If It's What's Inside That Counts Why Did You Have to Change the Cover?

Hullo!

First off, I want to tell you the three books I am most excited about us getting in the kids department since I last spoke to you:
1. Lola and the Boy Next Door by Stephanie Perkins (my love for it's companion book Anna and the French Kiss is pretty much legendary).
2. Journey by Aaron Becker (Shoshana called it Harold and the Purple Crayon meets The Wizard of Oz).
3. The Boy Who Swam with Piranhas by David Almond (I have a thing about piranhas plus a childhood love of David Almond and a current love of illustrator Oliver Jeffers).

Now on to today's ramble.

So, I’m kind of a Harry Potter fan (says the girl with the sign of the Deathly Hallows tattooed on her wrist while wearing a tee-shirt with the Hogwarts crest on it) and in case anyone was unaware, at the end of this month Scholastic is releasing a new set of Harry Potter books. These paperback versions will feature the art of Kazu Kibuishi (of Amulet graphic novel fame). The art itself has already been released for our devouring pleasure and they’re brilliant but I’m not sure I’m happy about it.

I have really mixed feelings about the matter. Kibuishi does beautiful artwork but, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, I’m a pretty sentimental creature so the Mary GrandPre covers will always be my Harry Potter covers. I remember waiting for the release of the cover images and in some ways they are the Harry Potter books for me. The thought of those illustrations becoming harder to come by (the original covers will only be available in hardcover, though, it will take a while for them to die off in paper, I imagine) makes my heart hurt a little.

On the other hand, I also collect different editions of the books so I’m kind of excited/exasperated that there is (yet) another set for me to get. Kibuishi does such a fantastic job of capturing the feeling of the scenes that he chose and I really hope his artwork can grab a different set of people than GrandPre’s (even if Harry probably doesn’t need the help pulling in an audience).

Anyway, this got me thinking of how publishers change cover designs. This often happens from hardcover to paperback, sometimes they just get reprints or anniversary editions, and, other times, the really bad times, they’ll change them in the middle of a series, leaving us with a miss-matched set of covers and a wounded soul.

Here are some of the wonderful, questionable, and minimal cover changes that have occurred in my world.

Holly Black’s Curse Workers got a redesign just before the third book came out. Even though we’d already seen the cover of the last one it was never printed. The new covers give a completely different feel. Admittedly, they took a little while to grow on me.

From this:

To this:

Stephanie Perkins' Anna and the French Kiss and it's companion novel Lola and the Boy Next Door were redone for Lola's paperback release. This means when the third novel comes out (tentatively spring 2014) the cover will match the new look of the first two. These also have a completely different look, but I can't lie, I really love them.

From this:

To this:

Sometimes cover changes happen from hardcover to paperback but aren't that major of changes. For example the softcover release of Maggie Stiefvater's The Raven Boys has the addition of a sketch of the Raven Boys themselves in the background. This one keeps the same feel as the original and might even tie in the cover of the second better.

Hardcover: 

 

Paperback:

Other times a cover goes through a progression. Maureen Johnson's The Name of the Star had one cover for hardcover, and then it looked like we might get the UK cover and then was printed with a completely different one in paperback. I'm glad we didn't get the UK one and the third is probably the best of three (even if it doesn't do justice to the creepy factor of the book) and is the one the cover of the second in the series matches.

Progression:

The really weird times though, are when books get completely repackaged, title and all. I am never 100% sure why this happens. I know it has something to do with marketing but to change even the title of a book always seems a little extreme.

Like Robin Wasserman's Skinned series which came out and looked like this:

Then a few years later they came out The Cold Awakening trilogy and looked like this:

The new covers are pretty cool all lined up like that but...what? I'm not even sure what to do with the complete revamp of the series. I hope more people picked it up. It does look a little more modern?

Anyway, I could be at this all day long (Sarah Rees Brennan's Unspoken cover! It was so pretty, so unique, why did you have to change it?!).

Some of the cover changes are really well done, some I even really love. But no matter how well done they are there's always a little part of me that rebels against changing the face of something I really like...even if it's for the better.

I think part of it changes how I sell the book and what sort of audience I think will be willing to pick it up. Look at the Curse Workers covers, especially the first one, they're so different and that's going to change how I go about recommending it.

But no matter what the covers look like it's the same text inside the book and they're all really fantastic reads. You should come in and check them out.

And seriously, I have another set of Harry Potter books to buy...

-Amy

The Backbone of a Book is its Spine

My first-ever blog post for Blogsmith. I'm very excited and intimidated to be here!

I'll start with a confession. I'm afraid I do, in fact, still judge books by their covers. Worse than that, I judge books by their spines.

