BOOKS AND COVERS
‘Never judge a book by its cover’ is one of those snappy bits of wisdom dispensed by grandparents and school teachers to encourage children not to base their opinions on superficial information – sweaters, sneakers, skin color. It’s good advice for making friends, but where books are concerned, it’s utter nonsense. As the co-owner of Parnassus Books in Nashville, Tennessee, I’m here to tell you, covers are precisely how we judge. You may know the author’s name or like the title, but in most cases it’s the arrangement of words, the size and shape of the font, the picture or absence of picture, that draws you in. Or doesn’t. There are a lot of books out there, and we need a little information before we pick one up and read the flap copy. It is the job of the book cover to call to us the way the roses call to bees.
When I sold my first novel, The Patron Saint of Liars, I was 27 years old. I knew as much about covers as I did about cars, which is to say I could identify what appealed without any understanding of how things worked. My publisher hired an artist named Thomas Woodruff who had painted the cover for Anne Tyler’s Breathing Lessons. The hope was that if he painted one for me, then Anne Tyler readers would become Ann Patchett readers. I suppose they were onto something as almost thirty years later people still tell me my books remind them of Tyler’s. For The Patron Saint of Liars, Thomas Woodruff sent in a painting of a field at sunset with a house in the distance and a night sky full of stars. In the foreground was a votive candle, a small flame twinkling in a glass cup. It was a beautiful painting.
But instead of saying thank you, I said I didn’t like the candle. The symbolism seemed too easy – light a candle against the darkness – and too Catholic, even though the novel was nothing if not Catholic. The art director went back to the painter to say the young novelist did not like the candle, and so the painter snuffed the candle out and replaced it with a dandelion whose seeds were blowing loose and floating up into the stars. When I saw the second incarnation of the jacket, I realized the candle had been a really good idea.
This took place before the digital age. That dandelion was not photo-shopped in. It was painted over the place where the candle had been. This time I kept my mouth shut. The book was published in 1992, the year that brought us The Secret History by Donna Tartt, All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy, and Bastard Out of Carolina by Dorothy Alison, three books with startling and ultimately iconic covers that used photography and crisp design to get the readers’ attention. The fact that all three of those books were brilliant only served to reinforce the point: original oil painting was out, archival photographs were in.
My second novel was called Taft. The title was bad and the cover was worse. Like every other book that came out in 1994, mine had a photograph on the cover, but this photograph was muddled and confusing. It was full of bar stools and featured, in a distance, a young white woman, even though the book was about a black man. There was nothing about it I liked. After a great deal of back and forth with my publisher, I pointed out that I had right of refusal written into my contract. When I reminded them that I could refuse this cover, they reminded me that they could print 2,000 copies and fail to distribute them. I was learning things about publishing all the time.
I switched publishers for my third novel, The Magician’s Assistant, and I loved the cover they came up with, a photograph of a 1960s model turned on her side so that she appeared to be floating in midair. I also loved the cover they came up with for the paperback – a giant rabbit sitting in an armchair. The general rule of thumb is that if the book is a big seller, the cover doesn’t change when it goes to paperback, and if the book hasn’t been such a hit, they’ll try something new. I liked the publisher of my third book, but by the time I had written my fourth book, everyone I knew who had worked there had either left or been fired. I left too.
When it was time to publish my fourth novel, something remarkable happened. My new editor sent me a whole stack of possible covers, called mock-ups, glued onto heavy black cardboard. Bel Canto, a novel by Ann Patchett it said in bright red, in navy blue, in the shape of an open mouth, on a line of music, on piano keys, in camouflage. I propped my choices up on window sills. I asked friends to give their opinions. The truth is I liked them all. The strong colors and simple graphics made my novel look like a work of serious literature. Any one of them could have been the cover of a John Updike novel (Updike, who designed many of his own covers, was my personal gold standard for good taste.) This new publisher did an equally good job on the paperback. The book sold well, won prizes and was taken seriously, just as the cover had promised it would be.
Bel Canto was published in more than thirty countries and none of them asked me what I wanted on the cover. Over time, boxes of books from China and Romania and Argentina started showing up at my house. The Swedish cover had a picture of a mansion flanked by palm trees, the windows lit with burning crucifixes. The Dutch cover showed a woman in a ball gown holding a violin, even though no one in the book played the violin. The Slovenian cover featured an incredibly cheerful looking blonde in a plunging red dress who may have been on her way to a disco. The Russian cover looked like a James Bond novel – a man in a tux with a gun, a sports car, and a busty babe in high heels. In many countries the emphasis was on a woman’s gorgeous hair, while other countries featured musical notes or guerilla fighters or, in a few cases, both. Sometimes I could convince myself that the publishers must know their audience better than I did, other times it was too much of a stretch. Foreign covers, I decided, were like translations, the quality was simply out of my control.
When I did speak up about a cover I didn’t like in another country, things didn’t get better. My fifth book, Truth & Beauty, featured a photograph of two girls sunbathing. One was pretty and wearing sunglasses while the other had an open book covering her face. Since this was a memoir about my best friend Lucy who had cancer of the jaw as a child and had suffered through countless surgeries, I didn’t like this at all. We weren’t those girls, and covering up one face was coy. I objected strongly. When the final copy of the book arrived, I saw the publisher had solved the problem by cutting off the girls’ heads. Now it was two headless girls lying on a beach towel, their necks stopping just at the jacket’s upper edge. It didn’t make me feel better.
My problems with covers hit an all-time high, or low, with my fifth novel, Run. While I had been sent eight different covers for Bel Canto, for Run I got ten, then twenty, then thirty. No one, including me, had any idea what should be on the cover. One choice I was given was a photograph of a snowy path in New York City’s Central Park (the book is set in Boston) with a trash can right in the middle of the frame. ‘Why are you sending me a cover with a trash can on it?’ I asked my new editor. She told me it wasn’t a trash can, and then, after looking at the picture again, said yes, in fact, it was. She hadn’t noticed. One of the choices that I absolutely loved was a photograph of two goldfish in a plastic bag. Since the book is about two brothers, one of whom was an ichthyologist, I thought this was perfect. I bought my editor a very expensive handbag, put the cover in the purse, and mailed it back to her. Finally! We had a winner.