The first piece

"And it was the covers 

that encouraged me to open the books."

I recently visited my local library for the first time since moving house earlier this year. It was everything you expect from a small, local library; it was overwhelmingly beige, slightly crooked and very unsexy. I wasn't holding out much hope for what was on offer in the design section I had come to investigate. However, somewhere between some suspiciously nineties looking books on football and what seemed like a disproportionate amount of weighty "How to..." tomes to do with computers, I found a small array of what I was after and came away with four titles.


The first of these that I selected was Faber and Faber: Eighty Years of Book Cover Design. Put together by author Joseph Connolly, himself having had all his own titles published by Faber and Faber, the bulk of the book is given over to textless pages that are dedicated solely to displaying an army of the covers Connolly adores so much. This approach, by the way, suits me fine. I know what I like to look at and, when it comes to clothing, graphic or any other type of design, I would almost always prefer to be presented with thousands of standalone examples than to go stingy on the images in favour of someone else's lengthy commentary.


In this case though, I began, as one should, at the very beginning and decided to see if Connolly's 'Personal Preface' to the collection of covers would be able to hold my attention away from the goods themselves. If I'm being honest, I was not expecting it to do so. A few phrases managed to achieve the near-impossible, however.


Connolly recalls his discovery of Faber books as a child, in the library of his new boarding school, waxing lyrical about the vitality and boldness of the designs. "And it was the covers, " he writes, "that encouraged me to open the books." Interesting. Not ground-breaking but familiar to me. 

Some of the covers that caught Connolly's eye

As someone who has only relatively recently come to realise that not everyone is wired, as I am, to understand the world almost entirely through the look of things, I have been deliberating over how best to express the way I think and how this drives my behaviour and reactions. Reading Connolly's preface, I stumbled across quite a few passages that started to tell this story for me. 


"I had always instinctively responded to the boldness of graphics, without of course ever knowing I was doing any such thing - the reason, I suppose, that I've always been drawn to comics, posters, packaging, among much else." 


With the exception of the reference to comics (mainly through ignorance of the genre rather than because of disinterest) this sentence echoes the visual epiphany I have recently experienced.


It would obviously be either naive or just plain stupid to suggest that I am somehow special because I react to aesthetics. Clearly everyone is influenced by the design of something to a greater or lesser extent, and if this was a new idea, designers wouldn't have been around for quite as long as they have. Whether you find the layout of a colleague's Powerpoint presentation easy to read or ugly and off-putting and whether you decide to upgrade your phone to one that looks good even if you don't really understand what it does are two pretty pedestrian examples.


For me though, the way something looks goes beyond being a contributing factor that affects my opinion or behaviour and is usually the main driver. There are two extremes to consider here: 1) You either already know as a result of previous reading, that you love a particular book or, for whatever reason, are quite confident that you will enjoy it. Despite this strong attraction to the story though, a 'bad cover' or simply one that you don't like (although I think my point here is that these are often interchangeable) is actually sufficient to stop you buying it.


While I am also a bit of a language geek and am a sucker for a beautiful piece of writing, I cannot deny that if I feel something is 'wrong' with the jacket that enrobes the story itself, this is likely to put me off buying it. After all, the chances are I will be able to find that same story elsewhere but looking the way I want it to. 

How many people first picked up one
of Connolly's own books because of
 the covers?

2) The flip side of this is when a love of the look and feel of something is enough to make you buy it regardless of whether you have reason to believe you will like it and, in extreme cases, even when you know you won't. 


Connolly openly admits to this behaviour:


"Sometimes I'd buy a book on pig breeding, say, or marrow farming or nursing – none of these fields my guiding force – simply because it was published by Faber and had such a fabulous cover.”


Of this second count, I too am definitely guilty - not in terms of shelling out to learn about marrow farming but certainly of the principle. I cannot count the number of times I have handed over hard-earned money to the Music and Tape Exchange in Notting Hill to take home albums by artists I had never heard of (and later discovered made music that I found underwhelming or worse) simply because I liked the colours, shapes or even textures on their sleeves.


On leaving a previous job, a colleague bought me a copy of Jane Austen's Emma. He chose this particular title because the lead character shares my name but the reason I love this copy so much is because of the series it is part of and, therefore, the cover that comes with it. It's one of the nice new ones with the patterns. You know the ones - part old-fashioned (hardback with the almost mesh-like covering) but made contemporary with their splattering of motifs in contrasting colours. Emma, in case you were wondering, is blue and covered in white chairs.


I would be lying if I pretended I wanted another copy of a book I already own for any other reason than the almost magical combination of those colours, those chairs and that texture. You see, as is the case for Connolly, I may end up getting lucky and falling in love with the tale that lies inside but it is definitely the cover that encourages me to open the book.