Judging books by their covers,
September 2003.

Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market
Eric Schlosser
Jacket design: Michaela Sullivan
Houghton Mifflin Co.

Also discussed:

Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal
Eric Schlosser
Jacket design: Martha Kennedy
Cover photograph: Jim Scherer
Boy and girl art by CSA Images
Houghton Mifflin Co.

You Shall Know Our Velocity
Dave Eggers
Jacket design: n/a
McSweeney’s Books

I haven’t eaten at Burger King, McDonald’s, KFC, or any of the other fast-food places like them in a year and a half (save once when there was no alternative). That was due to a single book, Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal. I hadn’t even read the book yet, but I knew it contained terrible things.

A few months later I did read it, and I was right: on every page Schlosser detailed some new horrendous facet of one company or another in the fast-food chain. Schlosser assembled a daunting mountain of evidence against the industry: examining the way poultry is grown, meat is slaughtered (which gives him the opportunity to compare himself to Upton Sinclair, but that’s another story), and potatoes are genetically massaged to be really freakin’ long.

Muckraking, though, is a difficult business: if you want to nail your subject, you can’t come off as anything less than thoroughly professional. Unfortunately, Fast Food Nation has a couple of problems in this department. For one, Schlosser has a very hard time resisting the glib side of his writing personality, and as a result he often comes off as someone who’s too clever for his own good. To me it makes him less trustworthy.

The other problem is that, for the most part, he doesn’t give his opponents any opportunities to defend themselves.

One example has a high school, competing for money from Coca-Cola, taking a picture of 1,200 students forming a human “COKE.” Just before the picture, one student took off his jacket, revealing that he was wearing a Pepsi T-shirt. He was suspended for a day over the incident. It’s a wonderful illustration of the insidious way schools have become beholden to soft-drink companies for badly needed funds, but it’s also an easy potshot in which it’s unclear whether Schlosser made any attempt to get the school’s side, other than what was reported in the Washington Post.

True, there are some things he reveals in the book which, even if they’re only partially true, seem indefensible. This example is one of them. But without talking to ther other side, there’s no way to know how damning his examples really are. I was left feeling that Fast Food Nation, though it makes a pretty good indictment of its targets, was less airtight than it could have, or should have, been.

I will say, however, that there was one way in which the book was an unqualified success, and that was the cover: a brilliant, ultra-professional parody of a McDonald’s-style French-fry box. I think the only thing that might have improved it would be to incorporate the subtitle into the box along with title and author, or drop it entirely since it seems a little redundant, but I’m quibbling.

And now we have Reefer Madness. Sarah thinks the makers of the propaganda film may have an actionable situation regarding the title, but I’m solely concerned with how it’s displayed on the dust jacket. Let me start by saying something positive, which is that I’m all in favor of setting type sideways or diagonally or upside-down, or whatever else may goose the reader a little bit. As long as it’s organic to the design, that is. So I appreciate the designer’s (and publisher’s) willingness to do something a little unexpected with the type. Ditto putting all that text on the cover, completely foregoing an illustration or a photograph. That took a certain amount of chutzpah. But in the end, I don’t see the value of either decision with this cover. Those choices, as well as others, seem like they were made just to get attention, and that bodes very poorly.

I’ll take the sideways text first. That approach would indicate to me that Schlosser wants to turn us on our ears, so to speak. But that doesn’t appear to be the point of the book, which is to examine the black market’s role in mainstream society. Though I’m sure he’s going to tell me a lot of compelling things I didn’t already know, like with Fast Food Nation, I assume he’s going to confirm my worst fears, not turn me to a new way of thinking. By contrast, Adam Bellow’s In Praise of Nepotism is the kind of book where sideways text might be appropriate, because it challenges a certain status quo.

Click on the image for a much larger view.

Next, plastering the cover with words really doesn’t work here, particularly because of the words chosen for the task. It’s a stale paragraph that reeks of defensiveness, as if purchasing the book needs a lot of justification. The paragraph has to suck you in and make you turn the page, not read like bland PR. By contrast, to the right is the original cover of You Shall Know Our Velocity, the debut novel from Dave Eggers. The hardbound original version (the novel was re-edited and rereleased under a new title, only several months later) contains no dust jacket whatsoever. Instead, the actual cover of the book is simply a prologue that’s set with the usual care with typography that is the hallmark of McSweeney’s, Eggers’ literary journal. (Justifying a column that narrow without too many major spacing problems is a marvel in itself; anyone who’s ever cringed at the way the prologue of any Star Wars movie is set will be relieved by the skill evidenced here.)

But back to Reefer Madness. Red, yellow, and black worked well as the dominant colors on Fast Food Nation (and they look great on the German flag), but here they’re not doing it for me. The whole thing just looks loud. Also: is the big yellow background supposed to symbolize yellow journalism? Just saying.

Other complaints: What’s with all those dollar-signs in the background? It just seems crass and obvious. That most of them are a pale red and a few are a pale green makes it seem like there’s a secret message that I’m not getting. But I have a feeling that’s not really the case. Oh, and when is embossing going to go out of style?

I’ve saved my biggest beef for last. I’m appalled at the typography on the cover, especially since it’s all type. The title and author are both set in Helvetical Compressed, while the paragraph is set in Helvetica Condensed Black. Yes, the two typefaces are part of the same family, and they bear a lot of similarities, but they’re just different enough that to see them together rubbed me completely the wrong way.

The less-font-geeky among you may think I’m protesting too much, but let me put it this way: in a musical scale you have a collection of notes that go together in a way that, used as a whole, can be combined to make lovely music. But you can’t just take any two notes of that scale, play them simultaneously, and expect them to sound good. Take the piano, for example. If you hit middle C and the white key two keys to the right, you’ve got yourself the first and third notes of C major, and it sounds pretty damned harmonious. You hit middle C and either of the white keys immediately to the right or left, you’ve got yourself a major dissonance. Nobody but John Cage thinks that sounds good.

Same thing with type. If you’re mixing two fonts together, they should be far enough apart so that they’re harmonious. On Reefer Madness, the two fonts are so close in relation that using them together just seems sloppy. The designer seemed to feel that they’re almost interchangeable, when what she really should have done was picked one or the other, or found two that were harmonious, like different weights of the same face or two completely different faces. Same thing for the mixing of Futura Condensed Bold and Trade Gothic Bold Condensed on another cover in this month’s reviews: they’re just too close together.

Here’s a comparison. First, here’s the title as it’s currently set in Helvetica Compressed:

Next, here’s how it would have looked in Helvetica Condensed Black, had the designer elected to do everything in one font:

Obviously the first one is more condensed, which allows it to be bigger in the same amount of horizontal space. But the bigger problem is that the shapes of the R, E, F, A, and S are also just different enough in places to make them look out of place next to each other. If the letters looked identical, just more condensed, then it would be fine with me to mix the two. But they don’t, and the end result just annoys me.

If she were to pick just one of them, by the way, I would have wanted her to go with Helvetica Compressed. It’s got that large x-height action that makes my heart pound. But hey, that’s me.

Apparently the three essays that make up Reefer Madness all first appeared, in some form, in Rolling Stone. It’s really too bad that the publisher couldn’t get Fred Woodward, former art director of RS, to design the cover. That would have been so much better.

Judgment: I’ll wait and see what the paperback has to offer. If I’m going to buy it anyway (and I probably will) it might as well be the one with the better cover.