i have to admit it.  i judge books by their covers.  i bet most of us do.  

    consider:  you are in a bookstore.  bookstore carries 100,000 titles in store.  books are mainly situated spine-out, so only a very limited amount of design real-estate is available.  all books want to be faced-out in section or placed on an endcap, or placed on a table at the front of the store.  only huge blockbuster bestsellers will be displayed for long, since there are always titles getting added to inventory for their turn at the front of the list.  

    the result of this is that the cover has to grab attention right away with the limited amount of time available to it while facing out on display.  and it has to connect with the right kind of reader who might actually pick it up and read the flap copy and eventually, hopefully, make the purchase.

    i won’t say that publishers have spent millions researching the visual cues that lure one kind of reader over another kind of reader, the right audience for a book rather than the wrong one.  they don’t need to.  publishing has a long enough history and thorough enough sales statistics for the past several decades that an editor or editorial team can read the book, figure out what other books are similar, and then use the covers of those books as inspiration for the newest book.  

    i won’t say that this is how publishers determine cover art, but something of this process has to take place.  the cover is the ad for the book, and just as certain layouts in magazines trend younger or older, so cover art isolates the chosen demographic.  design identifies the book as a certain kind of book for a certain kind of lifestyle matrix.  images and typefaces cary a burden of semiotic cultural baggage that we unconsciously taste-test when we shop for books.

    I picked up each of the covers shown at top without having head of either author of title.  all were spectacular reads, and all poses a visual characteristic that points up absence.  

    the first has a bowler hat held barely by two disembodied hands.  the bowler caught my eye because i am/was a serious nut for Rene Magritte, and had just discovered the artist during high school and only shortly before i first saw this cover.  the visual weight of such an artist’s hat motif carries this design and directs the reader to the kind of critical exercise that looking at a Magritte painting encourages.  it indicates absurdity, psychological/subconscious play, and a distinctly modern investigation of selfhood and the objective that give the self meaning.  the hands on this cover are clearly feminine, so they also posit a male character who’s visage is curiously missing from the mise en scene.  as though he has reacently arrived (hands removing hat) or recently departed quickly (leaving the hands holding nothing but the hat).

    the second i found as i unpacked a book shipment for the local bookstore i was working for at the time.  the wing was the strongest visual on the cover, and it invokes thoughts of Icarus, especially in the orientation of the wing far from the horizontal which would indicate stablility and stable flight.  this orinetation points down, thereby acting as a directional sign and as a visual cue for falling from the sky.  the street scene above the wing is abandoned and rickety, and the absence of people offers an interesting clue to the important role of the city in this novel.  finally, the majority of this cover happens “underground,” or below the ground of the city scene at top.  this is an important distinction, especially if one has seen the author photo on the back cover.  quite the underground look.  notice, too, that the title copy stairsteps down from left to right.  it invites the viewer into the dank cellar of the book’s territory as into a speakeasy or a dungeon.

    the final cover i found the same way as the Mieville book, at the bookstore unpacking a box.  this image is very disorienting:  the bird is hanging (clearly an inverted image), the bird’s tail and beak are cut short by the edges of the cover, and the hole in the middle of the bird gives us more view of the empty sky.  even the silver arch that delivers the title is just enough assymetrical to give the cover a further jolt.  i also think that this reminds me of magritte, where images interfere with each other and we can see beyond the forground into a curiously distant background space.  this confusion is not remedied by the strange poetry of the title.  dreamlike and elusive is how i characterize this book, and the cover’s visual references and the semiotic sleight of hand fully integrate the experience of the main character into the visual landscape of one of Magritte’s faceless businessmen.