Theatres of the Book: Covering, Flaunting, Marketing, Author and Text (original) (raw)
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The History of the Book Jacket in the 19 th and Early 20 th Century
The book in the 21st century can be read digitally, purchased from the comfort of one's home and stored in " bookshelves " that only exist online. When considering the book as an object, and not merely concerning oneself with its content, an interesting design history emerges. This article examines a part of book design that was essential in the late 19th and early 20th century: the book jacket. This specific part of the book was used for protection, communication and later marketing and reveals the thoughts and practises of publishers in England at specific moments in history. By examining some book jackets that have survived as well as consulting studies done by other scholars this article is an attempt at constructing the history of the book jacket from a publishing point of view. A history that reveals the interconnectedness of the publishing industry to the world around it and the fact that books evolve and will continue to evolve as technology and society evolves.
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
Can You Judge a Book by Looking at its Cover? Content and Form in Seventeenth-century Title Pages
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Many books in the seventeenth century received what is nowadays called an allegorical title page. In early modern allegorical images content and form are in an unstable relationship - their interpretation is intentionally variable and depends in large parts on the viewer. This paper addresses and questions the content-form relationship in the title pages of books. What happens, for example, to this relationship when a title page is copied for other editions by other publishers or for entirely different publications? The complexity of this relationship also increases when we consider the whole production process that was necessary to publish a book with an allegorical title page, not to speak of the various reader groups that these books often appealed to. So: can we judge a book by its cover? And if yes, then how?
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The change in the context of the functioning of literature since 1989 and the transformations contemporary literary life has been subject to due to various reasons have resulted in the need to add a literary science reflection on the latest or not yet fully used up thematic areas. One of the notions worth raising, which increasingly seizes the attention of researchers as well as literary critics, is the issue of the book cover considered as a significant element of the work and its non-neutral identifier. The article defines what kind of a source of knowledge on the work and its author the book cover has become; how writers themselves define themselves through it; how they use it to characterize or present themselves or clarify the strategies they choose; how literature functions and copes while being subjected to the influence of mass culture and various marketing actions or the influence of celebrity-based and (self)promotionally focussed pop culture.
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The experience of reading medieval manuscripts is profoundly visceral. The touch, smell, and appearance of the material object can be intoxicating, sometimes even generating feelings curiously akin to sexual desire. Yet scholars seldom discuss encounters with medieval codices in erotic terms, and many may well deny the validity of such responses. Lara Farina has observed that she 'know[s] from personal experience that when a scholar proposes an erotic reading of a premodern text she is likely to be met with the retort, seldom explained, that the given work just isn't erotic' (Farina, 2011, 50). Farina goes on to pose the rhetorical question 'What does it mean to say that something is not-and therefore cannot be-erotic?' before pointing out the illogical assumptions behind such claims, including the conviction that the 'erotic component of an artefact' is somehow 'prior to and independent of the act of reading/viewing'-in other words, that such erotic responses, whether they be to texts or objects or both, are instinctive and involuntary rather than discursively constructed. While not primarily concerned with the erotics of reading manuscripts per se, this Special Issue puts forward innovative methodologies through which the manuscript page begins to emerge as a desiring surface saturated with queer jouissance and excess, and on which error and deviance
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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.
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In his article, Aesthetic Issues in Book Cover Design, E.M. Thomson discusses the fluctuating aesthetics in the design and binding of books during the late 19 th century. Due to fledgling economy of mass production at this time, design and materials used in the production of the book became a concerning matter and a topic of large debate between the craftsmen whose income and lives depended on a skill whose future was appearing bleak. It was widely understood that a transformation in book design was on the brinks of a revolution in response to the current demands -but these changes were not going to transpire without contest. "Two mutually antagonistic impulses were at work: an attempt at universalizing ideas of beauty and a drive to return to pre-industrial national roots." (p.
Posturing on the Threshold: Author Pictures on Front Covers
Book Practices and Textual Itineraries: Contemporary Textual Aesthetics, 2015
Author photographs on book covers are fascinating material for an examination of the self-fashioning of authors. Until now these photographs have received little theoretical attention or systematic analysis. A sub-genre is the author picture on the front cover of books. In this paper, these kinds of pictures are approached as paratexts in which the author actively constructs a posture and at the same time stages a complex interaction with the book’s content. Some concrete examples from Dutch book covers are analyzed. The paper ends with a number of suggestions for further research.