Make book covers sexy again
This is how we fix the literacy crisis
Hello publishers.1 We are in a literacy crisis. You know this. I know this. But in my brain I am a “vibes consultant”-slash-Mad-Man-slash-public-relations-exec and I’m going to tell you how to solve it. Due to the precise nature of my solution there will be a non-neglible amount of nudity in this post. You have been warned!!
Stop being so twee please
Publishers have gladly nurtured a class of readers who think of themselves as “bookish.” The perpetual focus of the “bookish” is on a series of internet-defined “relatable” traits, none of which have anything to do with intellectual labour even though they think that’s what they’re doing: drinking tea, and hoarding books without reading them2, and enjoying the smell of old paper and of rain, and fantasising about being at Oxford in the nineteenth century. They are a world apart: books are in their blood. Non-bookish people just don’t get it, and probably only read “performatively;” the bookish are very concerned about this, to the point where they think it warrants a deluge of YouTube video essays.
We’ve all got to stop bowing down to “bookishness.” It seems like a promising trend, but it is really just another symptom of a post-literate society: reading is no longer a normal thing you are supposed to do if you would like to engage with the life of the mind beyond a surface level. Like knitting, keeping tropical fish, or being a Juggalo, it is now a specialist hobby with its own “kit” and worldwide community and superiority complex. We reinforce the exceptionalism of the “bookish” the more we humour them.
And we are humouring them at enormous scale. Under the reign of the “bookish,” physical books must go to extra lengths to signify that they are, in fact, “books.” We are spraying edges. We are using extravagant vintage fonts, the sort you might have seen advertising bike shops in the early 2010s in hyper-gentrified Shoreditch. We care less about words, ideas, and imagery than we do the fantasy of being a Victorian gentleman with a wood-panelled library. Enter the Penguin Clothbound Classics:
This line is a sort of “nice” extension of Penguin Classics. The main imprint is generally good; Modern Classics is excellent (more below). The “bookish” go into performative fits about the Clothbound Classics, but I think they’re dodgy and I don’t like them. There are 108 of them. They go from the literal Ramayana to Woolf and Nabokov. Every single one has been designed by the same person in the same style. The books are meant to simulate the vague visual idea of “antique,” with sort-of-relevant repeating patterns over coloured cloth. “Behold!” you are supposed to say. “A “Book”!”
The effect runs close to gentrification. Penguin throws off its responsibility as a publishing house and refuses to really say anything about Lolita or Pride and Prejudice or Vanity Fair. The editions are meant to be inoffensive, but I do find considerable offence in their version of Mrs Dalloway, which is bound in pink cloth and scattered with cartoon fighter planes. The idea is probably that you can’t go wrong when you refuse to make a statement - but a confounding novel should really signify that it is confounding. The whole point of Woolf was that she broke the literary mould.
I think it’s nice to manufacture “special editions” of widely-read books. This isn’t really a new thing; in a literate society there would still be lots of reverence for the book-as-object. The “bookish” shouldn’t get to claim the concept for themselves. The Folio Society’s massively expensive hardbacks are much less offensive as literary productions because they tend to commission different artists to work on each one.
The issue with the Penguin Clothbound Classics is in their flattening, winking and nudging - the castration of once-threatening and shocking literary ideas into “Easter eggs”. “You’ll only get this if you know what the book’s about,” they say - “and if you know what the book’s about, you must be bookish!” The life of the mind becomes an in-joke. Sex, danger and thrill take a backseat to “Omg look it’s a book.”
Solve publishing by hiring fashion photographers en masse
If we want people who aren’t “bookish” to read books, we will need the books to look sexy and glamorous and enticing. We need a visual language for danger and thrill. There is a whole class of people whose job it is to frame things this way. They are fashion photographers. We are currently in a golden age of fashion photography. If there is a contemporary heir to the visual and narrative tension of, eg. the Arnolfini Portrait, then it is in a fashion magazine and not in an art gallery. We should hire fashion photographers to do book covers.
Take Iris Murdoch. Zoomers don’t rate her. She’s not on BookTok. Her name has no fashionable cache. (Others do: I loved Lili Anolik’s Hollywood’s Eve, but her dual biography of Babitz and Didion is clearly hyper-targeted to a very specific class of readers in search of chic cultural capital). I picked up Under the Net because it was on the list of 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die3and was instantly shocked by how arch and stylish the writing was.
I was not expecting this. Murdoch’s newer covers look like books you would find left behind at a holiday home. But if you go back through the old editions on Goodreads4 you will find that the Penguin paperbacks from the mid-1970s are among the most stylish books ever produced:
The key: they’re decorated with work by Harry Peccinotti, who was successful across both commercial and erotic photography. You can see why everyone liked him: the images are expertly framed and coloured, and they’re intriguing, sensual, symbolic and arresting. He made women want to buy clothes; he made men want to buy Pirrelli calendars. Of course he makes you want to read Iris Murdoch!
