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Literary Review
Clothing matters
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The transformation of an untidy manuscript into an attractive, rectangular book is an amazing process. But others besides the author have a stake in the process and often it is a four-way battle between the author, editor, designer and the marketingman, says ANURADHA ROY.
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A.K. RAMANUJAN hated his. F. Scott Fitzgerald loved his.
When Ramanujan saw the cover of his book, Relations, showing his face close up with his parents superimposed on his capacious forehead, he urged his editor, Jon Stallworthy, to change it. "I find the picture quite distasteful," he wrote, "something bizarre and sentimental to my eyes, like some Indian calendar pictures. I would rather have no picture at all."
Fitzgerald wrote his publisher an importuning letter too, but in a different vein: "For Christ's sake, don't give anyone that jacket you're saving for me, I've written it into the book." The book was The Great Gatsby. The jacket showed yellow eyes on a disembodied face floating in a vast Prussian blue sky over a low line of suburban buildings aflame in fireworks. It looks dreadful. But he loved it.
The creation of a book is a steady process of the author losing control. From the solitude of a mind where the book is born, it begins to slip away: first on to paper where reach and grasp never match and perfection always seems just a page down; then the agents, editors, and proof-readers take it over, and finally a trident made up of designers, editors, and marketing executives dictates the book's cover design. A crime of passion in a publishing house would almost certainly take place in the design department. This is where the fiercest tussles between publishing departments take place, over the suitable armour for a book to don when going out there and conquering the world.
Some authors have minimal expectations of the cover. "The front should suggest the kind of matter you should expect inside," says Vijay Tendulkar with customary brevity. "Mostly it does." When the book is out, they are amazed and grateful at the transformation of their shapeless, untidy manuscript into something neat and rectangular.
Tendulkar is an unusual author. The commonest kind, I've found over years working in a publishing house, probably has a fairly clear sense of the cover but is unable to articulate it until presented with a possibility upon which she either goes totally silent or yells "No, no, no!" A third kind of author is one who watches out for likely cover illustrations all through the writing of a book and has definite ideas on its looks.
Pico Iyer is one of these. "I'm convinced," he says, "that the title, the jacket, even the shape and the size of the book play an unexpectedly large part in its destiny. I spend a lot of time thinking up possible images that will be true to the feeling of the book to pass on to the publishers."
Amit Chaudhuri too believes in productive meddling. He has found publishers can "offer muted but stubborn excuses" for persisting with covers the author doesn't like. "Sometimes," he says, "you have to put your foot down and hope for the best." Chaudhuri insisted on a Jamini Roy painting for the cover of his Picador Anthology of Modern Indian Literature and, having got his way, thinks it is one of his best.
Till a decade ago, covers were designed by hand, through a series of sketches, and then the type and illustrative matter was pasted onto a board. Designs are now generated using sophisticated software. Advanced print technologies ensure a choice of gimmicks. There was, for example, a book on witchcraft with an inexplicable blank white cover with an enigmatic keyhole cut into it. Only in the dark did you see a greenish skeleton — printed with fluorescent ink — glowing in that keyhole.
Given the range of easy tricks, it can get difficult remembering that a book cover still has to do a straightforward job. It has to tell you about the book. Quickly and memorably.
To achieve this it must do several related things. For a start, the author's name and the book's title must be clear. Sometimes, comments designer Sujata Keshavan, designers get so carried away with the visuals that these fundamentals are compromised. "Such designs," she feels, "are self indulgent and do not serve the book well."
A book's cover must also reflect the meaning of the book and its tone. Neelima Rao, a graphic designer who has worked with a range of publishers and books, says she tries to convey a book's mood and meaning when working on fiction; the results can be quite abstract. With an academic book or a textbook however she tries to produce something that makes more obvious sense. She has to stretch herself differently when there is a "series" look to adhere to.
Sometimes a "series" look can become a kind of branding that a publisher achieves for its entire list. Faber, for instance, had a range of covers done at a particular design studio, which evolved into a Faber look. There was clear, deceptively simple typography in a uniform typeface and a single strong image, often truncated for effect. The cover of Andrew Motion's biography of Philip Larkin, for example, shows only Larkin's eyes through his glasses close-up.
Publishers sweat blood developing "series" images, and having done so will be fierce about protecting them. Penguin Books UK once took a leading British university press to court for copying the well-established Penguin Classics series design for its own literary classics series. The university press had to eat crow. Destroying thousands of covers, they went back to the designing board.
Oddly enough the front of the book is not its only important part. The most viewed part of a book is its spine, since books spend most of their lives on a bookshelf. Penguin Books ensured "branding" and recognition through a uniform bright orange spine for most of its books. The spine, Rao says, can be made to do a lot of work and must be made eye-catching.
It seems simplicity itself when Keshavan summarises it: "Like in any piece of design, a cover design should combine beauty and utility. It should reproduce well and weather well in shop conditions."
The end to be achieved seems obvious and attainable. But it isn't. Everyone connected with the making of a book has an opinion on the cover that varies with perspective. The production manager's favourite nightmare could be the designer's dream. There are other problems. The editor may be unclear when briefing the designer. The designer, if a busy one, works on several covers a week and relies almost entirely on that brief to trigger off ideas in her head. The budget could be tight. Full-colour covers are more expensive than those with one or two colours; certain varieties of binding make covers more expensive.
Despite all effort, in the end something may go wrong at the print and processing stage. Even in the most sophisticated printing press, you will come across some bleary-eyed chaps in banian and shorts looking at a cover rolling off the press and scratching their heads: "Do you think it needs more blue?" "No, I think may be some red."
Everybody's favourite villain however, is the marketing man. Rao says marketing people are the same in all the publishing houses she has worked for. "He hasn't usually read the book, he is isolated from the author and editor, he is in a hurry, and he has some strange notions about the reader that he insists on."
Amit Chaudhuri's mild voice acquires an edge when speaking of this aspect of publishing. "The marketing man is not thinking of the book or the jacket, but of the ideal reader who's going to part with cash when he looks at the cover." The jacket description, a book's primary marketing tool, according to Vijay Tendulkar, instead of informing the reader about the book "is usually misleading and full of false claims."
The publisher however, isn't out there deliberately trying to hoodwink the reader — not all the time. People spend very little time in bookshops. Research shows that impulse book-buys happen in the first few minutes of handling a new book. The publisher has to seize those minutes, elbowing out the thousand other printed seducers. And sometimes, by chance or design, they do make decisions that work.
Pico Iyer agreed to a "somewhat mute black-and-white cover of a horse grazing" for his first book. "Then at the last moment," he continues, "my publishers sent me a wild Day-Glo, blue-and-orange image of a Balinese shaman seeming to spit out fire." That unexpected cover of his first book remains his favourite.
It might have something to do with loving a first-born with an unrepeatable desperation, whatever it looks like. Only later does the writer begin to discriminate, and then judge and shape his own book covers. Amit Chaudhuri remembers in minute detail the making of his favourite cover, also of his first book. Tendulkar however, does not remember his first book's cover at all, such was the intensity of the sensation "(of) holding your first child when it is not even one day old."
Perhaps the content is more important than the looks, after all.
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