Different elements of book cover designs throughout history
Different elements of book cover designs throughout history
Blog Article
Keep reading to discover a few different concepts relating to the way we see book covers set beside their history.
When we buy a book it ends up being something extremely personal to us. It can often be odd seeing a book you like with another book cover, merely due to the fact that it is not your book. This personalisation, and indeed ownership, of books was at a totally various level at the genesis of the age of printing, with book covers being developed by the owners themselves, and what they believed would be the best books covers for the book. They would purchase the book itself from the printer covered in paper, then bring it to a binder who would add in the covers to the customer's requirements. This usually suggested being clad in leather and then etched with the name of the book, and, usually, 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 value the ownership that individuals come to feel in relation to their books.
We enjoy reading books because they are extremely lovely things. This is true, but the nature of beauty that we may be speaking about is certainly separate to what we might be speaking about if we were talking about, for example, the visual arts. Or is it? For as long as we have actually had books we have actually decorated them with beautiful book cover designs that attempt to mirror the charm of what is within. This goes back for as long as the codex itself has been around, with middle ages monks, those charged with the security and duplication of the rare texts that might still be discovered, ornamenting each hand composed text with amazingly rich and stunning designs. 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 appreciate the manner in which the beauty of these book covers was created to match the beauty within the book.
When you truly think about it, it is rather fantastic that a book's cover, no matter how beautiful it is, is able to stand so eloquently for something that is almost the total reverse of its art form-- writing in white and black. In fact, book covers have been developed to show the emotional state of a book and interest its designated audience ever since the dawn of big scale publishing in the Victorian Period. Artists were tasked with finding what makes a good book cover for certain people, or to put it simply, marketing. People like the CEO of the asset manager that has a stake in Amazon can probably value the function of marketing in developing book covers.