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CHRIS WARE on book design in GQ

Updated August 31, 2010

How to Judge a Book By Its Cover:
Indie comic hero Chris Ware on the excellent art of book covers

by Chris Ware

In my twelve-year-old world, Penguin books represented the promise of a really bad time.

I remember one in particular: a spring break (my first, I think, to register as such) with plans of bike rides, sleepovers, and running around outside all smacked down by a thick slab of orange slapped onto our desks—A Tale of Two Cities, to have been read upon the class's recommencement. I won't detail the Sunday night choking-down of Dickensian this-and-that that transpired before Monday morning homeroom, but the sight of yet more Penguin orange in my ensuing academic years only compounded the sour association. (Those who have seen the British documentary film 49 Up may recall the scene of the stuffy prep school subject proudly seated before his trophy wall of orange-spined Penguin books—it always gets a knowing laugh.) My aversion continued until my college years, when, suddenly and without warning, many of the Penguin spines were changed to a soothing sea foam green, and in the coolest of cases, a somber black. It was like Tums for a literary digestion still tender from its unvarying childhood diet: a simple decision by a veritable editorial genius brought Tolstoy, Flaubert, and Maugham out of the purgatory of pop-quiz acid reflux and back into my life. The lesson is simple: books, like people, aren't all the same.

As a graphic novelist, I fell into book design out of necessity, just as I fell into typography and printmaking. As a technical requirement of the style I'd chosen to tell my stories, I learned the work piecemeal, and probably poorly. Thus, the design-savvy reader should be aware: I probably have little idea what I'm talking about. It seems to me a book design should be inevitable—a book demands its own shape just as an oak sprouts from an acorn and a pine from a cone. A book is a body in which a story lives and breathes, and, like a body, it has a spine, is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside, and it isn't going to go on many dates unless it can hold up its end of the conversation. If it does find its way into our life, a book can also be a companion, and sometimes a life-changing one. Concomitantly, the book cover has evolved from a simple protective wrapper into something of a contemporary striptease between author and reader, both as a means of drawing attention to and selling the book, or amplifying and even extending the book itself into the reader's mind and fingertips.

As far as real book designers go, I've only met a few, but they strike me as thoughtful, well turned-out, and desperately cutthroat people. What surprises me the most is how shamelessly art directors rip each other off; a clever cover will sometimes be imitated as quickly as two or three months after originally appearing. Book designers, you should know, have to be ready to create something new, exciting, and original almost every day in order to eat, and a certain degree of burnout smokes out the weaker specimens; I can't imagine coming up with cover after cover without at some point resorting to an out-of-breath take, intentional or not, on someone else's great idea. This urge toward ever-freshness brings the profession perilously close to that of fashion, and the worst examples of such greet us at the grocery store checkout among the tabloids, gum, and ring pops. But the best of it, those that last, have recently been appearing from Penguin (yes, Penguin, not just the bearer of boring spring break assignments anymore!), following a path led by designer Paul Buckley into beautiful new ways of graphically proffering the written word.

Leafing through this collection of designs, it should be clear that whatever the focus groups say about book buyers and how they are daily dropping like flies, designers, despite their frailty, sure are a sophisticated lot. Where once typography and illustration used to collaborate to spoil a narrative moment before a book was even opened, type and pictures now operate independently, hinting at a disposition, a feeling, or a slippery state of mind harmonious with, or at odds with, a book's title (or the expectations that title might suggest.)

Such an ineffable approach to design is much more in line with the higher aims of literature than it ever has been, and the methods are just as varied: a thousand-word-picture's worth of associations activate the flatly abutting images of Paul Buckley's covers for Don DeLillo, yet Greg Mollica's typographical palimpsests for Paul Auster disclose that author's penchant for narrative play in a world of letters. What I don't get, and I doubt the lay reader will either, is that even within all of the strikingly different and varied covers presented here lie branches and twigs of directions that seem perfectly good but were snipped or pruned in favor of more presentable (or saleable) shapes. Ron Currie's Everything Matters! is an especially dispiriting case of literally a dozen ideas being unaccountably ditched, the reader made privy to the ruthless rendering a book cover sometimes suffers.

But isn't a book, especially a work of fiction, ideally a work of art? As the reader peruses the anecdotes that detail each cover's creation, he or she should pay special attention to the degree to which each author's involvement and opinion shapes the final result. I personally find the relationship fascinating, having been on both ends of it, and being squarely in the camp that whatever the author wants, he or she should have. It doesn't always work out this way, however, and sometimes sensibly; authors are not always "visual people," but they might have an insight into a book's core that a designer might not. Some authors, of course, don't care at all and happily relinquish the reins. (I should add here that John Updike, whose knowledge of printing and typesetting informed his profession, claimed he could not begin writing a book until he first imagined its spine.)