To be fair, the world of children's literature grows exponentially on a weekly basis. There is so much out there and even for those of us lucky enough to spend our days buried away in the Booksmith's magnificent children's department, it's daunting to be asked for a book for an advanced ten-year-old who likes model cars, ponies, Saturday morning cartoons, and cooking. My hunt for the perfect book for this reader is likely to begin with a spine, which is likely the first part of the book that I will see.


It's worth noting that book jacket design is a huge and critical part of the publishing process. Whether the art belongs to the author/illustrator, the illustrator, or a graphic designer contracted by the publisher, it's critical that a book's spine be as eye-catching as its cover because even if a book gets some face-out time on the shelf, chances are it will spend the bulk of its time flashing its spine and hoping to be noticed by wandering eyes.

I should just mention that I wanted to do this post because it came to my attention recently that there are quite a few seriously cool book jacket designs kicking around our bookshelves right now with some really eye-catching spines. I've pulled a few of my favorites from different parts of the department to try and figure out what about them that stands out. Why did I pull these off the shelf (and why might you)?

Tess's Guide to Awesome Spinage 

Seriously cool book jacket designs with eye-catching spines

Imagery If you have a thick spine, use it! If you're lucky enough to be Caldecott medalist Brian Selznick, you got to design your own cover using your own artwork. His most recent novel, Wonderstruck, looks fantastic next to his debut novel, The Invention of Hugo Cabret, because they both literally stare at you from the bookshelf. Wonderstruck really stands out, though, because of the vivid color Selznick uses in his cover art (though the interior is black and white). Another important feature of imagery used in the jacket design is how active it looks, as though the spine is brimming over with action from the cover art. In the case of YA novels, some jacket designers make really good use of action imagery in their book spines. Ally Condie's Crossed (jacket design by Theresa M. Evangelista) simply recycles the photo and gargantuan title letters from the cover art. The combination of active imagery, large font, and reversal of a single letter, added to the Matched trilogy's coordinating designs for Matched and Reached, make this series' spines eye-catching ones. Chris Beam's I Am J doesn't have the advantage of belonging to a series but it does the job of being eye-catching by using an image that looks both like it's moving and like you could reach out and touch it (which you probably will, thereby choosing it over its competitors and making its parents very proud). 

Color One of the most challenging jackets to design is that of a picture book. While you often have twice or three times the cover space, you also have a long, narrow spine that is crammed it next to fifty other long, narrow spines. An effective means of drawing attention is to use bright (or even jarring) colors on the spine. Take, for instance, Matthew Luckhurst's Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox. Luckhurst worked with Chad W. Beckerman in the book's design and they could have done much worse in their choice of bright, pastel yellow. Likewise, the text on the spine is glaringly bright pastel blue, red, and green so it's easy to spot beside other books. Though not often found mixed in with picture books, Ingri and Edgar Parin D'Aulaires' classic, D'Aulaires' Book of Greek Mythology goes with a violently yellow spine and simple, bold black text. You're never ever going to lose track of this one on the shelves. And in Mo Willems' newest gem, Goldilocks and the Three Dinosaurs, jacket designer Martha Rago makes use of block lettering filled with several bright colors against pastel green so that Willems' name and the title pop.

Artwork If you're designing a jacket for a tremendously gifted illustrator, why not slap their artwork on the spine? Inga Moore illustrated Frances Hodgson Burnett's classic The Secret Garden and the elegance of the spine, with its straightforward color scheme and lettering, is enhanced by one of Moore's images of Mary Lennox peering down a garden path. The image is small but gives a taste of the clarity of the illustrations (also indicating that they're in color, which is a big draw in intermediate fiction right now. For another great taste of full-color chapter books, check out Roald Dahl's classic Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or E.B. White's Charlotte's Web).

Contrast It's important for the spine to stand out so another effective method of drawing the eye is by designing spines with contrasting colors and patterns. Instead of relying on a brightly colored spine to draw the eye, the contrast on the spine itself does the job for you. Take, for example, Tad Hill's How Rocket Learned to Read and Rocket Writes a Story.     

Cleverness When in doubt, do something clever. Rene Goscinny and Albert Uderzo's Asterix comic strips now appear in omnibus form. If you fit the spines of the omnibus editions together, they form a complete image from one of Uderzo's illustrations. Since even the omnibus editions don't actually have large spines, it's a smart move to make the series itself eye-catching by making sure that even a single copy of each volume draws attention on the shelf.

My judgment of a book's worth certainly doesn't end with its spine. But it's definitely a place to start. What book spines have caught your eye recently?



Pretty Things

Just some basic snaps of real pretty things that came in the UBC this week:

Love this cover of Muriel Spark's Memento Mori:

A beautiful book of poetry and Tibetan calligraphy that my picture can't do justice. Come in a take a look:

I don't know why but I want to live inside the cottage on this cover of Wordsworth poems:

And finally, the woman who once owned and collected these fine Modern Library editions we acquired sure had immaculate handwriting, it almost looks like its own brand of calligraphy:

Come get lost in your own aesthetic reverie in the basement with me. Carl's on vacation so there's no classic rock playing. 

