Judging books by their covers,
October 2003.

The English Roses
Madonna
Illustrated by Jeffrey Fulvimari
Callaway Editions

Also discussed:

Just the Two of Us
Will Smith
Illustrated by Kadir Nelson
Scholastic

(Illustrators have been given greater note than usual because they are more integral to these books.)

I’d like to think that writing a book for children is a selfless act. A writer and illustrator, if not the same person, are trying to help a child develop by explaining some of the complexities of the world, of relationships, of expression, of simply being. It’s rare, I think, that a children’s book is used as a means to extend one’s fame into an audience that isn’t yet old enough to buy cds...but will be.

But hey, breaking boundaries is what Madonna does, and it’s what she’s been doing for twenty years. Why shouldn’t she break this one as well?

I’m not going to comment on the story, since that’s not in my purview here, but suffice it to say that you can guess who the solitary blond girl on the left represents. Her name is Binah, which in Hebrew means “understanding.” Madonna wants us to see her, to understand her. First she makes sure you know she wrote the book, because her name is there in all caps. On a positive note, I will say I was surprised her name wasn’t bigger. At the same time, doing her name in all caps is a calligraphic no-no. Ornamental upper-case characters just aren’t meant to go together. To wit: here’s her name set in all caps in a typeface with a similar flavor to the handwriting on the cover:

Now here it is in the same typeface, but in mixed case:

The bonus is that you can even set it in a larger size and it will take up less space and look better! OK, now let’s take a look at how the illustrator’s name is treated on the cover.

Oh, wait, we can’t — it’s not on the cover.

It seems that Madonna’s name was so important that either she or the publisher (or both) didn’t want to obscure it with something so piddly as the name of the illustrator. Though I’m not crazy about the splotches on the ground, which look less like rain puddles than runny makeup, the rest of the illustration is pretty sophisticated. But that’s immaterial; if it’s a picture book, the illustrator’s name should be on the cover if the author’s is. Period.

Even Will Smith, who managed infinitely better than Madonna at crossing over from music to acting, shares space on the cover of his children’s book with the artist. In Smith’s case, the illustration is nice, though I think its effect is diminished by the typography, which, with its strange mixing of upper- and lower-case letters, makes no sense to me. Maybe it was trying to be playful, but there needed to be more variation; with so few letters changed to lower-case, it just ended up looking sort of arbitrary.

Judgment: Good typographic choices: we can make them if we try, just the two of us, you and I.