book covers

While we await the cover of The Speculative Turn, I wonder if anyone has ever written anything interesting on book cover designs in philosophy.

On the one hand, it’s supposed to be the content inside the book that counts. The author often has little to no say over the cover design, and an extremely successful philosophy book might go through several editions with different covers and appear with different covers when translated into foreign tongues. It ought to be a triviality, what your philosophy book looks like.

And yet, somehow it’s not. The cover of a book is almost like the face of an infant. You know ahead of time what the DNA is going to be like, more or less, but until you actually see the face of the child it doesn’t quite exist yet. Certain covers are very pleasant to look at, others not. And somehow they all have a great deal of rhetorical force in giving the book a certain flavor before it’s even opened. If you say to me the phrase “we have never been modern,” I think purple sturdy paperback for half a second before I think of the ideas contained in the work, and if you say “being and time” I think of a black cloth binding giving a sooty color to my hands (I always removed the dust jacket on that book for some reason). Certain books provoke displeasure simply because they are physically so uncomfortable to handle.

I’ve been pretty happy with all of mine, though perhaps not initially in every case. They all grew on me gradually (and some were great from the start).

One of the least successful ones may be/have been that N. Kemp Smith translation of the First Critique that was simply black with that oval with the multicolored border on it. At least one of my St. John’s classmates glued a snapshot of himself in that space inside the oval, quite humorously so.

I also think the cover of the familiar version of Process and Reality is pretty dumb, though by now I’ve gotten used to it. It makes Whitehead look old and boring, and that tannish yellow causes mild annoyance. After awhile you forget about it, however.

But I think those Indiana hardback Heidegger lecture courses aren’t bad at all. Unfortunately they are beginning to recycle some of the photos even though there are plenty of photos of Heidegger available, but they’re all pretty interesting. There’s a certain understated drama to Heidegger’s physical appearance, one that perhaps stems from nothing more than an air of intensity about the man.

Many continental European book covers are fairly boring, though especially in France this often gives them a certain elegance: I love the appearance of L’Objet quadruple, for instance. (My free 20 copies arrived today, and I passed out 6 to students in class, just for the fun of it.)

There may also be some books that are fun to read simply because they’re fun to look at and handle, though I can’t immediately think of any examples. But many Habermas books are dreadfully ugly, and I wonder if that’s harmed Habermas at all. It’s not as flippant a question as it might sound.