicates that the paperback revolution essentially recontemporised literary works. In her contribution “„Now a Major Motion Picture‟: The Delicate Business of Selling Literature through Contemporary Cinema”, Rebecca N. Mitchell performs a highly interesting examination of film tie-in covers. With support from a return to the phenomenological approach, she explores the tension and balance between loyal readers who prefer the standard edition of classic novels and courting customers drawn in by the film tie-in edition and its enticing images. In the next article, “In Real Life: Book Covers in the Internet Bookstore”, Alexis Weedon aptly analyses online bookstores, showing how the spatial structure of the online environment is a sign that the cultural attitude to books has shifted, so that “we can no longer point to the printed text as being the first encountered or necessarily the original” (124). She also makes a case for a narrative pattern in browsing online bookshops, as according to Weedon the customer‟s online interaction creates a story, including a narrative resolution in the guise of the actual purchase.
The fourth section, “Translating Covers: Moving Audiences and the Marketing of Books”, bundles three engaging case studies that consider ways in which covers are adapted and altered to cater for different audiences. In her essay “Cover Charge: Selling Sex and Survival in Lesbian Pulp Fiction”, Melissa Sky traces the sometimes strangely differing covers of the various editions of Ann Bannon‟s novels over the years, concluding that their “evolving cover art has illustrated the shifting landscape of fear and desire the lesbian evokes in depictions of her that are almost unrecognisable from one representation to the next” (145). On his turn, Chris Richards, in “Addressing „Young
Image & Narrative, Vol 11, No 1 (2010) 139 Adults‟? The Case of Francesca Lia Block”, elaborates on the reissues of Block‟s Weetzie Bat books, which had previously been published as young adult novels. Block‟s novels were repositioned and repackaged in such a way that effectively made youth culture into a lifestyle. In this way, young adult fiction is “separating into two differently orientated genres, one implicitly sustaining a contract with education and the other hailing „young people of all ages‟” (153). Finally, Pamela Pears examines “Images, Messages and the Paratext in Algerian Women‟s Writing”, focusing on four popular novels by Algerian female writers on the Western literary market and the representation of Algerian women on their covers. The central question is whether the image on the cover, which always “creates an expectation for the potential reader”, is “mired in stereotypical representations dating back to the colonial era”, or is “directly relevant to the text at hand” (170). As Pears fittingly writes on the final page of this volume, no image “that appears on the front cover of a book should be ignored or passively accepted, because in every case someone has chosen this particular image in order to sell or market the text that follows” (170).
“Never judge a book by its cover. Particularly if that cover quotes an obscure journal claiming it to be „the best book ever written‟. I made that mistake recently, and found myself reading a book about drugs and sex, which are scarcely suitable subjects for fiction. If I hadn‟t been on a stopping train to Aberystwyth, I should have cast the thing aside unread…” Following Rowan Atkinson‟s advice in The Thin Blue Line, judging a book by its cover is precisely what the contributors to this collection are not doing. All essays in this well-balanced and tightly edited volume are worthwhile reading and well-researched, and together they form a very consistent and coherent argument for the relevance and significance of book covers in literary analyses. Occasionally, the contributors incorporate some compulsory academic padding (with the likes of Bourdieu or Benjamin), and often quite unnecessarily so, as their own analyses and close readings are generally the greatest strengths of this collection. Ironically, only the peritext of this book falls somewhat short, since it sometimes lacks the requisite illustrations of the covers under discussion, but presumably the rights for reproduction could not always be cleared. In conclusion, Judging a Book by Its Cover does exactly what it promises in the introduction, for it emphasises “the way narratives are understood in relation to paratextual elements of books, and especially book covers” (xi-xii). Of course, the argument that book covers form an essential contribution to the meaning of a literary text seems so evident that few will dispute it, but all credit to this collection for putting that into practice. Since it features some drugs and sex, this particular journal will not claim it to be the best academic book ever written, but it certainly comes recommended.
Thomas Van Parys is a PhD student and teaching assistant at the Catholic University of Leuven, where he is finishing his thesis on science-fiction novelisations.
