A try at reading book covers and what they may be stating
A try at reading book covers and what they may be stating
Blog Article
Books may be made up of words in plain old black and white, but they are likewise the colour covers that they are decorated with.
When we purchase a book it ends up being something very personal to us. It can often be weird seeing a book you love with a different book cover, merely because it is not your book. This personalisation, and certainly ownership, of books was at a totally various level at the dawn of the era of printing, with book covers being created by the owners themselves, and what they believed would be the best books covers for the text. They would buy the book itself from the printer covered in paper, then bring it to a binder who would add in the covers to the client's specs. This normally meant being clad in leather and then etched with the name of the book, and, more often than not, the name of the book's owner. Individuals like the co-founder of the impact investor with a stake in World of Books can probably appreciate the ownership that people come to feel in regards to their books.
When you truly think of it, it is rather amazing that a book's cover, no matter how gorgeous it is, manages to stand so eloquently for something that is practically the total reverse of its art format-- writing in white and black. In fact, book covers have actually been designed to reflect the feeling of a book and attract its designated audience ever since the advent of big scale publishing in the Victorian Period. Artists were entrusted with finding what makes a good book cover for particular individuals, or in other words, marketing. People like the CEO of the asset manager that has a stake in Amazon can probably appreciate the role of marketing in developing book covers.
We like reading books since they are extremely gorgeous things. This is true, but the nature of beauty that we may be speaking about is certainly different to what we might be talking 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 attempt to mirror the beauty of what is within. This goes back for as long as the codex itself has actually been around, with middle ages monks, those charged with the defense and proliferation of the scarce texts that might still be discovered, ornamenting each hand written text with amazingly rich and beautiful designs. In fact, such was the appeal held within these books that most of these creative book cover designs were sculpted into ivory or solid gold, studded with gems, and inlaid with rivers of rare-earth elements. Individuals like the co-CEO of the hedge fund that owns Waterstones can probably appreciate the way that the beauty of these book covers was created to match the beauty within the book.