Posturing on the Threshold: Author Pictures on Front Covers (original) (raw)
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Uncovering the Book Cover: An Analysis on Judging a Book by its Cover
LV SPECIAL ISSUE DECEMBER 2021, 2021
“There's much to uncover that's not on the cover!” Before a reader turns the pages of any book, his/ her eyes behold the jacket of that book and the author's name on it, which has a bearing on the mind of a possible reader even before the words inside begin to influence. Writers of books don't write books, they write manuscripts. Designing a book cover is the process of getting an author's manuscript into the hands of a reader, by materializing it – giving it a form. Moreover, the covers determine the primary way in which books are marketed and promoted. In addition to other factors, the gender of the writer plays a significant role in the designing of a book cover. Certainly, the covers of books written by women on the whole are differently curated, in illustration and lettering both — the images are ambiguous, painted or misty or eccentrically drawn, and for some unknown reason, 'serif' font is used much more liberally as compared to the covers of books written by men. In this paper, apart from taking into consideration the gender of the writer of a book, book covers are being analysed in two aspects. First, the appearance of book covers which includes the colour scheme, font size, font style and pictures used on the outer jacket. Secondly, it will also be investigated whether the cover of a book also plays a role in deciding the literary merit of the book, which also includes the reasons for winning or losing a literary award. Keywords: Culture, reader-response, reception theory, authorship
Atelier cultures de l'image: the book cover project
Dossier for course "Atelier cultures de l'image: the book cover project" - Université Paris Nanterre (a.y. 2022/2023) TASKS: - Hypothetical original cover for Calvino's Invisible cities, by Giorgia Armario (VISIBLE ONLY with DOWNLOAD) - Comparative analysis of DeLillo's White Noise front cover by Noma Bar (Picador) - Analysis of Rushdie's East,West cover by Sroop Sunar (Vintage) - Comparative Analysis of Pynchon's The crying of lot 49 front cover by Yuko Kondo (Vintage) - Interview with Livia Massaccesi, creative director for the cover of the Italian edition of Evaristo's Girl, Woman, Other (SUR) - both English and Italian versions of the interview are provided.
Design Issues, 2010
Eye in the Sky, each of which interprets its subject literally. Juxtaposed, the two thumbnails present a pair of eyes staring out with great alarm at the potential reader of Judging a Book by Its Cover. This cover tells us that this is a book about books, visuality, and populist genres. On the back, the blurb proclaims "This exciting collection opens up a new field of enquiry for scholars of book history, literature, media and communication studies, marketing and cultural studies." Clearly, for graphic design historians, the analysis of book covers is not new; this anthology presents a welcome incursion into graphic design history terrain by an interdisciplinary group of scholars.
On Photographing Artists’ Books
Journal of Medical Humanities, 2019
Artists’ books are challenging to photograph. They function as a unit of tightly conceptually-bound visual, textual and material elements in addition to a heightened self-awareness of the work's booksness. Binding, size, weight, and shape of the book, translucency, texture, thickness of paper, placement of images and/or text on the page or off the page interact with other graphic elements; they control, and direct the reader towards the expressive components of meaning which arise from pace, haptic experience, and visual or structural stylistic choices. Most of such information gets sacrificed in the process of documentation. Here I discuss some of such issues of photographing artists books for this journal and my solutions to replicating each artists’ book within the physical and thematic constraints of this publication: I tried not only to visualize the books’ content but also to translate some of the experience of how that content makes itself meaningful to the reader.
Visual Illustration and Photography on Islamic Book Cover Designs: A Semiotic Analysis
International Journal of Heritage, Art and Multimedia, 2019
The publication of religious books recently has been in line with the publication of books of other genres. It is because of the increase in the demands by the readers in addition to the design of the book covers which has been made up more interesting. Hence, this research was aimed to identify the influence of visual illustration and photography displayed on book covers which preferred by the readers. Sign theory by Peirce (1839) and Semiotic Analysis by Stokes (2003) were applied for the purpose of data analysis. A book published by Telaga Biru Sdn. Bhd. entitled Ikon Syabab by Umar Muhammad Noor (2014) has been made as to the research data focusing on the taxonomy aspect of its cover. The results showed that the proper use of pictures was undeniably able to attract the readers to buy the religious book currently in the market. This research also was predicted to be able to contribute to the national socio-economic interest, generate a rich cultural society and elevate the percen...
Facepoeia: The Author Becoming a Photographic Subject. The Example of Tadeusz Różewicz
Anglica Wratislaviensia, 2018
This paper reflects on the visual practices involving the circulation of portraits of authors in their publications, and in public sphere. The photographic portrait of the author interjects the belief that the presence of the author through and in the image familiarizes and intensifies its subject’s presence and declares the author’s identity. As a visual paratext, a portrait becomes an autobiographical space of self-invention and self-construction. I wish to illustrate these processes by focusing on Tadeusz Różewicz’s 1921–2014 complex ways of accessing visibility and manners of “fixing” his identity in the collaborative work he produced with the photographer Adam Hawałej under the title Rubbish Dump 2015.
Typography: body and dress of a text - a signing mode between language and image
Visual Communication, 2005
His main research areas are in multimodal media communication, text linguistics and stylistics. His most recent publication, Language in the Image-The Image in Language (de Gruyter, 2004), analyses the numerous interrelations between language and image in printed mass media texts (journalism and advertising) and especially emphasizes the pictorial nature of language.