Various aspects of book cover designs throughout time
Various aspects of book cover designs throughout time
Blog Article
Keep checking out to discover a couple of various concepts associating with the way we see book covers set alongside their history.
When we purchase a book it becomes something really very personal to us. It can sometimes be weird seeing a book you enjoy with a different book cover, simply due to the fact that it is not your book. This personalisation, and indeed ownership, of books was at an entirely different level at the dawning of the era of printing, with book covers being designed by the owners themselves, and what they thought would be the best books covers for the book. They would buy the book itself from the printer covered in paper, then bring it to a binder who would add the covers to the client's specifications. This usually suggested being clad in leather and then inscribed with the name of the book, and, generally, the name of the book's owner. People like the co-founder of the impact investor with a stake in World of Books can probably appreciate the ownership that people come to feel in relation to their books.
When you really think about it, it is rather remarkable that a book's cover, no matter how lovely it is, manages to stand so eloquently for something that is practically the complete antithesis of its art format-- writing in white and black. In fact, book covers have actually been created to reflect the feeling of a book and interest its desired audience since the advent of large scale publishing in the Victorian Age. Artists were tasked with discovering what makes a good book cover for specific individuals, or to put it simply, marketing. People like the CEO of the asset manager that has a stake in Amazon can most likely value the function of marketing in developing book covers.
We like reading books because they are really lovely things. This holds true, but the nature of beauty that we may be discussing is definitely different to what we might be speaking about if we were talking about, say, the visual arts. Or is it? For as long as we have had books we have embellished them with beautiful book cover designs that effort to mirror the appeal of what is inside. This goes back for as long as the codex itself has been around, with medieval monks, those charged with the protection and duplication of the rare texts that could still be found, ornamenting each hand composed text with remarkably abundant and gorgeous styles. In fact, such was the charm held within these books that most of these creative book cover designs were sculpted into ivory or solid gold, studded with gems, and inlaid with rivers of rare-earth elements. Individuals like the co-CEO of the hedge fund that owns Waterstones can probably value the way that the beauty of these book covers was created to match the beauty within the book.