But seriously, Carl, come back.

In Of Mice and Men, one of the main characters, Lenny, famously has a fondness for "soft things." And whom among us isn't tactile, perhaps not to the intense degree of Lenny himself, but there is something about the feel of tiny, hoppy bunnies--or particularly well-made books--that makes them that much more satisfying to enjoy.

Maybe the most obvious texture that a lot of favorite books have is the deckled edge, the byproduct of an old way of papermaking that leaves the edges of a paper artfully rough (observe photo left). Nowadays, only artisans make paper this way, so when you get a book with these edges it's usually faked by a machine to make the book look real legit. But it does have a certain fancy feel to it, even if it makes it difficult to flip through the pages. Sometimes a book is given a fancy texture in another way. Varnishes, like metallic foil or spot gloss are pressed onto a cover to give the color of the jacket more POP and the result is also a tactile delight. The embossing on some covers, too, gives a subtle look to the jacket but also makes it really pleasant to hold, and also therefore more difficult to put down.

Recent books that employ this technique really well are the Penguin Threads series designed by magically amazing artist Jillian Tamaki. For three recent reprintings of Black Beauty, Emma and The Secret Garden, Tamaki HAND-EMBROIDERED jacket illustrations, and when the books were printed, the texture of the threads was embossed on the cover, making them stunning art objects that are compulsively touchable. Rachel Sumpter is designing the next three covers for Wind in the Willows, Wizard of Oz and Little Women. They are STUNNING.

Of course, sometimes texture and touch are employed in the design of a book in a way that is integral to the text. Firmin by Sam Savage (a recent acquisition in the UBC) is the story of a rat born in a 1960s Boston bookstore (not us!) who devours literature both literally and figuratively. The book is die cut with a huge bite-mark taken out of the right side, all the way through the book. It's a playful way of introducing a central element of the story into the design, and makes it a really fun book to pick up and inspect. It's sort of a grown-up version of classic touch-and-feel books like Pat the Bunny, where images, text and texture combine to help young toddlers in the tactile phase with language acquisition. This phenomenon is timeless, and since the publication of Pat the Bunny in 1940 there have been a plethora of additions to this category of books. A more recent one that I'm particularly fond of is Betsy Snyder's Have You Ever Tickled a Tiger which employs some really creative materials to imitate turtle skin and walrus whiskers in particular.

This completes my little blog-series on senses by-the-book. Thanks for reading! As always, come check us out in the Used Book Cellar! And remember we can even give you money for your already-felt books. Stay in the black this year and exchange your books for store credit, then take care of all your holiday shopping under our roof. We buy Wednesdays through Saturdays from 10 AM to 4PM.

don't judge a book by its....you know

So can I talk for a minute about reading on the T?

For several weeks I was trying to slog through Obama's Wars. Nothing against the book, but it was pretty dense and not exactly the read I was expecting. But I loved carrying it on the T -- even though I disliked reading it -- because everyone would see me reading Obama's Wars and think, somehow, that I was erudite and political and clearly a smart lady. I remember a situation in which three men in Army fatigues got on, and I literally was so excited to convey the message that I was reading Obama's Wars that I tried extra-extra-hard to make my book cover visible.

When I finished that one, it was on to Living Dead in Dallas, the second book in the Sookie Stackhouse vampire series. Oh boy! I am a major fan of True Blood, which is based on the book series, and I was itching to read the semi-trashy, pulpy novel. "But no!" I thought to myself. "The only time I have to read is on the T! I can't read Living Dead in Dallas on the T! People will see me! GAHHH!" Upon deciding that not reading the book was not an option, I hid the cover as best I could in my lap.

And now I'm reading Tommy's Tale, the self-proclaimed "Queer as Folk meets About A Boy", which features a pair of splayed male legs falling out of a bathtub. (They're attached to said male, of course -- it's not a slasher novel -- but all you can see is the legs.) Now I feel like people are looking at my book cover and thinking that I am reading some party-hard, not-literary, trash. (I also feel this way when I come to sex scenes in books I'm reading on the T -- suddenly embarrassed and quite furtive.)

So I was thinking about my issues with T reading, and why I was so concerned that other people would care about what I was reading. "Self," I said to myself, "when was the last time YOU noticed what someone else was reading on the T?" And the honest answer is -- never.

So I just need to get over my reading-on-the-T complex and display my book covers proudly, whatever they may be. But I know that sometimes I may still hope that people are taking more notice of the "I Love Brookline Booksmith" pin on my bag than they are of my choice of reading material.