Keep checking out to discover a couple of different ideas connecting to the way we see book covers set along the side of their history.
When we purchase a book it becomes something extremely very personal to us. It can often be unusual seeing a book you like with a different book cover, simply because it is not your book. This personalisation, and certainly ownership, of books was at an entirely different level at the origin of the era of printing, with book covers being created by the owners themselves, and what they thought would be the best books covers for the text. 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 specs. This normally suggested being clad in leather and then etched with the name of the book, and, usually, 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 appreciate the ownership that people come to feel in regards to their books.
When you truly think of it, it is rather amazing that a book's cover, no matter how stunning it is, manages to stand so eloquently for something that is practically the complete reverse of its art format-- writing in white and black. In fact, book covers have actually been created to show the mood of a book and appeal to its designated audience since the advent of big scale publishing in the Victorian Age. Artists were charged with finding what makes a good book cover for particular individuals, or to put it simply, marketing. Individuals like the CEO of the asset manager that has a stake in Amazon can probably appreciate the role of marketing in designing book covers.
We love reading books since they are extremely stunning things. This holds true, however the nature of beauty that we may be discussing is definitely separate to what we might be discussing if we were discussing, say, the visual arts. Or is it? For as long as we have had books we have decorated them with beautiful book cover designs that attempt to mirror the beauty of what is inside. This goes back for as long as the codex itself has actually been around, with middle ages monks, those charged with the defense and replication of the scarce texts that might still be discovered, ornamenting each hand written text with amazingly rich and beautiful designs. In fact, such was the appeal 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 appreciate the way that the beauty of these book covers was created to match the beauty within the book.