I love this quote about cover art from The Look of the Book.
I was reminded of that quote looking at the 1958 cover below, by James Meese. Does it make genre visible?
The cover copy tells us it’s a mystery involving pearls and microfilm. The image gives us the tropics, a beautiful, worried woman in a swimsuit and a villain. Without the copy I think I’d assume it was some kind of “jeop” (‘woman in jeopardy’ story) — with the woman targeted by some kind of stalker. Or maybe a romance. Nothing about the cover says “spy” or “mystery.” Without the cover copy it doesn’t make genre visible.
However the cover does have copy so the genre comes across. I suppose it was reasonable to factor that in and go with a sexy woman as the hook (as so many paperbacks did in that era). Still, it’s at best adequate, nothing special
For another look at the same topic, one of the books I read during my recent Charleston trip was GOOD MOVIES AS OLD BOOKS: Films Reimagined as Vintage Book Covers by Matt Stevens. The premise is exactly what it sounds like. Here are more examples.
Most of the covers look cool. Some of them, like The Usual Suspects and Cast Away, are inspired. However I don’t think most of them would make good real book covers. Where The Usual Suspects is arresting, John Wick doesn’t tell us anything about what makes the movie compelling — hell it doesn’t tell us anything other than it involves a man with a gun. Ditto Say Anything on the book cover. They would not, shall we say, move the merchandise even though they’re pretty.
Part of that’s because Stevens is working primarily in the style of serious, tasteful literary paperbacks as I remember from the 1960s and early 1970s — the kind that, as Look of the Book says, doesn’t do anything so tacky as a vivid cover scene. The subtext is that you’re supposed to pick the book up because it’s Quality, not because it grabbed you with a lurid image (if you check out my cover art posts you’ll find lots of those).
The covers also have a certain sameness after a while (I’d have parceled them out over time but I had to get this back to the library). The book would have been more entertaining if we’d had more variety — the only really off-the-wall one is the psychedelic 1970s style for Fury Road. Great idea, not entirely satisfactory results.
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