Different elements of book cover designs through history
Different elements of book cover designs through history
Blog Article
Books may be made up of words in plain old black and white, however they are also the colour covers that they are adorned with.
When we purchase a book it becomes something really very personal to us. It can sometimes be weird seeing a book you love with a different book cover, just because it is not your book. This personalisation, and undoubtedly ownership, of books was at an entirely different level at the dawn of the era of printing, with book covers being designed by the owners themselves, and what they believed would be the best books covers for the book. They would buy the book itself from the printer covered in paper, then take it to a binder who would add the covers to the customer's specifications. This generally indicated being clad in leather and after that etched with the name of the book, and, more often than not, the name of the book's owner. Individuals like the co-founder of the impact investor with a stake in World of Books can probably value the ownership that people come to feel in relation to their books.
We like reading books since they are very lovely things. This is true, however the nature of beauty that we may be discussing is certainly separate to what we might be discussing if we were speaking about, say, the visual arts. Or is it? For as long as we have actually had books we have embellished them with beautiful book cover designs that attempt to mirror the appeal of what is inside. This goes back for as long as the codex itself has been around, with middle ages monks, those charged with the protection and proliferation of the rare texts that might still be found, ornamenting each hand composed text with astonishingly rich and lovely designs. In fact, such was the appeal held within these books that many of these creative book cover designs were sculpted into ivory or solid gold, studded with gems, and inlaid with rivers of precious metals. People like the co-CEO of the hedge fund that owns Waterstones can most likely value the way that the beauty of these book covers was developed to match the beauty within the book.
When you actually consider it, it is rather amazing that a book's cover, no matter how stunning it is, is able to stand so eloquently for something that is almost the total reverse of its art form-- writing in white and black. In fact, book covers have actually been designed to show the mood of a book and attract its desired audience since the advent of big scale publishing in the Victorian Period. Artists were tasked with finding what makes a good book cover for particular people, or simply put, marketing. Individuals like the CEO of the asset manager that has a stake in Amazon can most likely value the role of marketing in designing book covers.