Books, covers, and choices

This year’s Economic Survey looks different from its predecessors: It is pink. Chief Economic Advisor (CEA) Arvind Subramanian had an explanation for this choice, saying that the Survey was pink in order to express the government’s support for movements “in favour of women and women’s empowerment”. Some might carp that associating women with pink does not necessarily send out the correct message, but I have to admit that it did get the point across quite effectively. Previous Surveys have also had interesting covers; when Kaushik Basu was CEA, the artistically-inclined economist would design it himself.
 
On this occasion, at least, the cover helped you judge the book — or a particular chapter in it, at least; the CEA included a chapter in the Survey about India’s “missing women”, using a novel methodology that demonstrated that Indian families often keep on trying to have children till they have a son.

 
But the Economic Survey’s decision got me thinking about book covers, and how often we rely on them for a quick, heuristic guide to what’s inside. We do this even though we are consciously aware that this is an awful idea, and that judging a book by its cover is disapproved of by that highest intellectual court — common proverbs.
 

When Harry Potter first came out in the early 2000s, I remember that the colourful cover illustrations chosen by Bloomsbury/Scholastic clearly marked it out as a children’s series. Which it was; at least, for the first couple of books. But when it began to gain mainstream success, the covers became an issue; and soon an “adult edition” had to be issued, in which the only difference was that the colourful illustrated covers were replaced with sombre woodcuts hand engraved by London-based artist Andrew Davidson, who has also designed Royal Mail postage stamps — and, apparently, the engravings on the glass doors at Wimbledon’s Centre Court.

 
Sometimes the power of covers can really hit you — and tell you a lot about how unreconstructed and backward-looking our subconscious judgment really is. Next time you’re in a large bookshop, one of those with enough books to have different shelves or even bookcases devoted to books about different parts of the world, note the colouring closely. The China shelf will be distinctly red; the India shelf, bright yellow or pink; the Africa shelf, yellow (for the desert), green (for the forests) or blue (for the sky). Try and get a book about India published in the West with sober, academic colouring, and you’ll fail. That’s reserved for books about countries with paler people and greyer skies. Not through any rule, written or unwritten, but by the simple pressure of thousands of readers’ unconscious judgment. There’s sexism, too, besides Orientalism: American science fiction and fantasy covers are particularly prone to this, with SFF readers constantly irritated at the mystifying way in which female characters tend to be dressed by US-based cover artists. So are “young adult” publishers, with books targeted at girls full of sparkly pink.

 
This gender-based cover choice by publishers extends to the identity of the author as well: The writer Maureen Johnson crowd-sourced a brilliant exposition of this bias through an experiment she called “coverflip”, which hilariously reworked famous book covers — from authors such as Jonathan Franzen or Harlan Coben or Neil Gaiman — as if the books had been written by a woman.
 
Meanwhile, “serious” books — collections of essays, or thoughtful maundering about the world — have a specific look as well, as Tim Kreider points out in the New Yorker. They have a pale, perhaps white background, authors’ name almost as big as the title, and just a face or a single object that doesn’t detract from the text. There’s even a Malcolm Gladwell book cover generator online.

 
The self-publishing revolution — which also means self-designed book covers — is adding swiftly to the already long list of entreatingly bad cover choices. Browsing through Amazon’s list of discounted Kindle books, which is where vanity titles go to die, is an alternately horrifying and hilarious experience: Just imagine what the average self-published writer could do with clip-art, an unquenchable ego, and Microsoft Paint, and you might begin to grasp the awesomeness of some of what’s on display.
 
But the Kindle, of course, has its own effect. Covers become less important. It was often said that Fifty Shades of Grey could not have become a cultural phenomenon if anyone was actually seen reading a physical copy of the book. Of course, fans read it on their Kindle or their phones. Thus the cover didn’t matter. That’s a big reflection on how much publishing had changed in just the few years between Fifty Shades and the publication of Twilight, on which it was based — and which has an instantly recognisable cover. And of course, the Economic Survey also didn’t arrive in paper form for most of us. Perhaps the CEA should have addressed that first if he wanted his cover choice to have an impact.