Don’t Judge a Book by Its Cover… Or Should You?

We’ve all heard the saying.

Never judge a book by its cover.

Excellent advice when applied to people.

Slightly questionable advice when applied to actual books.

Because if I’m standing in front of a shelf containing hundreds of books I’ve never read, written by authors I don’t know, I’m going to need something to make me reach for one rather than another.

And very often?

It’s the cover.

There. I said it.

We absolutely judge books by their covers

Perhaps judge is the wrong word.

Maybe we should say we notice books because of their covers.

A cover has only a few seconds to make us stop.

A beautiful illustration. An unusual typeface. A striking colour. A slightly peculiar title.

Something catches your eye and suddenly you're pulling the book from the shelf.

You still don't know whether it's any good.

But it has achieved something rather important.

It made you curious.

And curiosity is where an awful lot of reading begins.

Covers tell us things before we've read a single word

Book covers are actually rather clever.

Without consciously thinking about it, we can often look at a cover and make a reasonable guess about what sort of reading experience is waiting inside.

Dark woods and a lonely house?

Things are probably not going terribly well in there.

Pastel illustration of two people looking resolutely in opposite directions?

They'll almost certainly be in love by page 300.

A blood-red title above an abandoned shoe?

Someone is having a considerably worse day. 😂

Publishers use colour, typography, imagery and design to give us clues.

Not the whole story.

Just enough to whisper:

You might like this.

And then there's the title

Sometimes I don't even think it's the artwork that gets us.

It's four or five words printed on the front.

A title can be irresistible.

You see it on a shelf and immediately want to know what on earth that's about.

That was part of what we talked about in Why We Love Books That Surprise Us. Sometimes you don't need a recommendation, a review or an algorithm.

Sometimes curiosity is enough.

The cover catches your eye.

The title makes you wonder.

You turn it over.

And suddenly you've found an Oh-Go-On-Then Book.

Second-hand bookshops make this even more interesting

Online book shopping is incredibly useful.

You can search for a title, find an author, read reviews and locate exactly what you came for.

But browsing second-hand books is different.

There may be ten editions of the same novel scattered across ten different shelves in ten different bookshops.

And the covers can be completely different.

One might look romantic.

Another mysterious.

Another wonderfully old-fashioned.

Another frankly looks as though the designer finished it at 4:57 on a Friday afternoon.

Yet inside?

Exactly the same story.

That's one of the things I love about older books.

Their covers belong to different moments in time.

Sometimes the older cover is better

I have a soft spot for older book covers.

Not all of them, obviously. Some are magnificently dreadful.

But there is something wonderful about finding an old edition whose design immediately tells you when it came from.

Typography changes.

Illustration styles change.

Photography changes.

Even the way authors' names are presented changes.

Put several editions of the same famous novel beside each other and you've almost got a miniature history of graphic design.

And occasionally I find myself thinking:

Why did they ever change this one?

But covers can also get it completely wrong

Here's where our supposedly shallow book judging becomes dangerous.

Because sometimes a wonderful book has a terrible cover.

Perhaps it looks dated.

Perhaps the design simply isn't your taste.

Perhaps it makes the book look like an entirely different genre.

And if you're browsing quickly, you might walk straight past something you would have loved.

This is where second-hand books occasionally ask a little more of us.

Pick it up anyway.

Read the back.

Open it.

Read the first page.

The cover got you this far — but now the words need to take over.

Then there are the books we buy partly because they're beautiful

We should probably admit this too.

Sometimes we want the beautiful edition.

Publishers know perfectly well that readers like lovely books.

Foil lettering.

Decorative endpapers.

Cloth covers.

Illustrated editions.

Beautiful spines that look wonderful lined up together.

Do we technically need another copy of a story we already own?

No.

Are we standing in the shop stroking the cover while inventing reasons why this is an entirely sensible purchase?

Quite possibly.

Readers contain multitudes. 😂

The cover gets us to pick it up. The story decides whether we keep it.

And perhaps that's the distinction.

Judging a book entirely by its cover probably isn't wise.

But allowing a cover to make us curious?

That's different.

The cover is an invitation.

Pick me up.

The title makes us turn it over.

The description makes us open it.

And then the writer gets their chance.

Sometimes we put it back.

Sometimes we take it home.

And every now and then, that completely unknown book we picked up simply because something about the cover caught our eye becomes one of those books we remember for years.

Maybe even one of the books we keep.

So perhaps the old saying needs a small amendment.

Don't judge a book entirely by its cover.

But by all means let the cover introduce you.

You never know where the conversation might lead.

Wherever today finds you, I hope you find a story worth getting lost in.

— BookBuddies