Judging a Book by It's Cover?

Everyone knows the old adage about not picking books based on their packaging, but do you heed this advice? I will openly admit to being drawn to the siren’s call of a beautiful book cover (although I still maintain that only the content of the book determines if I actually read it or not) and will actually cross a room to further admire said works of art.

A quick detour into my local Waterstone’s yesterday then, left me in a state of general feverishness tinged with despair. Long term readers of this blog will know that since the beginning of this year, I have forsworn buying books until I have actually read all those I currently own in a vain attempt to cure both my book addiction and alleviate some of the stress from my groaning bookshelves. This decision has meant that any visit I have made to a bookstore this year has been a bizarre source of personal torture and yesterday was no exception to that rule. As I looked wide eyed at all the lovely, lovely new books, I noticed a strange trend in the stacks of paperbacks and walls lined with glistening hardbacks. Everywhere I turned there were sets of previously unrelated books, reprinted in attractive, unifying styles.

Whilst it has been common practice for publishers to reissue old classics with modern covers and designs, it seems that in recent years, the trend of reprinting in order to create new, highly desirable collections has blossomed. Take for instance these gorgeous, graffiti cover designs for the Penguin Ink collection. It’s not often that you’d see Will Self’s The Book of Dave and Zoe Heller’s Notes On a Scandal categorised together, but thanks to these new designs, they’ll be forever linked. Penguin’s website mentions that the designs were made by some of the world’s leading tattoo artists, but is curiously silent on why such a disparate collection of British books deserves to be redesigned in this particular way. 

Meanwhile, as the lead picture to this post shows, Vintage have been celebrating twenty one years in the business and have reissued 21 of their top selling titles in block colour to celebrate the fact. Altogether, they make a lovely rainbow effect. Here, the collection has a defined purpose: to make people aware of the depth and range of their signings over the last two decades. Likewise, one can argue that the Penguin cloth bound classics fulfil the same purpose, providing relatively affordable copies of the classic £1 and £2 titles in a more enduring binding. But these are all positive points for the consumer, what about the other side of the coin?

Wuthering Heights re-interpreted for the Twilight generation

Creating a new collection from old material can be a very canny move for publishers. Not only does it open up the book to potential new audiences with aesthetically pleasing covers, it can also highlight different aspects of the books better than any marketing campaign ever could. Just think, would Wuthering Heights have started creeping back into store bestseller lists if it wasn’t for the cunning publisher who noted the reference in the hugely popular Twilight Saga and had it and other classic novels republished to resemble Meyer’s series? Ok, so a little part of me died inside on learning that giving it a black cover with a soppy lily was the only way to market a classic to the Emo generation but hey, if it gets teenagers to read literature, it can only be a good thing.

Whilst most of us big kids would like to feel we’re too sophisticated for a cheap trick like that to fool us, there are some exceptions to the rule. From my own experiences as a bookseller, I often saw covers to tie in with film adaptations sell much better than the normal covers: even when displayed side by side.

Then there are the collections which I mentioned earlier, all of which are designed to appeal in bulk. Some book series have even been known to combine together so that their spines spell out a message or make a picture when placed in the right order. Most of us have had the need to collect the ‘full set’ ingrained into us by hard nosed marketing campaigns for years: one day its football cards, the next it’s the Faber and Faber Twentieth Century Greats collection.* Seeing how lovely all the books in a particular collection look as they’re displayed together in the bookshop would fill even the most casual book buyer with longing through this kind of conditioning alone. Everyone likes feeling that they haven’t missed out, that the collection is complete. Logically, its complete nonsense, but nevertheless, I for one am aware of falling prey to the consumerist trap of wanting them all, just because they exist. I’d like to think that there is some deep, psychological reasoning behind this (like the tendency to overeat because the caveman part of our DNA says ‘See food: eat it’ because it hasn’t yet learned to accept the existence of 24 hour supermarkets) but it’s probably just further evidence of my book addiction.