Re-release the Harry Peccinotti covers and I guarantee Murdoch will reach Joan Didion status in about six months. She will make her way into Pinterest moodboards next to Ottessa Moshfegh and Jeffrey Eugenides. Kendall Jenner will read her on the beach. Eventually she will emerge triumphant because her novels genuinely are funny and sexy and cosmopolitan in a manner that doesn’t exist today. We could rehabilitate so many of our neglected authors by just doing this over and over again.
I shall demonstrate. I made a list of my favourite books that have awful covers, went through my “fashion photography” Pinterest board, and then worked out how to approximate the Penguin Modern Classics font and colour scheme (sorry!!). The results are as below:
I am not sure why it’s so impossible to create a good cover for a novel set in Hollywood, ie. a city fixated on the visual. The Day of the Locust always loses, even though it has a film adaptation that is famous for its lighting and sense of atmosphere. My copy has really cliched cartoon stars from the Hollywood Walk of Fame (Grauman’s Chinese Theatre is right there!). I have recast it with my favourite photo from Madonna’s 1995 Versace campaign, shot by Steven Meisel. It works great because the whole point is that it’s glamorous and foreboding.
I also often think that if you’re in doubt and you already have visual material to work with, there’s nothing wrong with a (good) movie cover:
Nobody really seems to read They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, a book about struggling actors in the 1930s who are rejected from Hollywood walk-on roles and are forced enter a 24/7 danceathon contest. It was massive in France in the 1960s. The whole vibe of They Shoot Horses is glamour under the strain of communal poverty, so I thought it would be cool to take from this Il Deserto Rosso-inspired 2013 Miu Miu campaign:
Mary McCarthy is probably the most sadistic Lady Writer of all time (I say it affectionately, she’s also my favourite). She is so witty and so mean to all of her characters. You wouldn’t know this just from looking at her stuff on a shelf. For image rehab, I have paired her with the most sadistic photographer of all time, Helmut Newton. The time reference works in either case; so does the composition. Nothing overtly sadomasochistic happens in The Group. But that doesn’t matter. We are meant to be selling books! I also think you could get a competitive advantage from Meisel’s Versace S/S 2001:
I love D.H. Lawrence. Unfortunately all his book covers are really bad aside from the original phoenix ones. The library copies I read were decorated with a series of unsatisfactory nudes; Lady Chatterley’s Lover had some of the most sterile full-frontal nudity I’d ever seen. I propose a reissue of literally ever single Lawrence book with images from Guy Bourdin’s 1976 “Sighs and Whispers” campaign.
It’s a perfect match: the women are Lawrence women (stuck between the pre-Raphaelite and the flapper), the nudity is Lawrence nudity (sensual but also just sort of “there”), the lighting and wind is Lawrence lighting and wind (elemental, beyond human control).
Another modernist-ish literary production let down repeatedly by bad covers: Dorothy Strachey’s Olivia. You are supposed to think this very short novel, first published in the 1940s, is a groundbreaking heartwarming story of first lesbian love, &c.5 Thus the two major recent reissues look like YA novels illustrated by ex-Tumblr fan artists:
In reality Olivia is one of the most twisted novels ever written, in equal parts a precursor to Nabokov and to late-period Tennessee Williams, and it’s really the story of two fading belles dames who are trying to get one over on each other by competitively grooming the children at the finishing school they run. Many of its conventions are borrowed from earlier gothic horror stories about vampires. It is full of hysterics and mythological callbacks. This is how I would do it, ft. a 1996 Valentino campaign by Saitoshi Saikusa:
Sidenote: sometimes paintings are a good idea, IF you are consistent
Penguin Modern Classics has reissued (pretty much) a full set of Nabokov’s English books, all decorated with zooms from the paintings of Meredith Frampton:
I love this because:
There’s something classy about matching a single writer to a single painter - it gives dignity to the idea of an irreplaceable style and continuous inner world, on either account
The mischievous cropping and symbolism is SO Nabokov
Frampton was British, but the paintings reflect a tentatively modernist, tentatively international, and highly sophisticated “Lubitschian” interwar society that also features in Nabokov’s writing - full of military men, European emigres, academics, etc. Whoever chose them has really thought this through
Like everyone else I am really into Sudan Archives atm
Also you might be interested in the fact I’m writing a book. My agent’s details are on my website. Just saying
For some reason the bookish are OBSESSED with “untranslatable words” and will jump to tell you this is called “tsundoku” in Japanese (they don’t speak Japanese)
Generally enjoy these lists and have found them invaluable in building up a “critical apparatus.” They are an autodidact’s best friend. But the Before You Die framing is so scaremongery. The list could more accurately be named “A Few Important Books From Every Year.”
The Goodreads database is unusable and I think this impedes the flourishing of literary culture in general. Seriously it took me WAY too long to locate the editions above. There is no way to filter by publisher or decade. I wish Letterboxd would buy Goodreads…
I maintain lesbian culture will go so far once someone musters up the courage to wipe out all the self-conscious twee stuff and return to the avant-garde, eg. Nightwood. Madonna was maybe the last high-profile artist to really “get it,” probably because she spent the late 1980s-early 1990s mainlining 1930s cinema. You’ve all got to stop talking about “longing” etc