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?



I Shot the Serif

Dear readers, you may not know this, but I wasn't always a gift/book seller.

Nay, many moons ago I was but a student, earning my BFA in Digital Media. When I tell people this, I usually get a look that's a combination of interest and confusion: "Oh, that's interesting! So... what is that, exactly?" Basically, I learned a little bit of everything artsy that you can do with computers. Photoshop, of course, and graphic design; but also a bit of animation (2D with Flash, and 3D with Autodesk Maya), print design, virtual reality design, web design and HTML/CSS, and interactive interfaces of various natures. I am now what you may call a geek-of-all-trades.

I also learned how to draw adorable robots.

As a requirement for my major, I had to take three courses of typography. That meant that not only did I have to learn how to animate a convincing walk cycle, but also the nuances of various typefaces. When I heard of this, my response was both dread and incredulity. Three semesters to learn how to make pretty letters? Who even cares about that stuff?

But, over the course of Typography I, II and III, my relationship with type changed from loathing it with all my being to sorta kinda loving it in spite of myself. It's the sort of thing you don't think about until you're forced to. Typography is all around us--in our books, yes; but also our posters, signs, web sites, TV advertisements, iPhones, journal covers... everywhere! And most of us are blissfully unaware of its presence in our lives.

Thinking with Type was required reading for my typography classes, and I keep coming back to it no matter what type-oriented situation in which I may find myself. It was this book that made me start seeing the printed word as a living, breathing being. It has personality (bold or soft, elegant or funky), and fonts even have families like we do.  Letters have arms, spines, shoulders, and ears, as do human beings



Albeit, their body parts look a little different from ours.



The history of typography is equally dynamic, and the origin of many fonts can be (at least, to me) fascinating. Take Comic Sans for example--the font of choice for all pre-teen girls and family-friendly event posters. This highly-ridiculed font was never really supposed to exist. It was designed by an programmer who wanted a particular Microsoft software program (MS Bob, which failed spectacularly) to seem more approachable to younger audiences. The font didn't make it into this ill-fated program, but it was dug up by later programmers and now holds a sacred place in the palace of of every personal computer's Default Fonts folder.

Consider, also, Helvetica: the anti-font. Helvetica (which can be found most famously in the NYC public transit system) is a typefaces so ubiquitous that it is almost invisible. How did this rather plain and unimpressive typeface become the default font for practically everything? Simon Garfield's fairly recent book Just My Type explains this and many other facts and stories about typography that most people just don't know, but in reality are actually pretty cool.

But Mr. Garfield is not the first person to write about our friend the printed word. Designers and typographic theorists (yeah, they exist) have been thinking about typography for decades--nay, centuries, since Gutenberg invented the printing press. In 1955, Beatrice Warde asserted in her famous essay "The Crystal Goblet, or Printing Should Be Invisible" that all typographers should aspire to create their own Helvetica. Print should not be loud or call attention to itself; instead, it should be as a clear crystal goblet, only displaying the message of the words.

Warde's words are considered sacred by many traditional typographers. But in the present day, typography has taken on a different role in our society. Gone are the days when typography was as simple as creating an elegant layout for a book. In this day and age of pop-ups and tweets and instant everything, type has to catch people's eye, else it be ignored.

Take Quotable Cards, for instance. The cards made by this company (and its magnets and mugs) are hugely popular here at Booksmith. But there are no pictures, no pretty artwork here; what makes these products so popular is simply the typography. Yes, the quotations are important, but no one would buy a magnet or mug with Ghandi's "Be the Change" quotation set in 12-point Times New Roman. It's the designer's choice in typography that really make these images great. Not only the typeface itself, but the color, layout, kerning (space in between the letters), leading (space between lines of type), and a multitude of other factors that make up just a few words on a square white or black background. This typography is not invisible, it is loud and proud. Instead of just displaying the words on the page, it is enhancing them: it is the ornate throne for the king, the flashy case for your iPod, the cute print on your purse. In a world where image is everything, Quotable Cards has gotten the hint and caught up with the times.

Many designers of greeting cards and book covers have gotten the hint, too. Notice how many book covers out there are composed of simply typographic imagery. Take this Zadie Smith book cover: there are no images to hint at the subject of the book, but the typography (clean, thin, uniform lines, no serifs but swirls extending from the letters) can already give you a hint of its theme and mood. I, personally, have never read this book and don't know anything about it. But something about the typography makes me want to do so, even without a picture to entice me.

The next time you're in Booksmith, or anywhere at all, take a look at the words around you. How does typography impact how you see things? If something was set in a different font, would the meaning itself change? When you start actually seeing the printed word as its own living art form, your perception of the words they convey might just change.

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.

Designers of the World, Don't Unite!

Just look at this.
To scan the new arrivals and pull this selection from the shelves and tables took me less than one minute.

Seven publishing houses.
Eight designers.

The averted, cropped off or masked face of a woman tells me nothing except that the designer and publisher don't want to be held accountable. It's the pinnacle of non-committal design.

I will leave it to others (who have read the books) to determine what the design ethic at work across such a broad spectrum of subject matter, not to mention cross-section of the publishing industry, has to say, if anything, about gender relations.

But I will say that it is unsettling to witness publishers and designers churning out the exact same visuals as each other in a year when the book is loudly rumored to be on its last legs.

It brings to mind a biologically deficient strain of corn, its pesticide-protected field blanketing the continent, feeding us all we can eat and fueling us as far as we can go until that one microbe who has the doomsday genetic code rides in on the wind of an uncovered sneeze and turns the corn fields and our dinner tables into wastelands.

I know it's not as apocalyptic as all that, obviously. Just as anyone who works in a decent bookstore knows that paper books are,
indeed,
very long for this world.

You can just put me in that camp that thinks we should be encouraging diversity wherever we find it, you know, for the health of the species.

I want to sell your books, guys, but you make it a hell of a lot harder when they all look the freaking same. Designers, don't you all talk to each other? Publishers, don't you look at what the other ones are doing?
Oooooooh, I see.
You do.

It's a little thing to many, maybe.
But I think that good design has a lot to do with good life.
And bad design makes my head hot.
And collectively bad design that appears to be the product of an agreement amongst the largest publishing houses in the country makes me...turn away.

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