What Do the Stories Look Like?: Distillation, Belonging, and Looking Pretty

What Do the Stories Look Like?: Distillation, Belonging, and Looking Pretty

by Meghan Miraglia

Even before I'd reached that part of the TedTalk where Kidd says that book designers have to be interpreters and translators, I thought that covers are a translation of a story - “a distillation” of the text. Book designers take what they interpret to be the emotional core of the text, and they render it the most visible. 

I get really fussy about the physical interaction that the reader has with the book: paper, covers, text, the way the book sits on a table/in your hand…all of that matters, and it impacts the reading experience. I remember the IQ84 cover! The TEDTalk made me curious about what sells in the United States versus in other countries - for instance, on Bookstagram, lots of users will lust over UK book covers because they “look prettier” than the American iteration. Did the book itself matter? Sure. But not as much as the cover.

Lahiri is right - book covers, though not of an author’s choosing, are “another part of me [that have] to be dressed and presented to the world” (10). I’m interested in her conversations around covers as awakening and defining of a text (objectification). I love her early mention of a uniform, which makes me wonder about Fitzcarraldo, with their signature minimalist blue/white uniform. It’s the “branding” of the text as “belonging” to this publisher, not the author.