Judging books by their covers,
September 2003.

Dogs of Babel
Carolyn Parkhurst
Jacket design: Mario Pulice
Cover photograph: Marc Yankus
Little, Brown and Company

Another one bites the dust jacket.

If I had a flag, I’d fly it at half-staff, for another desecration has taken place. This is not hyperbole; this is not tongue in cheek. This a burgeoning movement, and I want you to join it. We’re fighting the scourge of book-club and book-award logos being printed directly on covers, and believe me, it’s the good fight.

Look, I grew up with books sporting Newbery and Caldecott medals, but back then they were stickers, and you could take them off if you were so inclined. Now all these awards are printed right on the cover, and you can’t do anything about it.

The latest victim is The Dogs of Babel, which has been selected by Today’s Book Club. It’s a gorgeous cover that’s now been reprinted (sullied, really) with the Today’s Book Club logo.

NBC’s “Today” began its book club after Oprah put hers on indefinite hiatus. I’ve already had some piquant things to say about the logo for Oprah’s Book Club, which, as readers of the last collection of book cover reviews already know, has made an auspicious return, in its original form, no less.

Comparing the two book club logos, Today’s is the lesser of two evils, I suppose. Oprah’s earns points for its justified circularity, as Oprah is known familiarly as O. But it fails after that. Those two typefaces could work together, but not the way it is now. It just looks a little clunky.

Today’s, on the other hand, is cleaner. Personally I’d have gone with two type treatments instead of three, as “Book Club,” at least to me, should be a single entity. But at least they’re all just varying weights of the same typeface.

Then there’s the question of the use of a book as a symbol. As the art director of a literacy nonprofit, I see books in logos all the time. I’ve even made logos with books in them, because sometimes you just can’t avoid it. It’s an easy visual reference, and it runs the risk of being clichéd. But there’s always an opportunity to try to explode the cliché, or at least tweak it a little. For me, as long as you can do something unique with the book, then you stand a chance of getting away with it.

I think Today’s logo pretty much gets away with it. By picking up the sunrise colors of the main “Today Show” logo, it makes a connection to its source, and I always appreciate that. And overall, the book has a nice amount of layering and dimension to it. I don’t think the circle is as successful, particularly because with the book breaking the circle, when the logo is printed on a book (the horror), it has to be floated within a larger circle. That’s about 20% more suckage!

Oprah’s logo avoids the cliché trap by leaving out a book reference altogether. While generally I appreciate the desire to sidestep falling into tired imagery, I think that Oprah’s Book Club is less about books and more about Oprah. But as I was researching this review, I stumbled upon a merchandise section of Oprah’s site, and look what I found:

Now that’s what I’m talking about. If you’re going to have an egocentric logo, go ahead and really do it. This is apparently a secondary logo, but if you ask me, it should be the only logo she uses for her book club. It’s balanced, it’s lively, it’s even a little subtle, and it says, through her signature, that she stands behind her recommendations.

Oprah has every right in the world to have a logo for her book club for just this purpose. She can print all the T-shirts, caps, and canvas tote bags she wants; I don’t care. As much as I think the signature logo is a pretty good one, I still wouldn’t want to see it, or her other logo, or Today’s, printed on a cover.

There are alternatives to printing these logos directly. As already discussed, they could be seals that could be removed. Perhaps an even better solution might be a subtle line of text printed on the bottom of the cover, as long as it fits within the scheme of the overall design. Covers are meant to sell books, no doubt, and these affiliations help. But, please, not at the expense of a gorgeous dust jacket.

And particularly in this case. The cover of The Dogs of Babel is a thing of understated beauty. An elegant typographic design, with two faces that complement each other with grace, is paired with a rich, evocative photograph by the supremely talented Marc Yankus, who’s done a lot of photographs and illustrations for covers that have caught my eye over the years.

Judgment: ¡Viva Jonathan Franzen!