Reflections on Jhumpa Lahiri's "The Clothing of Books" (Tennant)

Jhumpa Lahiri’s essay The Clothing of Books made me think about the dominant aesthetic of book covers in France, where white is king. Immediately, my mind conjures the sober stock design of Gallimard jackets with their eggshell palette, clean rectangular lines, and signature red typeface. Gallimard's influence as a publisher is so imperial that their book covers now belong to the nation’s iconography. If you ask me, there is a quintessentially French logic to their style in the same way that the dazzling superabundance of graphic covers in the U.S. reflects a quintessentially American tradition of XL consumer culture and optionality (i.e., the paradox of choice). Given that French history has been molded by secularism and French culture born out of related values, the nation's publishing mechanisms favor the preservation of the author (justified as “faithfulness”) over concessions to a more collaborative and diversified final product. The ubiquity of the Gallimard cover in the French marketplace speaks to (and perpetuates) an underlying belief that illustrations pollute the reading experience, restraining readers' freedom to imagine. The singularity of Gallimard's aesthetic does away with the question of function that troubles Lahiri: "Once the cover exists it's part of the book, and has an effect, either positive or negative. It either attracts or repels the reader." It aims to eliminate the middleman. 

However, as Lahiri points out, the conventions of contemporary publishing show a relationship between reader and book that is "far more mediated.” I cannot help but appreciate the industry's impulse to elevate books into fuller packages adorned with accessories: cover art, blurbs, author bios, milestone banners, anniversary editions, and so on. The jacket represents the designer's investment in the writer’s work and earnest desire to see it succeed. If the book is bad, there is no saving it: the reader remembers a bad book. To quote Roland Barthes: "The brio of the text (without which, after all, there is no text) is its will to bliss: just where it exceeds demand, transcends prattle, and whereby it attempts to overflow, to break through the constraint of adjectives---which are those doors of language through which the ideological and the imaginary come flowing through." It may be naïve and romantic of me, but I find that bliss to be a utopian force that transcends any superficial dressing like a book cover.