Joanna Trollope, chief judge for this year’s Orange Prize, has got into hot water for, allegedly, claiming that ‘you can judge a book by its cover.’
Actually the notion that a cover influences a reader came in her response to a supplementary question, a follow-up to her remark that a book’s appearance is an important part of its identity, the realisation of which has led her to abandon the idea of reading all 143 contenders for the prize on an e-book reader; the device homogenises everything, removing any difference between War & Peace and a novella.
Well of course.
At least for those of us who have spent most of our lives in an analogue age the whole physicality of a book (certainly when that term is stretched to cover much more than works of mere fiction) tells us a lot.
Starting with size & cover; as with humans, they give plenty of clues to age & status – well-loved, untouched, abused, level of education, status, the kind of company they keep, high class or downmarket.
Then there is all the preliminary information, in a standard or familiar layout: title, author, publishing history, contents. All easy to find with a glance & a turn of the wrist.
And when you get down to the business of actually reading it, you always know exactly where you are, & how much further you have to go.
Maybe following generations - those who, from their earliest years, grow to assimilate information one screen at a time, while authors & providers alike settle on more standard ways of presenting the mass of auxiliary detail - will develop the same instinctive ways of assimilating the bigger picture.
The latest version of the computerised library catalogue is a delight – a huge improvement which is both easier to use & gives a lot more clues as to the character of a book, which can be taken in at a glance.
I sniffed when told that it even shows you a picture of the book. I was wrong.