The cynical view might be to think that repackaging bestsellers is an attempt to wring more profit out of publishing back catalogues in times of economic hardship. Whilst you can certainly make that argument, I think that a stronger secondary motive behind the trend is at work, one which will only help ensure the survival of the printed book. As sales of electronic books rise, it has become apparent that the major differences between a printed book and a digital copy is the added visual and tactile power of it's binding. A book, for example, can colour co-ordinate with the décor, but a Kindle (or any other type of e-reader) could never add value to a room in the same kind of way.

Beautiful book covers may in time prove to be the saviour of the printed word. For now, they stand as the first thing which draws a potential reader to another world and, if done well, can represent in a single page design the content and spirit of the hundreds of pages of writing it adorns. A beautiful book cover is not always indicative of a beautiful book, but all beautiful book covers remind us of why we covet them so much: the simple, unalloyed joy of reading.

                                                                                                         

* Or something to that effect.

Review: Out - Natsuo Kirino

They say you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but it was precisely the cover that drew me to Out. It’s striking in its simplicity and pretty much tells you everything you need to know about the plot.

I had wanted to pick this up for ages, but never seemed to get round to it. I’ve even managed to read Kirino’s Grotesque previously, even though Out had been in British bookstores for longer. Out was the first English translation of Kirino’s books to be published. Set in her native Japan, it’s a hard hitting crime novel that is not for the faint of heart.

Following four female colleagues who work the graveyard shift making boxed lunches, the plot soon dives into the seedy underworld of suburban Tokyo. All four of the women have very different but equally difficult home lives until the young housewife Yaoi, murders her husband in retaliation for his mistreatment of her and her two young children. Panicking, she calls her friend and colleague, Masako, to help her. Before long Masako has roped in their friends ‘The Skipper’ and Kuniko to help dismember and dispose of the body. It seems they’ve got away with it, until that is, bags of body parts are found in a local park and the police start asking them questions…

As you can probably tell, it’s a pretty intense book. There are some incredibly graphic descriptions and subject matters and I found myself wincing more than once. As I’d read Kirino before, I knew it wasn’t going to be an easy ride but no amount of mental preparation dulls the power of these scenes. Whilst the subject matter is undoubtedly dark, Kirino does not glorify in these scenes. Rather, we watch as the four women get sucked further and further into a murky world, as their lives slowly unravel, as they try to cope with the mental and spiritual scars they have inflicted on themselves. As the net pulls in around them, the atmosphere becomes unbearably tense, with the feeling that retribution is just around the corner.

Kirino creates realistic characters, worn down from years of drudgery. It’s a bleak view of the world, yet she never lapses into polarisation. Even the most repulsive characters like Kuniko and the lone shark Satake are complex and there are moments where I felt genuine pity for both. Likewise, the characters painted as mostly good (the put upon and the misunderstood) show realistic slivers of steel and undercurrents of cruelty, demonstrating that in Kirino’s world, as in life, good people can sometimes to bad things.

Although often disturbing, the narrative pulls you into turning the pages and I found myself genuinely caring if the women would get away with their crime or not. Kirino knows exactly when and how to amp up the tension, depicting slow burn scenes where nothing much happens accept the characters wondering how much longer they have left before they’re found out. In some ways, it’s quite an internal book with the main characters taking turns to share with us their point of view, their interactions with others dulled by the events they have witnessed and taken part in.

Due to the subject matter, I felt as if I didn’t want to spend too much time in the book lest the characters dark views started wearing off onto me. Finishing the book is like rising out of a murky pool: you feel like you need a mental shower to make yourself clean again. The grubby, sordid tale is so realistic and well written, that although you may not spend a very long time with the characters, you’ll carry the story around for much longer.

Despite my squeamishness, it’s a brilliantly daring novel: I doubt very much that you’ll have read anything similar. Unlike most crime novels, there are no hero detectives, no fiendishly clever, morally straight protagonists to root for. Kirino spins the situation on its head in that you’re essentially rooting for the criminals. Nothing is black or white in this world and everything is complicated.

Out is a compellingly tense psychological thriller that will leave you questioning your own morality: it’s a fairly quick read, but is not an easy one. If I were you, I’d line up a nice, light-hearted comedy to read straight afterwards, trust me, you’ll need it.