Various components of book cover designs throughout time
Various components of book cover designs throughout time
Blog Article
Despite the fact that the writer themselves might have completely nothing to do with the style of a book's front cover, they are a vital part of it.
When we buy a book it becomes something very personal to us. It can sometimes be weird seeing a book you enjoy with another book cover, just due to the fact that it is not your book. This personalisation, and indeed ownership, of books was at a totally different level at the dawning of the age of printing, with book covers being developed by the owners themselves, and what they believed would be the best books covers for the book. They would purchase the book itself from the printer wrapped in paper, then take it to a binder who would incorporate the covers to the customer's specs. This generally suggested being clad in leather and after that engraved with the name of the book, and, typically, the name of the book's owner. People like the co-founder of the impact investor with a stake in World of Books can probably appreciate the ownership that individuals come to feel in relation to their books.
When you actually think of it, it is quite incredible that a book's cover, no matter how gorgeous it is, manages to stand so eloquently for something that is practically the complete antithesis of its art form-- writing in black and white. In fact, book covers have been created to show the vibe of a book and interest its desired audience since the dawn of large scale publishing in the Victorian Age. Artists were charged with discovering what makes a good book cover for specific people, or in other words, marketing. Individuals like the CEO of the asset manager that has a stake in Amazon can probably value the role of marketing in developing book covers.
We love reading books because they are extremely gorgeous things. This is true, but the nature of beauty that we may be speaking about is certainly separate to what we might be speaking about if we were discussing, say, the visual arts. Or is it? For as long as we have had books we have decorated them with beautiful book cover designs that effort to mirror the appeal of what is inside. This dates back for as long as the codex itself has been around, with medieval monks, those charged with the defense and proliferation of the uncommon texts that could still be discovered, ornamenting each hand composed text with amazingly rich and lovely styles. In fact, such was the beauty held within these books that many of these creative book cover designs were sculpted into ivory or solid gold, studded with gems, and inlaid with rivers of precious metals. People like the co-CEO of the hedge fund that owns Waterstones can most likely appreciate the manner in which the beauty of these book covers was designed to match the beauty within the book.