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Judging books by their covers,
East of Eden (Centennial Edition) The last time I checked in with Oprah’s Book Club, she was having a tough time with Jonathan Franzen. Franzen was concerned about the sheer commerciality of the whole endeavor. Oprah said, Hey, you don’t want to be on the show? I don’t want you either. She canceled his appearance on the show, and that about wrapped it up for The Corrections on Oprah. Soon after, claiming that she just couldn’t find enough good new books to talk about, she shut the book club down. A few months ago, however, she announced that she was bringing it back, but in a different form: from now on, she would only focus on classics. She just hadn’t picked one yet. And now she has. She chose John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, which was just in the process of being rereleased in a boxed centennial edition with other Steinbeck masterpieces (the centennial is Steinbeck’s, not East of Eden’s).
The centennial editions have beautiful covers that hark back to an earlier era of design, featuring restrained typography and gorgeous woodcuts. I’m not so keen on the title treatment, but that’s quibbling. And then here comes Oprah. All I can say is, thank God her big red banner is meant to come off easily, because it is a tragedy of design. Though it appears to mean to do well, picking up the Egyptian-style typeface of the cover, it then veers off into Futura, an unfortunate pairing. That’s not even mentioning the bold colors, which could easily have worked well on another cover, but here it’s just gaudy. Finally, Oprah had a year and a half to revisit her book club logo. Did no one ever tell her how clunky it was? Apparently not, because it’s back, too, in all its unbalanced O-ness and its own two fonts, which brings the total to four, just on this little banner. It just makes me feel that it’s not really about the book, it’s about what the book says about Oprah, and maybe about Oprah’s viewers: Alert! Alert! There is finally a book worthy of Oprah’s attention again! It is now safe to read again! Judgment: Go pick it up, rip off the dumb banner, and enjoy. Even the paperback edition’s pages have those wonderful rough edges of classic hardback editions, for that old-time flavor.
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